Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 13,253
dollar in my DAF is approximately as good as a dollar in my normal bank account for making the world a better place.
Well, one of them has reduced your tax burden when you deposted it. The comparison should be $DAF ~= $(cash—taxes).
Also, there’s some controversy about whether political spending is actually altruistic. I tend to lean toward being restrictive in my giving—not even most registered charitable organizations make my cut for making the world better, and almost no political causes.
All-or-nothing, black-or-white thinking does not serve well for most decisions. Integrals of value-per-time-unit is a much better expected-value methodology.
What difference does it make whether I die in 60 years or in 10,000? In the end, I’ll still be dead.
What difference does it make whether you die this afternoon or in 60 years? If life has value to you, then longer life (at an acceptible quality level) is more valuable.
[note, not a utilitarian, but I strive to be effective, and I’m somewhat altruistic. I don’t speak for any movement or group.]
Effective Altruism strives for the maximization of objective value, not emotional sentiment.
What? There’s no such thing as objective value. EA strives for maximization of MEASURABLE and SPECIFIED value(s), but the value dimensions need not be (I’d argue CAN not be) objectively chosen.
I don’t see much disagreement. My comment was intended to generalize, not to contradict. Other comments seem like refinements or clarifications, rather than a rejection of the underlying thesis.
One could quibble about categorization of people into “bad” and “nice”, but anything more specific gets a lot less punchy.
Put another way: everyone underestimates variance.
Implicit in this argument is that the path of human culture and the long-term impact of your philanthropy is sub-exponential. Why would that be so? If there’s no way to donate NOW to things that will bloom and increase in impact over time, why would you expect that to be different in 50 years? If you prioritize much larger impact when you’re dead over immediate impact during your life, you should find causes that match your profile.
“people who would reflectively endorse giving control over the future to AI systems right now”.
“right now” is doing a lot of work there. I don’t believe there are any (ok, modulo the lizardman constant) who reflectively want any likely singularity-level change right now. I do believe there is a very wide range of believable far-mode preferences and acceptances of the trajectory of intelligent life beyond the immediate.
Neither upvoted nor downvoted—I’m happy that you’re thinking about these topics, but I don’t think this goes deep enough to be useful. It tries to use word definitions incorrectly to prove things that aren’t true.
All world leaders want to do good things. Their values is to do the most good. They just disagree on what the most good is!
Nope. All humans (including leaders) want many conflicting things, which they then try to justify as “good”. The label “good” is following, not leading, their desires.
All wars are because one side thinks X is good, another side thinks X is bad, and both sides are willing to fight for what they believe in to stop X or to keep X.
Perhaps, but see above. “good” is poorly-defined and “good for me and my people” is not even theoretically compatible among different entities.
All cooperation is because two sides think X is good/moral, so they work together to get X!
Otherwise, one side wouldn’t want X, and they wouldn’t both work to get it.
Not at all. A LOT of cooperatoin and trade is because two sides think they’re better off, without any agreement that either result is “good”. Or maybe true, but only if you define “good” as “what each trader in an agreement wants”.
And all bad decisions are because someone’s goals/values led them to think “I should do this bad thing.”
I can’t tell if you’re saying “all decisions are because someone’s goals/values led them to think “I should do this thing”, or if you’re saying decisions to pursue bad things (to some) are in this category. This is either incorrect or tautological.
There’s also a saying of “don’t try to teach a pig to sing—it wastes your time and annoys the pig”. It seems like you could investigate the porcine valence correlation using similar methods.
Ah, your inner Bruce. I do sympathize, though I’m not sure I have great advice, other than self-awareness and noticing when it happens. “Akrasia” doesn’t get discussed around here as much as it used to, and it was never particularly rigorous discussion, but it may be worth looking for some older posts and sequences. https://www.lesswrong.com/w/akrasia
It seems easy to deal with Bruce. Take the seat to his left. Do your best to help him enjoy giving you +EV opportunities.
More seriously, I didn’t engage deeply with the linked post, more about the text on LW. the link had enough blanket statements and far-mode stories that I didn’t think there was much information for me. What, specifically, is your difficulty? If it’s that “many people spew money because of emotional disregulation or bad epistemology”, you mostly have to decide whether and how you can help them, and how you can catch some of the spew when you can’t help. This itself is a game that you may or may not be able to win, and deciding your goals and how to pursue them is key.
I should admit that one of the reasons I play less poker nowadays is that I find I don’t enjoy the company of the people who make it profitable. I do enjoy those who make it unprofitable, by thinking about the game and talking intelligently about life. The goals of winning and of optimizing my social interaction are at odds, so I do something else.
It’s been said and written many times—the important skill in poker is game selection: find the softest field, and exploit it. As said long long ago on rec.gambling.poker: “to succeed in life, surround yourself with people smarter than you. to succeed in poker, surround yourself with people dumber than you.”
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that it’s universal in either direction. You’re absolutely right that this urge to avoid trying because it’d make failing feel a bit worse is common as well.
It does vary a LOT among groups and situations—some will be dispassionate strategists in money issues, but emotionally-risk-averse in (some) relationships. Many will play a game or games enough to learn some of the lessons about meta-outcomes, and a few will apply that to other areas.
It didn’t resonate with me, though I recognize some of the behaviors in others. I recognize just how thick the wall of my bubble is, though, so I really don’t want to imply universality. I do recommend my approach, though. Losing is part of playing, and shouldn’t affect one’s ego in either direction. The puzzle of how to maximize the overall outcome of the sequence of games in life remains fascinating and worth pursuing.
People have a strong need to lose in various situations. For example: you see them say ‘oh, I just got unlucky’ when they play a game of Magic and don’t get dealt quite the right cards in some turn. They are justifying losing, making it OK, coming up with an excuse that they will then use later on when they meet another such situation: ‘oh, I have got bad cards. There’s no way I can win. Losing is OK’. Then they lose.
I think I’m missing a bunch of context here, and I can’t tell if you’re arguing against something or if you’re agreeing with it. Taking it at face value, I think this is just factually incorrect for many people, in addition to being awash in typical mind fallacy.
I’m a gamer. I’ve played a lot of professional-level poker (I never made a full living from it, but many of my close associates did and do), I’ve studied to high-amateur level many forms of board, card, and classic games (the full cube of two/multiplayer, hidden/open information, random/deterministic).
Losing is part of the world. Anyone serious (or unserious but experienced) understands this. Recognizing the chance of winning, recognizing the different tactics that can maximize your payoff even if winning is unlikely, and accepting that you’ll often lose a game or subgame is CRITICAL to overall winning. Anyone who denies this is likely to be unpleasant, and probably wins less than they could.
Understanding one’s handicaps is NOT a need to lose. Justifying and accepting a loss is NOT a need to lose.In poker, folding early is one of the primary differences between an overall winner and an overall loser. Someone who tries to win every hand goes broke extremely quickly. In many other games, one should be conservative when ahead (protect the lead) and take crazy risks when behind (high-variance “hail mary” plays, if the cost of a loss doesn’t get any worse and it increases the chance of winning).
For non-money games, there’s ALSO the metagames of wanting people around me to have fun. I unabashedly don’t play only to win. And THAT is not “needing to lose”, it’s still trying to find ways to win, just recognizing that I can still get almost as much fun, perhaps get MORE strategic practice and domain learning, in losing as I do in winning.
I think much of the fear (aka probability mass of AI-doom) is not from the coherence of misaligned goals, but from the competence at implementing anything that’s not an aligned-goal. Extremely effective incoherent behavior is arguably MORE risky to biological life than is effective coherent behavior that’s only slightly misaligned. Effective and anti-aligned is worst, of course, but only small parts of motivation-space for extremely powerful optimization processes are good for us.
This is the problem with financial attribution. Net is highly susceptible to that accounting trickery (aka structure decisions) regarding how expenses are distributed. In truth, all of these are correlated in customer behavior—the credit card revenue comes because of operational/flight options. How much of the expense should be attributed to each (and how much of the debt service for the enterprise, which is significant for airlines) is a choice they make.
They are tied together enough that there IS NO objective truth of the matter for what the post is claiming. Revenue gives the closest approximation IMO, but really, it’s everything combined with everything else.
It would be nice to see an analysis of a median passenger, how much they pay in flights, how much they pay in foregone rewards from a non-airline card, etc. Or a revenue analysis—valuation is very subject to accounting trickery regarding debt management and liability assignment choices.
Claude says 75-80% of airline revenue is ticket sales, 8-10% add-on fees, and 10-12% credit card loyalty programs.
not downvoted, but also not upvoted—this wasn’t really useful for the LW audience—nothing particularly new, and no added clarity on any of the questions.
I would be very happy to see, and almost certainly upvote even if I didn’t agree, with a strong attempt at an operational definition of “power”. I think it’s a missing element in a LOT of discussions about bargaining, AI takeover and influence, voluntary vs involuntary actions, etc.
I fully agree with this, including the acknowledgement that people and contexts differ enough that I don’t actually know how easy it is for others to include a disclaimer consistently, nor how they variously perceive the change in value and strength of their post/comment if they include a disclaimer. Changing norms is hard, and typical mind fallacy is rampant.
I wish people were generally more careful, kind, clear, and humble. This includes wishing this of myself.
Right. A prerequisite for personhood is legible entityhood. I don’t think current LLMs or any visible trajectory from them have any good candidates for separable, identifiable entity.
A cluster of compute that just happens to be currently dedicated to a block of code and data wouldn’t satisfy me, nor I expect a court.
The blockchain identifier is a candidate for a legible entity. It’s consistent over time, easy to identify, and while it’s easy to create, it’s not completely ephemeral and not copyable in a fungible way. It’s not, IMO, a candidate for personhood.
I don’t think EA is a trademarked or protected term (I could be wrong). I’m definitely the wrong person to decide what qualifies.
For myself, I do give a lot of support to local (city, state mostly) short-term (less than a decade, say) causes. It’s entirely up to each of us how to split our efforts among all the changes in our future lightcone we try to improve.