I think the idea is that short position pays off up-front, and then you don’t need to worry about the loan if everyone’s dead.
If by paying off you mean this bet actually working I think you’re right though. It seems more likely that the stock market would go up in the short term, forcing you to cover at a higher price and losing a bunch of money. And if the market stays flat, you’ll still lose money on interest payments unless doom is coming this year.
I’ll be out of town (getting married on the 25th) but I’d be happy to do something the weekend after.
I don’t think this is actually the rule by common practice (and not all bad things should be illegal). For example, if one of your friends/associates says something that you think is stupid, going around telling everyone that they said something stupid would generally be seen as rude. It would also be seen as crazy if you overheard someone saying something negative about their job and then going out of your way to tell their boss.
In both cases there would be exceptions, like if if the person’s boss is your friend or safety reasons like you mentioned, but I think by default sharing negative information about people is seen as bad, even if it’s sometimes considered low-levels of bad (like with gossip).
I also agree with this to some extent. Journalists should be most concerned about their readers, not their sources. They should care about accurately quoting their sources because misquoting does a disservice to their readers, and they should care about privacy most of the time because having access to sources is important to providing the service to their readers.
I guess this post is from the perspective of being a source, so “journalists are out to get you” is probably the right attitude to take, but it’s good actually for journalists to prioritize their readers over sources.
The convenient thing about journalism is that the problems we’re worried about here are public, so you don’t need to trust the list creators as much as you would in other situations. This is why I suggest giving links to the articles, so anyone reading the list can verify for themselves that the article commits whichever sin it’s accused of.
The trickier case would be protecting against the accusers lying (i.e. tell journalist A something bad and then claim that they made it up). If you have decent verification of accusers’ identifies you might still get a good enough signal to noise ratio, especially if you include positive ‘reviews’.
I largely agree with this article but I feel like it won’t really change anyone’s behavior. Journalists act the way they do because that’s what they’re rewarded for. And if your heuristic is that all journalists are untrustworthy, it makes it hard for trustworthy journalists to get any benefit from that.
A more effective way to change behavior might be to make a public list of journalists who are or aren’t trustworthy, with specific information about why (“In [insert URL here], Journalist A asked me for a quote and I said X, but they implied inaccurately that I believe Y” “In [insert URL here], Journalist B thought that I believe P but after I explained that I actually believe Q, they accurately reflected that in the article”, or just boring ones like “I said X and they accurately quoted me as saying X”, etc.).
It would be very surprising to me if such ambitious people wanted to leave right before they had a chance to make history though.
They can’t do that since it would make it obvious to the target that they should counter-attack.
As an update: Too much psyllium makes me feel uncomfortably full, so I imagine that’s part of the weight loss effect of 5 grams of it per meal. I did some experimentation but ended up sticking with 1 gram per meal or snack, in 500 gram capsules and taken with water.
I carry 8 of these pills (enough for 4 meals/snacks) in my pocket in small flat pill organizers.
It’s still too early to assess the impact on cholesterol but this helps with my digestive issues, and it seems to help me not overeat delicious foods to the same extent (i.e. on a day where I previously would have eaten 4 slices of pizza for lunch, I find it easy to eat 2 slices + psyllium instead).
Biden and Harris have credibly committed to help Taiwan. Trump appears much more isolationist and less likely to intervene, which might make China more likely to invade.
I personally think it’s good for us to protect friendly countries like this, but isn’t China invading Taiwan good for AI risk, since destroying the main source of advanced chips would slow down timelines?
You also mention Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies, which seem bad for standard reasons, but not really relevant to AI existential risk (except to the extent that he might stay in power and continue making bad decisions 4+ years out).
I think it’s important that AIs will be created within an existing system of law and property rights. Unlike animals, they’ll be able to communicate with us and make contracts. It therefore seems perfectly plausible for AIs to simply get rich within the system we have already established, and make productive compromises, rather than violently overthrowing the system itself.
I think you disagree with Eliezer on a different crux (whether the alignment problem is easy). If we could create AI’s that follows the existing system of law and property rights (including the intent of the laws, and doesn’t exploit loopholes, and doesn’t maliciously comply with laws, and doesn’t try to get the law changed, etc.) then that would be a solution to the alignment problem, but the problem is that we don’t know how to do that.
I think trying to be Superman is the problem, but I’m ok if that line of thinking doesn’t work for you.
Do you mean in the sense that people who aren’t Superman should stop beating themselves up about it (a real problem in EA), or that even if you are (financial) Superman, born in the red-white-and-blue light of a distant star, you shouldn’t save people in other countries because that’s bad somehow?
The argument using Bernard Arnault doesn’t really work. He (probably) won’t give you $77 because if he gave everyone $77, he’d spend a very large portion of his wealth. But we don’t need an AI to give us billions of Earths. Just one would be sufficient. Bernard Arnault would probably be willing to spend $77 to prevent the extinction of a (non-threatening) alien species.
(This is not a general-purpose argument against worrying about AI or other similar arguments in the same vein, I just don’t think this particular argument in the specific way it was written in this post works)
I’m only vaguely connected to EA in the sense of donating more-than-usual amounts of money in effective ways (❤️ GiveDirectly), but this feels like a strawman. I don’t think the average EA would recommend charities that hurt other people as side effects, work actively-harmful jobs to make money[1], or generally Utilitarian-maxxing.
The EA trolley problem is that there are thousands (or millions) of trolleys that have varying difficult of stopping, barreling toward varying groups of people. The problem isn’t that stopping them hurts other people (it doesn’t), it’s just that you can’t stop them all. You don’t need to be a utilitarian to think that if it’s raining planes, Superman should start by catching the 747′s.
For example, high-paying finance jobs are high-stress and many people don’t like working them, but they’re not actually bad for the world.
One listed idea was that you can buy reservations at one website directly from the restaurant, with the price going as a downpayment. The example given was $1,000 for a table for two at Carbone, with others being somewhat less. As is pointed out, that fixes the incentives for booking, but once you show up you are now in all-you-can-eat mode at a place not designed for that.
I’ve been to several restaurants that do some form of this, from a small booking fee that gets refunded when you check in, to just paying entirely up-front (for restaurants with pre-set menus).
This is built into OpenTable so it’s not even that hard. I’m really confused why more restaurants don’t do this.
I’m not a video creator, but I wonder if this could be turned into a useful tool that takes the stills from a video and predicts which ones will get the highest engagement.
Also if anyone’s interested in the other meetups I mentioned, there’s:
The Millenial Social Club meetup group plays board games every Friday in the food court in Lincoln Tower South in Bellevue. The group is always huge (30+ people). It looks like they started doing it on Sundays recently too. https://meetu.ps/e/Ns6hh/blHm6/i
There’s a Seattle Rationalists reading group that meets on Mondays in Seattle. https://meetu.ps/e/NrycV/blHm6/I
Seattle Effective Altruists occasionally has social meetups in Redmond but I don’t know when the next will be: https://meetu.ps/e/Ns3Gt/blHm6/I
If anyone finds any other social rationalist-adjacent meetups on the east side I’d love to know, since I’m not really into book clubs and getting into Seattle is too hard after work.
In case anyone’s wondering, the lights I talked about were these:
I have 8 of the 4 ft 5000K version (they’re cheaper in 4-packs). I have them plugged into a switched outlet and daisy-chained together, and they’re attached at the top of the wall to make it look like light is coming down from all around. They’re tedious to setup by worth it in my opinion.
I like the 5000k version but some people might like warmer light like 4000k (or 6500k if you really like blue). https://www.waveformlighting.com/home-residential/which-led-light-color-temperature-should-i-choose
There’s probably cheaper similarly-good lights available but Waveform’s marketing materials worked on me: https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led
I have a severely ‘unbalanced’ portfolio of assets for this reason, and even getting rid of the step-up on death would not change that in many cases.
What would be the point of not realizing gains indefinitely if we got rid of the step-on on death?
This is actually why a short position (a complicated loan) would theoretically work. If we all die, then you, as someone else’s counterparty, never need to pay your loan back.
(I think this is a bad idea, but not because of counterparty risk)