I’m quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW’ers aren’t investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren’t trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)
Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the chance to potentially shift a non-trivial (for certain definitions of trivial) amount of funding away from bad organizations and towards good organizations (which I’m investing primarily as a personal financial strategy), seems very worrying to me. While it is (as ChristianKI pointed out) debatable that the amount of funding I can provide as a single person will make a big difference to a big company, it’s bad decision theory to model my actions as only being correlated with myself; and besides, if the funding was redirected, it probably would have gone somewhere without the enormous supply of funds Alphabet has, and very well could have made an important difference, pushing the margins away from failure and towards success.
There’s a good chance I may change my mind in the future about this, but currently my response to this information is a substantial shift away from the LW crowd actually being any good at usefully using rationality instrumentally
(For what it’s worth, the post made it not at all clear to me that we were talking about a nontrivial amount of funding. I read it as just you thinking a bit through your personal finance allocation. The topic of divesting and impact investing has been analyzed a bunch on LessWrong and the EA Forum, and my current position is mostly that these kinds of differences in investment don’t really make much of a difference in total funding allocation, so it doesn’t seem worth optimizing much, besides just optimizing for returns and then taking those returns and optimizing those fully for philanthropic impact.)
This seems to be the common rationalist position, but it does seem to be at odds with:
The common rationalist position to vote on UDT grounds.
The common rationalist position to eschew contextualizing because it ruins the commons.
I don’t see much difference between voting because you want others to also vote the same way, or choosing stocks because you want others to choose stocks the same way.
I also think it’s pretty orthogonal to talk about telling the truth for long term gains in culture, and only giving money to companies with your values for long term gains in culture.
For what it’s worth, I get frustrated by people not responding to my posts/comments on LW all the time. This post was my attempt at a constructive response to that frustration. I think if LW was a bit livelier I might replace all my social media use with it. I tried to do my part to make it lively by reading and leaving comments a lot for a while, but eventually gave up.
Does LW 2.0 still have the functionality to make polls in comments? (I don’t remember seeing any recently.) This seems like the question that could be easily answered by a poll.
While it is (as ChristianKI pointed out) debatable that the amount of funding I can provide as a single person will make a big difference to a big company
My point wasn’t about the size about the company but about whether or not the company already has large piles of cash that it doesn’t know how to invest.
There are companies that want to invest more capital then they have available and thus have room for funding and there are companies where that isn’t the case.
There’s a hilarious interview with Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt where Thiel charges Google with not spending their 50 billion dollar in the bank that it doesn’t know what to do with and Eric Schmidt says “What you discover running these companies is that there are limits that are not cash...”
That interview happened back in 2012 but since then the amount of cash reverse of Alphabet has more then doubled despite some stock buybacks.
Companies like Tesla or Amazon seem to be willing to invest additional capital to which they have access in a way that Alphabet and Microsoft simply don’t.
A) most LW’ers aren’t investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing)
My general model would be that most LW’ler think that the instrumentally rational thing is to invest the money into a low-fee index fund.
Wow, that video makes me really hate Peter Thiel (I don’t necessarily disagree with any of the points he makes, but that communication style is really uncool)
In most context I would also dislike this communication style. In this case I feel that the communication style is necessary to get a straight answer from Eric Schmidt who would rather avoid the topic.
On the contrary, I aspire to the clarity and honesty of Thiel’s style. Schmidt seems somewhat unable to speak directly. Of the two of them, Thiel was able to say specifics about how the companies were doing excellently and how they were failing, and Schmidt could say neither.
Thank you for this reply, it motivated me to think deeper about the nature of my reaction to Thiel’s statements, and my thoughts on the conversation between Thiel and Schmidt. I would share my thoughts here, but writing takes time and energy, and I’m not currently in position to do so.
I’m quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW’ers aren’t investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren’t trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)
Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the chance to potentially shift a non-trivial (for certain definitions of trivial) amount of funding away from bad organizations and towards good organizations (which I’m investing primarily as a personal financial strategy), seems very worrying to me. While it is (as ChristianKI pointed out) debatable that the amount of funding I can provide as a single person will make a big difference to a big company, it’s bad decision theory to model my actions as only being correlated with myself; and besides, if the funding was redirected, it probably would have gone somewhere without the enormous supply of funds Alphabet has, and very well could have made an important difference, pushing the margins away from failure and towards success.
There’s a good chance I may change my mind in the future about this, but currently my response to this information is a substantial shift away from the LW crowd actually being any good at usefully using rationality instrumentally
(For what it’s worth, the post made it not at all clear to me that we were talking about a nontrivial amount of funding. I read it as just you thinking a bit through your personal finance allocation. The topic of divesting and impact investing has been analyzed a bunch on LessWrong and the EA Forum, and my current position is mostly that these kinds of differences in investment don’t really make much of a difference in total funding allocation, so it doesn’t seem worth optimizing much, besides just optimizing for returns and then taking those returns and optimizing those fully for philanthropic impact.)
This seems to be the common rationalist position, but it does seem to be at odds with:
The common rationalist position to vote on UDT grounds.
The common rationalist position to eschew contextualizing because it ruins the commons.
I don’t see much difference between voting because you want others to also vote the same way, or choosing stocks because you want others to choose stocks the same way.
I also think it’s pretty orthogonal to talk about telling the truth for long term gains in culture, and only giving money to companies with your values for long term gains in culture.
I don’t understand. What do you mean by contextualizing?
More here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms
For what it’s worth, I get frustrated by people not responding to my posts/comments on LW all the time. This post was my attempt at a constructive response to that frustration. I think if LW was a bit livelier I might replace all my social media use with it. I tried to do my part to make it lively by reading and leaving comments a lot for a while, but eventually gave up.
Does LW 2.0 still have the functionality to make polls in comments? (I don’t remember seeing any recently.) This seems like the question that could be easily answered by a poll.
It doesn’t; this feature didn’t survive the switchover from old-LW to LW2.0.
My point wasn’t about the size about the company but about whether or not the company already has large piles of cash that it doesn’t know how to invest.
There are companies that want to invest more capital then they have available and thus have room for funding and there are companies where that isn’t the case.
There’s a hilarious interview with Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt where Thiel charges Google with not spending their 50 billion dollar in the bank that it doesn’t know what to do with and Eric Schmidt says “What you discover running these companies is that there are limits that are not cash...”
That interview happened back in 2012 but since then the amount of cash reverse of Alphabet has more then doubled despite some stock buybacks.
Companies like Tesla or Amazon seem to be willing to invest additional capital to which they have access in a way that Alphabet and Microsoft simply don’t.
My general model would be that most LW’ler think that the instrumentally rational thing is to invest the money into a low-fee index fund.
Wow, that video makes me really hate Peter Thiel (I don’t necessarily disagree with any of the points he makes, but that communication style is really uncool)
In most context I would also dislike this communication style. In this case I feel that the communication style is necessary to get a straight answer from Eric Schmidt who would rather avoid the topic.
On the contrary, I aspire to the clarity and honesty of Thiel’s style. Schmidt seems somewhat unable to speak directly. Of the two of them, Thiel was able to say specifics about how the companies were doing excellently and how they were failing, and Schmidt could say neither.
Thank you for this reply, it motivated me to think deeper about the nature of my reaction to Thiel’s statements, and my thoughts on the conversation between Thiel and Schmidt. I would share my thoughts here, but writing takes time and energy, and I’m not currently in position to do so.
:-)