David Gross

• David Gross 14 Nov 2023 22:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Redi­rect­ing one’s own taxes as an effec­tive al­tru­ism method

  Thanks for the response. This goes far enough afield of my expertise that I don’t think I can give very helpful answers to your specific questions. I don’t have any experience with corporate tax refusal of this sort. In the very limited anecdotal reports I’ve seen, it seems like the IRS is most likely to crack the whip and potentially pursue corporate officers when 1) the corporate entity fails to pay employment taxes (payroll/​social-security taxes) after withholding them from employees’ paychecks, 2) when there’s actual fraud/​dishonest filing involved, 3) when there’s no filing of required forms; in roughly that order of severity. I’m much less confident in anticipating the IRS’s behavior here than I am in the case of individual tax-nonpayers.

  As far as the 10-year limitations deadline, again here I have much less information to go on for corporate taxpayers than for individuals. I know in the case of individuals, once the tax debt passes the “collection statute expiration date” it just sort of vanishes from the system and so they stop bothering you about it.

  Note that if the corporate entity formally files for bankruptcy that this suspends the ticking of the statute of limitations clock until six months after the bankruptcy is resolved.

• David Gross 14 Nov 2023 0:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Redi­rect­ing one’s own taxes as an effec­tive al­tru­ism method

  Yeah, it’s an imperfect first-stab calculation at best. But that doesn’t mean that 1 in 12,000 is necessarily an underestimate because while the 8,143,000 denominator may be exaggerated for the reasons you suggest; the 699 numerator is too, for the reason I gave (“even if every one of those prosecutions had been of people who merely refused to pay”). In fact, few to none of those 699 prosecutions were of people who merely refused to pay. An appendix to their report shows how many indictments the IRS pursued in a variety of categories (this adds up to more than 699 because some non-tax crimes e.g. narcotics, money laundering are also prosecuted via the same unit). Non-payment doesn’t even make the list:

  • Abusive Tax Schemes: 35

  • Corporate Tax Fraud: 23

  • Financial Institution Fraud: 20

  • Bank Secrecy Act: 338

  • Employment Tax: 142

  • Healthcare Fraud: 69

  • Abusive Return Preparer Program: 112

  • Identity Theft: 88

  • Money Laundering: 701

  • International Operations: 143

  • Narcotics: 475

  • Non-Filer: 115

  • Public Corruption: 27

  • Questionable Refund Program: 51

  • Terrorism: 33

• David Gross 13 Nov 2023 22:43 UTC

  3 points

  −2

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Redi­rect­ing one’s own taxes as an effec­tive al­tru­ism method

  I believe it’s not actually true that, if you merely repeatedly neglect to pay your taxes, the I.R.S. will inquire into your motives and intent in order to decide whether to come after you with both barrels blazing. As far as I can tell they do not have the resources or inclination to do that sort of investigation.

  I base this largely on the experience of American war tax resisters. They are often loudly self-incriminating about their willful intent: sometimes going so far as to write letters to the I.R.S. explaining their motivation. Of the tens of thousands of Americans who have engaged in war tax resistance over the years, I know of only two in the past 75 years who have been criminally prosecuted merely for willful refusal to pay taxes (there have been others who have been criminally prosecuted or jailed for things like filing inaccurate forms or contempt of court, but those were cases in which they were defying the law in ways that went beyond merely not paying). The war tax resistance movement keeps pretty good records on its “martyrs” so if there were other cases like those two they would probably have come to my attention.

• David Gross 13 Nov 2023 22:30 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: antanaclasis’s comment on: Redi­rect­ing one’s own taxes as an effec­tive al­tru­ism method

  Last I heard, about 40% of U.S. citizens don’t have passports to begin with, so I expect that at least for some readers, this isn’t such a big deal. For the rest it is certainly a consideration to factor in. Note that it typically takes some time before it becomes a problem: you accumulate $59,000 (actually more, as this number is inflation-adjusted) in delinquent taxes, the I.R.S. notices you’re over the limit and submits paperwork to the State Department, then somewhere down the line your passport expires and you’re unable to renew it until you resolve the tax delinquency (and go through a State Department paperwork dance of your own).

Redi­rect­ing one’s own taxes as an effec­tive al­tru­ism method

• David Gross 13 Oct 2023 1:26 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: How to make to-do lists (and to get things done)?

  FWIW, some tips on how to improve your resolve here: Notes on Resolve

• David Gross 20 Sep 2023 21:39 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: The stereo­type of male clas­si­cal mu­sic lovers be­ing gay

  Aesthetically, opera seems like it slots in well to a Very Gay modern niche, in that it is flamboyant, is dramatic to the point of histrionic, lends itself well to backstage scuttlebutt about prime donne and other such inside baseball dish, is nicely campy in its traditional overwroughtitude of costume and set design and vocal fireworks and Götterdämmerung, and is a good object to lavish conspicuous aficionado-points on. It’s as gay as green is Irish.

[Question] Do you know of any re­li­able DIY com­pendium of home phys­i­cal ther­apy ex­er­cises?

Book re­view: The Im­por­tance of What We Care About (Harry G. Frank­furt)

• David Gross 8 Aug 2023 12:26 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: No­tice your everything

  I’d also like to see what work people have already done that I don’t already know about.

  See Notes on Attention for some possible leads.

“Des­per­ate Hon­esty” by Agnes Callard

• David Gross 19 Jul 2023 15:19 UTC

  14 points

  2

  on: What Caused the Puz­zling De­cline in Ac­tivism Against Policy Violence Towards Black Peo­ple?

  I’d add “Covid” to the hypotheses. At the time it was difficult to sustain many varieties of coordinated grassroots activity, even something as banal as a book club, just because you didn’t want to meet indoors in groups and because alternatives like Zoom were off-putting to some and suboptimal in many ways. People may have relished the opportunity to come out in the streets and protest a bit, or to engage in social media histrionics, but to sustain this sort of activism in a meaningful way requires the sort of organizing and group deliberation that was unusually difficult at that time.

• David Gross 15 Jul 2023 1:45 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Physics is Ul­ti­mately Subjective

  This reminds me of a POV that I find perennially tempting, a sort of Buddhism verging on solipsism:

  “Reality Itself” is already completely here and completely available to you. That indeed is the definition of Reality Itself: the actual subjective contents of the present moment, your (pre-”assessed”) subjective experience. To discover Reality Itself, you don’t have to assess your subjective experience as though it were merely evidence left behind by the real reality that you have to examine for clues. It’s already the real deal. Our ideas about “objective reality” (atoms and quarks and fields, but even chairs and tables and people) are models and linguistic conventions we find helpful for discussing, finding patterns in, and predicting Reality Itself, but they are not themselves Reality Itself hiding behind our subjective experience. You can learn interesting things about Reality Itself by examining it and subjecting it to scientific analysis, but you can’t get any realer that way: any closer to reality. You’re as close as you can get already—it’s right here; you can’t miss it.

• David Gross 10 Jul 2023 14:52 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: The virtue of determination

  See also: Notes on Resolve

• David Gross 3 Jul 2023 23:05 UTC

  3 points

  −2

  on: What in your opinion is the biggest open prob­lem in AI al­ign­ment?

  This will probably be dismissed as glib, but: human alignment.

• David Gross 28 Jun 2023 21:58 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: What is your fi­nan­cial port­fo­lio?

  FWIW, here’s how my “investment” strategy has been changing (“investment” considered broadly, in a time=money sense).

  I’m weighting foreign language acquisition less than I used to, in part because advances in AI are making that a somewhat less-valuable skill than I had originally anticipated.

  I’m googling for websites a lot less than I used to. This is partially because Google’s web search has declined in quality (and while its competitors can roughly match it, none have really leapfrogged it) and partially because the web itself has become such a morass of crap. I’m correspondingly increasing my investment in particular sources of web content (these seem vulnerable as well, so I’m keeping my options open, but by the time AI starts writing LW content on the regular it might be worth reading). I’m long on the wisdom of the ancients, short on anything expressed in an op-ed.

  I’ve given up on Twitter/​Facebook, and am finding my long-shot investment of time in Mastodon to be paying off better than I’d hoped. I’m tentatively exploring other fediverse options.

  I’ve been divesting from politics /​ political arguments broadly for a while, and shifting to a more-local focus on political action (meaning not just action involving governments & elections, but any organized efforts for social goals). This is I think in part motivated by an inchoate hunch that our ability to rationally observe and engage in useful discourse about events outside of our own back yards is going to be terribly disrupted by AI/​bot-fueled disinformation.

  My retirement portfolio is slightly more tech-heavy now, but I otherwise don’t feel confident picking winners & losers among public companies or sectors and haven’t made any galaxy-brained I-think-I’m-smarter-than-the-market moves.

  So far, my policy of frugality has paid good dividends. My spending has been largely in sectors less-affected by inflation, and I have accumulated enough buffer savings that if my job gets automated away I’ll have some time to pivot gracefully.

  I continue to be long on health, and take steps to secure a vigorous longevity to the extent fortune allows. Whatever happens in the coming decades, I don’t want to miss it.

• David Gross 30 May 2023 2:34 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Wikipe­dia as an in­tro­duc­tion to the al­ign­ment problem

  Reduced it by ~43kb, though I don’t know if many readers will notice as most of the reduction is in markup.

• David Gross 17 May 2023 15:43 UTC

  2 points

  −1

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: New User’s Guide to LessWrong

  Since you’ve gone with the definition, are you sure that definition is solid? A reasoning process like “spend your waking moments deriving mathematical truths using rigorous methods; leave all practical matters to curated recipes and outside experts” may tend to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than “attempt to wrestle as rationally as you can with all of the strange and uncertain reality you encounter, and learn to navigate toward worthy goals by pushing the limits of your competence in ways that seem most promising and prudent” but the latter seems to me a “more rational reasoning process.”

  The conflation of rationality with utility-accumulation/​winning also strikes me as questionable. These seem to me to be different things that sometimes cooperate but that might also be expected to go their separate ways on occasion. (This, unless you define winning/​utility in terms of alignment with what is true, but a phrase like “sitting atop a pile of utility” doesn’t suggest that to me.)

  If you thought you were a shoe-in to win the lottery, and in fact you do win, does that retrospectively convert your decision to buy a lottery ticket into a rational one in addition to being a fortunate one? (Your belief turned out to be true, your decision turned out to be good, you got a pile of utility and can call yourself a winner.)

• David Gross 17 May 2023 2:10 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: New User’s Guide to LessWrong

  LessWrong is a good place for:

  Each of the following bullet points begins with “who”, so this should probably be something like “LessWrong is a good place for people:”

• David Gross 17 May 2023 2:09 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: New User’s Guide to LessWrong

  A more rational reasoning process tends to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than a less rational process.

  It’s not clear from this or what immediately follows in this section whether you intend this statement as a tautological definition of a process (a process that “tends to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often” is what we call a “more rational reasoning process”) or as an empirically verifiable prediction about a yet-to-be-defined process (if you use a TBD “more rational reasoning process” then you will “tend[] to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often”). I could see people drawing either conclusion from what’s said in this section.