I got the same piece of advice—to think about things in terms of “wants” rather than “shoulds” or “have tos”—from someone outside the LW bubble, but in the context of things like doing my tax returns.
Giles
Karma: 1,716
She teaches social skills to nerds at CFAR workshops. She has an incredibly positive view of humanity and of what people are capable of, and meeting her massively increased the size of my reference class for what a rational person is like.
LW Women Submissions
a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW
Seven women submitted
uh… could this be rephrased?
I’m a very satisfied customer from the March workshop. The biggest win for me has been with social skills—it turns out that anxiety had been making me stupid, and that if I de-stress then whole new parts of my brain spring into action. And that was just one of a large number of practical insights. I was amazed at both how much CFAR know about how we can use our brains effectively, and at how much they were able to teach over 4 days. Really impressive, well-run effort with a buzz of “this is where it’s happening”.
I promised I’d write about this in more detail, so stay tuned!
The best thing about this was that there was very little status dynamic within the CFAR house—we were all learning together as equals.
Agree with purchasing non-sketchiness signalling and utilons separately. This is especially important if like jkaufman a lot of your value comes as an effective altruist role model
Agree that if diversification is the only way to get the elephant to part with its money then it might make sense.
Similarly, if you give all your donations to a single risky organization and they turn out to be incompetent then it might demotivate your future self. So you should hedge against this, which again can be done separately from purchasing the highest-expected-value thing.
Confused about what to do if we know we’re in a situation where we’re behaving far from rational agents but aren’t sure exactly how. I think this is the case with purchasing xrisk reduction, and with failure to reach Aumann agreement between aspiring effective altruists. To what extent do the rules still apply?
Lots of valid reasons for diversification can also serve as handy rationalizations. Diversification feels like the right thing to do—and hey, here are the reasons why! I feel like diversification should feel like the wrong thing to do, and then possibly we should do it anyway but sort of grudgingly.
I can imagine having a preference for saving at least X lives
I feel like you’ve got a point here but I’m not quite getting it. Our preferences are defined over outcomes, and I struggle to see how “saving X lives” can be seen as an outcome—I see outcomes more along the lines of “X number of people are born and then die at age 5, Y number of people are born and then die at age 70″. You can’t necessarily point to any individual and say whether or not they were “saved”.
I generally think of “the utility of saving 6 lives” as a shorthand for something like “the difference in utility between (X people die at age 5, Y people die at age 70) and (X-6 people die at age 5, Y+6 people die at age 70)”.
We’d have to use more precise language if that utility varies a lot for different choices of X and Y, of course.
I felt like I gained one insight, which I attempted to summarize in my own words in this comment.
It also slightly brought into focus for me the distinction between “theoretical decision processes I can fantasize about implementing” and “decision processes I can implement in practice by making minor tweaks to my brain’s software”. The first set can include self-less models such as paperclip maximization or optimizing those branches where I win the lottery and ignoring the rest. It’s possible that in the second set a notion of self just keeps bubbling up whatever you do.
One and a half insights is pretty good going, especially on a tough topic like this one. Because of inferential distance, what feels like 10 insights to you will feel like 1 insight to me—it’s like you’re supplying some of the missing pieces to your own jigsaw puzzle, but in my puzzle the pieces are a different shape.
So yeah, keep hacking away at the edges!
I can imagine that if you design an agent by starting off with a reinforcement learner, and then bolting some model-based planning stuff on the side, then the model will necessarily need to tag one of its objects as “self”. Otherwise the reinforcement part would have trouble telling the model-based part what it’s supposed to be optimizing for.
This is like a whole sequence condensed into a post.
Incidentally, in case it’s useful to anyone… The way I originally processed the $112M figure (or $68M as it then was), was something along the lines of:
$68M pledged
apply 90% cynicism
that gives $6.8M
that’s still way too large a number to represent actual ROI from $170K worth of volunteer time
how can I make this inconvenient number go away?
aha! This is money that’s expected to roll in over the next several decades. We really have no idea what the EA movement will turn into over that time, so should apply big future discounting when it comes to estimating our impact
(note it looks like Will was more optimistic, applying 67% cynicism to get from $400 to $130)
This implies immediately that 75-80% haven’t, and in practise that number will be higher care of the self-reporting. This substantially reduces the likely impact of 80,000 hours as a program.
Reduces it from what? There’s a point at which it’s more cots effective to just find new people than carrying on working to persuade existing ones. My intuition doesn’t say much about whether this happy point is above or below 25%.
Good point about self-reporting potentially exaggerating the impact though.
The pledging back-of-the-envelope calculation got me curious, because I had been assuming GWWC wouldn’t flat out lie about how much had been pledged (they say “We currently have 291 members … who together have pledged more than 112 million dollars” which implies an actual total not an estimate).
On the other hand, it’s just measuring pledges, it’s not an estimate of how much money anyone expects to actually materialise. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would read it that way—I may be mistaken here though, in which case there’s a genuine issue with how the number is being presented.
Anyway, I still wasn’t sure the pledge number made sense so I did my own back-of-the-envelope:
£72.68M pledged 291 members £250K pledged per person over the course of their life 40 years average expected time until retirement (this may be optimistic. I get the impression most members are young though) £6.2K average pledged per member per year
That would mean people are expecting to make £62K per year averaged over their entire remaining career, which still seems very optimistic. But:
some people will be pledging more than 10%
there might be some very high income people mixed in there, dragging the mean up.
So I think this passes the laugh test for me, as a measure of how much people might conceivably have pledged, not how much they’ll actually deliver.
I love the landmine metaphor—it blows up in your face and it’s left over from some ancient war.
Did he mean if they’re someone else’s fault then you have to fix the person?
You also know your own results aren’t fraudulent.
That experiment has changed Latham’s opinion of priming and has him wondering now about the applications for unconscious primes in our daily lives.
He seems to have skipped right over the part where he wonders why he and Bargh see one thing and other people see something different. Do people update far more strongly on evidence if it comes from their own lab?
Also, yay priming! (I don’t want this comment to sound negative about priming as such)
2 sounds wrong to me—like you’re trying to explain why having a consistent internal belief structure is important to someone who already believes that.
The things which would occur to me are:
If both of you are having reactions like this then you’re dealing with status, in-group and out-group stuff, taking offense, etc. If you can make it not be about that and be about the philosophical issues—if you can both get curious—then that’s great. But I don’t know how to make that happen.
Does your friend actually have any contradictory beliefs? Do they believe that they do?
You could escalate—point out every time your friend applies a math thing to social justice. “2000 people? That’s counting. You’re applying a math thing there.” “You think this is better than that? That’s called a partial ordering and it’s a math thing”. I’m not sure I’d recommend this approach though.
This may appear self-evident to you, but not necessarily to your “socially progressive” friend. Can you make a convincing case for it?
Remember you have to make a convincing case without using stuff like logic
I’ve got a few people interested in an effective altruism version of this, plus a small database of cards. Suggestions on how to proceed?