Sure, uncollateralized lending is knowingly a higher-risk higher-reward space. So far they’ve had $57million in in successfully repaid loans and zero defaults, but obviously they can’t keep up that perfect streak forever, and it remains to be seen if the net yields still look great when some defaults inevitably occur.
benjamincosman
I wonder how blockchain tech might affect this? e.g. a lot of my savings are currently invested in cryptocurrencies; I don’t purposefully link my addresses to my name but it’s probably possible for someone to figure it out if they wanted to. As blockchain becomes more mainstream/safer, I would expect this to start applying to more people.
So does your answer change if the soul-seller is the artist instead of the prop? Also Tim would argue that he did not sell his soul but rather an artwork entitled Selling My Soul; I haven’t seen reason to argue yet ;)
...what’s wrong with my link formatting? I checked all the [common failure modes](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Comment_formatting#Links_2)
Thanks!
The problem with this argument is that it’s implicitly assuming that all curves are lines, i.e. very roughly you argue that politicians on Twitter is bad, politicians not on Twitter is good, and therefore removing one politician from Twitter is a step in the bad->good direction so it’s good. But not all curves are lines—e.g. if Twitter banned half of all politicians but chose only the conservative half, I claim that’s worse than each of the endpoints of banning nobody and banning all politicians. (Well, except for the fact that with such an outrageous show of bias they might lose some of the hold they have over the world, which would be good.) So you have to argue more specifically that removing Trump and only Trump is still good. Might be doable, but I don’t think you did it—in fact you specifically replace that narrow question with the general one (“A better question than “why are we banning Trump from Twitter?” is instead “why are we encouraging high-profile politicians to engage with potential behavioral addictions?””)
There are two possible meanings to phrases like “banning Trump is a good thing”, and I think you are conflating the two in a motte-and-bailey. The motte is “the fact that Trump is banned is a good thing for Trump’s health”. This is likely true for the reasons you mention (Twitter is a drug etc). The bailey is “the decision process that Twitter used to ban Trump (which, as an ongoing process, has also been used to ban people in the past and will presumably be used to ban people in the future) is a good thing for the world”. But to defend this statement, all claims about whether Trump himself is healthier off Twitter are irrelevant, because Twitter is obviously not banning people for their own health (they’re the cause of the addiction!). Even if every individual person they choose to ban is personally better off banned, if the process is flawed (as our simplistic example, “only ban conservatives”) then the process can still be bad for the world at large.
So which of the two versions are you claiming (or is it some third thing I missed)? If your claim is just “the fact that Trump is banned is a good thing for Trump”, then fine, I don’t disagree with you, but I’m also not sure why you’d bother to write this article—why should we all care about Trump’s personal health? But if instead you’re arguing that Twitter’s process isn’t broken, then stop hiding in that motte.
I think one key reason this can’t be done is the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics—once you’ve interacted with the problem by allowing people to settle in your (former) land, people will now blame you for anything that happens, including the fact that they don’t have all your country’s nice citizenship benefits (even though they didn’t have those benefits back home either).
An unrelated issue is that the incentives might be built wrong: if failure means absorption into the host country, why bother succeeding?
Very sorry to have missed this—somehow I’d calendared it for 6pm :( I hope to join future ones—is there a mailing list I could be added to?
An Oracle’s prediction does not have to apply to worlds in which the Oracle does not ‘desire’ to retain its classification as an Oracle. Indeed, since an Oracle needs to take the effects of its predictions into account, one of the ways an Oracle might be implemented is that for each prediction it is considering making, it simulates a world where it makes that prediction to see whether it comes true. In which case there will be (simulated) worlds where a prediction is made within that world by (what appears to be) an Oracle, yet the prediction does not apply to the world where the prediction is delivered.
Or to put it another way, talk of “an Oracle” seems potentially confused, since the same entity may not be an Oracle in all the worlds under discussion.
I don’t doubt that in the heat of battle, we’re going to be asking some version of “is nuking women and children cheaper than firebombing them”. But discussing the ethical questions outside of battle directly feeds into this calculation: because humanity has decided that nuking civilians is immoral, even a commander with no moral compass knows that nuking civilians may have reputational/legal impacts on themselves and their country, and may cause the enemy to retaliate in kind where it would not have otherwise: in other words, the “cost” of using the nuke has gone up, hopefully to the point that they’ll decide alternatives are “cheaper”.
Can someone point me to discussion of the chance that an AGI catastrophe happens but doesn’t kill all humans? As a silly example that may still be pointing at something real, say someone builds the genie and asks it to end all strife on earth; it takes the obvious route of disintegrating the planet (no strife on earth ever again!), but now it stops (maxed out utility function, so no incentive to also turn the lightcone into computronium), and the survivors up in Elon’s Mars base take safety seriously next time?
This looks cut off: “It’d have been handy to have a strong background in epidemiology,”
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks!
This “detox” idea was so close to being a good thing—if only they’d decided on (ineffective and) harmless chemicals rather than (ineffective and) harmful ones, then its main function would be to give vaccine holdouts a face-saving safe way to get vaccinated (“I still think vaccines are unsafe, but I got one because I knew I could just drink this particular juice blend afterward to cancel it...”). I briefly toyed with the idea that to this end it might be worth spreading some such ‘safe detox scheme’ on purpose, but any good this might cause does not seem to come anywhere close to the extremely high bar one would have to meet to justify spreading lies.
...I also wonder if a ‘safe detox scheme’ could actually spread as effectively anyway—perhaps the known harmfulness of the chemicals in the current detox process is part of what gives it credibility, in the same way that medicine is ‘supposed to’ taste bad.
Typo: Eitan = Eitin = Eitian. (Though now I’m looking for a deeper meaning, like how Abram becomes Abraham after a covenant with God; curse you Scott Alexander :) )
I love the electric shocks analogy!
Just wanted to thank you for trying this!
Minor note: would you be willing to change the name? two extremely similar projects with extremely similar names is asking for trouble.
(Disclaimer: I mention TUSD and TrueFi below; my brother is the CEO of the company behind those so you can guess my biases. None of this is financial advice)
Not quite—Tether hasn’t been properly backed by dollars since 2019 (see discussion over at Metaculus). A better example of a second fully-backed stablecoin would be TrueUSD (and its sister coins for other currencies, like TrueHKD).
TrueFi is offering uncollateralized loans. It’s not nearly as trustless and decentralized as something like Uniswap, but it is moving in that direction—loans are voted on by holders of the governance token TRU, and the project roadmap says that soon they’ll be doing more of this algorithmically based on info such as your on-chain credit history.
(also TrueFi is offering some pretty sweet yield farming rates right now :) )