Writings on philosophy, investing, and altruism from a person with some thoughts on philosophy, investing, and altruism
Some people (including me) have argued that altruists often benefit from leveraging their investments. Recently, it has become easier to use leverage thanks to the emergence of return stacked funds.
This is not financial advice.
Continue readingThis research piece is not as rigorous or polished as usual. I wrote it quickly in a stream-of-consciousness style, which means it’s more reflective of my actual reasoning process.
My understanding of HIIT (high-intensity interval training) as of a week ago:
I now believe those are all probably wrong.
Continue readingAn if-then commitment is a framework for responding to AI risk: “If an AI model has capability X, then AI development/deployment must be halted until mitigations Y are put in place.”
As an extension of this approach, we should consider retroactive if-then commitments. We should behave as if we wrote if-then commitments a few years ago, and we should commit to implementing whatever mitigations we would have committed to back then.
Imagine how an if-then commitment might have been written in 2020:
Pause AI development and figure out mitigations if:
- AI exhibits what looks like deceptive or misaligned behavior, or feigns alignment (1, 1b, 2)
- AI breaks out of containment in a toy example
- AI finds a real-world zero-day vulnerability
- AI qualifies for Mensa1
- AI exhibits some degree of agentic capabilities
- AI writes malware
Well, AI models have now done or nearly-done all of those things.
We don’t know what mitigations are appropriate, so AI companies should pause development until (at a minimum) AI safety researchers agree on what mitigations are warranted, and those mitigations are then fully implemented.
(You could argue about whether AI really hit those capability milestones, but that doesn’t particularly matter. You need to pause and/or restrict development of an AI system when it looks potentially dangerous, not definitely dangerous.)
Okay, technically it did not score well enough to qualify, but it scored well enough that there was some ambiguity about whether it qualified, which is only a little bit less concerning. ↩
(I write listicles now)
(there are only 7 eligible high-protein breakfast cereals, so the ones at the bottom are still technically among the 7 best even though they’re not good)
If you search the internet, you can find rankings of the best “high-protein” breakfast cereals. But most of the entries on those lists don’t even have that much protein. I don’t like that, so I made my own list.
This is my ranking of genuinely high-protein breakfast cereals, which I define as containing at least 25% calories from protein.
Many food products like to advertise how many grams of protein they have per serving. That number doesn’t matter because it depends on how big a serving is. Hypothetically, if a food had 6g protein per serving but each serving contained 2000 calories, that would be a terrible deal. The actual number that matters is the proportion of calories from protein.
My ranking only includes vegan cereals because I’m vegan. Fortunately most cereals are vegan anyway. The main exception is that some cereals contain whey protein, but that’s not too common—most of them use soy, pea, or wheat protein instead.
Conventional wisdom says charity cost-effectiveness obeys a power law. To my knowledge, this hypothesis has never been properly tested.1 So I tested it and it turns out to be true.
(Maybe. Cost-effectiveness might also be log-normally distributed.)
Leftist critics of effective altruism like to say this. Well, it’s not true, and I proved it by calculating (an estimate of) the expected utility of a communist revolution. It wasn’t even hard—it took me less than an hour.
Continue readingI have some observations and half-baked ideas about my recent donation process. They weren’t important enough to include in the main post, but I want to talk about them anyway.
Continue readingLast updated 2024-11-20.
It’s been a while since I last put serious thought into where to donate. Well I’m putting thought into it this year and I’m changing my mind on some things.
I now put more priority on existential risk (especially AI risk), and less on animal welfare and global priorities research. I believe I previously gave too little consideration to x-risk for emotional reasons, and I’ve managed to reason myself out of those emotions.
Within x-risk:
In the rest of this post, I will explain:
Then I provide a list of organizations working on AI policy and my evaluation of each of them, and where I plan to donate.
Cross-posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.
Continue readingPsychologists have done experiments that supposedly show how people behave irrationally. But in some of those experiments, people do behave rationally, and it’s the psychologists’ expectations that are irrational.
Continue readingScott Alexander once wrote:
David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I.
If those guys can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this:
“A long time ago, not-A, and also, not-B. Now, A and B. Therefore, A caused B.”
Example: In 1820, pirates were everywhere. Now you hardly ever see pirates, and global temperatures are rising. Therefore, the lack of pirates caused global warming.
(This particular argument was originally made as a joke, but I will give some real examples later.)
Naming fallacies is hard. Maybe we could call this the “two distant points in time fallacy”. For now I’ll just call it the Worst Argument.
Continue reading