sapphire

• sapphire 27 Jun 2018 22:47 UTC

  43 points

  on: Last Chance to Fund the Berkeley REACH

  I neither live in Berkeley nor am I unusually wealthy for a rationalist. but I think it would set a very bad precedent for Sarah and friend’s efforts to end in failure. My vision of the rationalist community can make projects work.

  I pledged $100

• sapphire 31 Jul 2019 13:31 UTC

  40 points

  on: Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism

  I don’t think Qiaochu’s comment is particularly low effort. He has been Berkeley for a long time and spoke about his experiences. Given that he shared his google doc with some people, the comment was probably constructive on net. Though I don’t think it was constructive to the conversation on lesswrong.

  If someone posts a detailed thread describing how they want to do X, maybe people should hold off on posting ‘actually trying to do X is a bad idea’. Sometimes the negative comments are right. But lesswrong seems to have gone way too far in the direction of naysaying. As you point out, the top comments are often negative on even high effort posts by highly regarded community members. This is a big problem.

• sapphire 26 May 2017 16:56 UTC

  31 points

  on: Dragon Army: The­ory & Char­ter (30min read)

  -- A note: I originally sent Duncan criticism privately. I didn’t want to add too much negativity to the discussion. But Duncan asked me to post publicly and I will defer to his judgement. Its his project and he is a very capable guy. I really hope DA succeeds, the rationalist community could be doing much better on many metrics. In general I find the model of DA very promising. But I have some serious concerns.

  -- The ethics code seems extremely strict.

  For example this rule strikes me as extraordinarily hard to follow: “A Dragon will assume good faith in all interactions with other Dragons”. As does “A Dragon will be fully present and supportive when interacting with other Dragons in formal/​official contexts”.

  Earlier in the document Duncan said “Discuss, and then agree upon, and then rigidly and rigorously enforce a norm of perfection in all formal undertakings”. This implies to me that Duncan intends to enforce the CoC pretty strictly. Should Duncan be confidant its reasonable to expect such large deviations from how humans normally operate? I should note that normal bootcamps do not require as much psychologically from their recruits. Even though bootcamps require obedience they don’t normally require recruits to think a certain way.

  Duncan explicitly said he was willing to modify norms that members felt were too hard to follow (” Be ruthless about discarding standards during strategic review; if a member of the group says that X or Y or Z is too high-cost for them to sustain, believe them, and make decisions accordingly.”). But he also said that the CoC was unlikely to change. If I thought the CoC was meant more as a set of guidelines than strict rules I would be less worried. But that is not how I interpreted the post.

  -- How many people do we expect to leave or get kicked out?

  I have moderated some internet communities (And admin an active one now). Temp bans and warnings can only go so far. At some points you have to be willing to pull the trigger and ban people.

  The section on reparations reassured me that Duncan was thinking hard about to keep people from falling off the path. In addition, unlike most internet communities, the DA recruits will be heavily vetted. But in order to enforce the reparations you either have to appeal to social pressure or the threat of kicking people out. I think the standards are very strict so serious discipline might be needed.

  -- Are there practical or ethical problems with this plan?

  People who get kicked out of DA are still required to pay rent until they can find a replacement. Assuming they are on the lease it seems highly unlikely you can kick them out of the house. However if someone gets kicked out of the house they might be pretty negative towards the rest of the group. It probably a bad situation to keep them around, but maybe they can’t easily find a replacement or a new place to live.

  Secondly people who get kicked out might be psychologically unable to remain at the DA barracks. But until they can find someone to replace them they are on the hook for rent. In my personal opinion joining dragon army should be a “Good deal” for anyone involved. Its important that the downside of: “get kicked out” → “lose friends, need to find a replacement despite the fact that you got kicked out and maybe can’t give DA a good review, on the hook for lots of rent” is manageable. I would really hate to see anyone get hurt. I assume Duncan shares my concerns but he didn’t address them in the post.

  In addition, has Duncan looked into the legalities surrounding renter’s rights in California (and Berkeley in particular)? This isn’t in the post even if he has done the research.

  -- Duncan said the following “I also considered whether to update/​change my tone given your first impression, but it seems to be enough of an outlier that I probably won’t make any deliberate effort.

  Its plausible to me they aren’t much of an outlier. I had the same reaction, as did several people I showed Duncan’s post to (though other people thought Duncan’s post sounded fine). If I didn’t know Duncan was the curriculum director at CFAR I would have thought he was crazy and probably dangerous. Stuff about “living under my thumb”, self comparisons to Tyler Durden and the ender’s game quote about “quick, decisive obedience” really worried me. Some of the most shocking stuff, from my perspective, was in the pop culture references. But a number of things in the main text gave off an extremely strong cult vibe. Some examples include the “house salute” and the “Various call-and-response patterns surrounding house norms”. I should note I am not accusing Duncan of anything, based on his reputation he seems trustworthy. But his tone definitely set off loud alarm bells for me.

  --

  Again I am really happy people are considering new rationalist norms. Duncan seems like a very good choice to lead an experimental project. The general strategy of DA seems like a good one. But I wanted to share my concerns.

• sapphire 15 Jun 2019 3:17 UTC

  30 points

  on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/​​well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism

  I think you should explain in substantially more detail why you think communities should do the opposite of following Eliezer’s advice.

• sapphire 12 Apr 2021 2:44 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: supposedlyfun’s comment on: Peo­ple Will Listen

  Which epistemic values? I am posting these trades in public (not always on lesswrong itself but in adjacent spaces which are easy enough to check if needed). If they blow up I will suffer the reputational consequences. The inverse should occur if they work out well. Do you want to bet on whether FTX.com losses a substantial amount of user funds in the next year? What odds do you give?

  The opportunities don’t seem gone to me. Though I doubt we see anything as good as 2011 bitcoin. Many rationalists bought Solana around January 7th when it unlocks. I posted about this on the EA investing group in early January (before the unlock). It is up more than 10x. That’s not 250x but it’s something. The arbitrage opportunities I discuss are live right now.

  You claim there are these huge counterparty risks but you have no presented any data substantiating your claims. I would estimate the expected loss rate in decentralized finance is probably between 1.6%-2.75% yearly. This is based on actual empirical data. The loss on a centralized is dramatically lower. Probably a tenth of that. Exchanges do not commonly lose user funds. They have been safe for many years. You should be more concerned with getting hacked than with counterparty risk from a Cefi exchange. As I said before the risks would have to be quite large not just present to compensate for the returns. I see no evidence that they are.

  I believe scholarship is one of the twelve virtues. Please teach me this value. Please show me some kind of credible analysis that counterparty risks are extremely high (as in 10%+ a year)? Many people I know will be very interested if you can. I will share your findings with many interested parties.

• sapphire 1 Nov 2021 22:05 UTC

  28 points

  on: Self-In­tegrity and the Drown­ing Child

  Humans don’t swim very well wearing lots of clothing. Take off your suit before going into the water.

• sapphire 1 Mar 2021 5:09 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Take­aways from one year of lockdown

  Multiple houses did this sort of thing.

  There was also an enormous amount of social pressure to be extremely covid cautious. It was really over the top given the community demographics (very young!). This is part of the reason I recently left the Bay community.

• sapphire 13 Jan 2024 14:11 UTC

  22 points

  1

  on: Sav­ing the world sucks

  I will say I tried extremely hard to be a good EA. It basically drove me insane. Community is extremely unsupportive. I basically decided Im retired. I put in enough years in the misery mines and donated more than enough money (most of what I did ended in failure but I cashed out 7 figs of crypto and donated a lot). I will be a nice friendly generous person by the extremely low standards of my actually existing society. But otherwise I will just do what I want. I cried enough tears and sacrificed enough of the windfalls I was legally entitled to keep.

• sapphire 13 Jul 2021 17:58 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: Go­ing Out With Dignity

  I don’t know how it will all play out in the end. I hope kindness wins and I agree the effect you discuss is real. But it is not obvious that our empathy increases faster than our capacity to do harm. Right now, for each human there are about seven birds/​mammals on farms. This is quite the catastrophe. Perhaps that problem will eventually be solved by lab meat. But right now animal product consumption is still going up worldwide. And many worse things can be created and maybe those will endure.

  People can be shockingly cruel to their own family. Scott’s Who by Very Slow Decay is one of the scariest things I ever read. How can people do this to their own parents?

  After a while of this, your doctors will call a meeting with your family and very gingerly raise the possibility of going to “comfort care only”, which means they disconnect the machines and stop the treatments and put you on painkillers so that you die peacefully. Your family will start yelling at the doctors, asking how the hell these quacks were ever allowed to practice when for God’s sake they’re trying to kill off Grandma just so they can avoid doing a tiny bit of work. They will demand the doctors find some kind of complicated surgery that will fix all your problems, add on new pills to the thirteen you’re already being force-fed every day, call in the most expensive consultants from Europe, figure out some extraordinary effort that can keep you living another few days.

  Robin Hanson sometimes writes about how health care is a form of signaling, trying to spend money to show you care about someone else. I think he’s wrong in the general case – most people pay their own health insurance – but I think he’s spot on in the case of families caring for their elderly relatives. The hospital lawyer mentioned during orientation that it never fails that the family members who live in the area and have spent lots of time with their mother/​father/​grandparent over the past few years are willing to let them go, but someone from 2000 miles away flies in at the last second and makes ostentatious demands that EVERYTHING POSSIBLE must be done for the patient.

• sapphire 27 Mar 2021 14:57 UTC

  21 points

  on: deluks917′s Shortform

  My father died It has been a rough year.

• sapphire 8 Sep 2018 19:18 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: No stan­dard met­ric for CFAR work­shops?

  I think its very confusing to call d = 0.2 to 0.5 ‘small’, especially in the context of a 4 day workshop. Imagine the variable is IQ. Then a ‘small’ effect increases iq by 3 to 7.5 points. That boost in iq would be much better described as ‘huge’. However IQ has a relatively large standard deviation compared to its mean (roughly 15 and 100).

  Lets look at male height. In the USA male height has a mean around 70 inches and a standard deviation around 4 inches. (Note ⁴⁄₇₀ is 38% of ¹⁵⁄₁₀₀). A d of 0.2 to 0.5 would correspond to an increase in height of 0.8 to 2 inches. Some people are willing to undergo costly, time consuming and painful length lengthening surgery to gain 4-5 inches of height. If a four day, 4000 dollar workshop gave increased your height by 0.8 to 2 inches millions of men would be on the waiting list. I know I would be. That doesnt really sound ‘small’ to me.

• sapphire 21 Mar 2018 17:34 UTC

  20 points

  on: Ex­plicit and Im­plicit Communication

  The 8 point sabotage strategy is amazing. One of the best things I have ever found by reading lesswrong.

• sapphire 30 Aug 2023 13:40 UTC

  19 points

  −4

  on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  I would wire you guys 300-400K today if I wasn’t still worried about the theory that ‘AI Safety is actually a front for funding advancement of AI capabilities’. It is a quixotic task to figure out how true that theory is or what actually happened in the past, neverminded why. But the theory seems at least kind of true to me and so I will not be donating.

  Its unlikely to be worth your time to try to convince me to donate. But maybe other potential donors would appreciate a reassurance its not actively net-negative to donate. For example several people mentioned in the post have ties to dangerous organizations such as Anthropic.
  
  Meta-honesty: There is not enough values alignment to trust me with sensitive information and I definitely do not endorse ‘always keep secrets you agreed to keep’. I support leaking the pentagon papers, etc.

  What links here?

  • Linch's comment on LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now by Linch (EA Forum; 31 Aug 2023 0:41 UTC; 30 points)
  • Greg_Colbourn's comment on Long-Term Fu­ture Fund Ask Us Any­thing (Septem­ber 2023) by Linch (EA Forum; 5 Sep 2023 15:17 UTC; 4 points)

• sapphire 23 Jul 2018 15:03 UTC

  19 points

  on: Who Wants The Job?

  Zvi posted the following comment:

  Yeah, I likely should have been more explicit about the whole ‘the ones who are any good already got hired’ thing. Which has the same implication, of course – that if you can simply display what we’d instinctively think of as ordinary competence, you’ll get hired reasonably quickly once you start putting in effort. Which matches my experience on both sides.

  ---

  To put it mildly, the above does not match my experience at all. And I know a ton of rationalist programmers having trouble finding a job. These people are usually not super expereinced and didnt go to the ICPC final. But they certainly seem at least ‘ordinarily competent’.

• sapphire 14 Jun 2018 0:04 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Scott Garrabrant’s comment on: On the Chatham House Rule

  That runs into the problem that if you say the rules are absolute many people will ‘follow their spirit’ and if you say ‘follow the spirit of the rules’ then people will be way too lax about the rules. Eliezer mentions this issue in his meta-honesty.

• sapphire 7 Nov 2023 21:23 UTC

  17 points

  1

  on: How to (hope­fully eth­i­cally) make money off of AGI

  My current allocation to AI is split something like this:
  
  

  AMAT	4.25
  AMD	3.55
  ANET	4.30
  ASML	8.07
  CDNS	4.04
  GFS	1.28
  GM	1.84
  GOOG	7.90
  INTC	6.17
  KLAC	2.33
  LLY	2.88
  LRCX	4.62
  MRVL	1.87
  MSFT	14.65
  MSFT Calls	2.78
  MU	4.38
  ONTO	0.24
  RMBS	1.00
  SMSN	7.88
  SNPS	2.77
  TSM	10.45
  TXN	2.74

• sapphire 10 Jul 2021 17:42 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Go­ing Out With Dignity

  I don’t particularly blame humans for this world being full of suffering. We didn’t invent parasitoid wasps. But we have certainly not used our current powers very responsibly. We did invent factory farms. And most of us do not particularly care.

  I am very afraid more powerful humans/​human-aligned beings will invent even worse horrors. And if we tolerate factory farming it seems possible we will tolerate the new horrors. So I cannot be confident that humans gaining more power, even if it was equitably distributed among humans, would actually be a good thing.

  I fear this has already happened and I am already at the mercy of those vastly more powerful humans. In that sense, I fear for myself! But even if I am safe I fear for the many beings who are not. We can’t even save the pigs, how are we going to save the ems!

• sapphire 11 Apr 2021 22:46 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Peo­ple Will Listen

  1 - The historical returns would obviously have been ludicrously high. I assume advice will be worse going forward. There has not been all that much investing advice on lesswrong and some of it was to buy crypto relatively early. If some of your investments 200-2000x you don’t need to be right about much else. And it is not like all the other advice would have gone terribly. Tech stocks are doing great. Some of the advice was also boring stuff like ‘buy index funds’. Do you think there are hundreds of examples of investment ideas on lesswrong that went to near zero? Which examples are you thinking of? Why do you think the normal investment ideas even underperformed the S&P500 (or whatever your favorite index is).

  2 - It does not seem like a ‘really hard problem’ to me. I don’t think I am especially talented. I know many rationalists who are doing much better than I am. The reason you are hearing from me is that I am the one willing to break the norm against posting such threads. Now is an unusually easy time to make money but rationalists are also making good money on things like prediction markets. If someone is a smart rationalist it seems to me they can pretty reliably find a way to ‘beat the market’.

  It’s worth noting that I talk to many people who are actually professionals. They agree the trades I discuss are good. I agree it is a hard problem for most people. But the idea that good rationalists cannot make money trading part-time seems based purely on theory. Experience, over quite some time in many cases, begs to differ.

  I also disagree with the framing. In many cases the community agreed the advice was good but just failed to act!

• sapphire 18 Oct 2020 23:52 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Bet 100% of your upcoming charitable donations. Even if you are loss averse the charities are not. Donate the winnings if the bet pays off.

• sapphire 11 Jan 2024 8:50 UTC

  16 points

  0

  on: Univer­sal Love In­te­gra­tion Test: Hitler

  I genuinely feel terrible for Adolf Hitler.

  Adolf was close with his mother but she died when he was seventeen. His father was a horribly abusive person to almost everyone. Dad was certainly not kind to his illegitimate son Adolf. Adolf wanted to be an artist. He tried and failed twice to enter the Academy of fine arts. He was deemed physically unfit for the army and had to ask for special permission to serve. He was injured while serving and later gassed! Despite his injuries and seeming lack of aptitude as a soldier he was at the front lines a huge amount of time as a headquarters runner. He sure as fuck earned his iron cross.

  After WW1 Germany was treated quite horribly. Hitler loved his country but his country was humiliated and put under terrible onerous conditions. When he got into politics after the war he was finally good at something! Obviously he had views I find abhorrent but lots of people have views I quite seriously dislike. Things escalated. Its easy to get swept up in things, even if you are also contributing to the dynamic. It is especially easy if you have good reasons for feeling hurt. Adolf was vegetarian. I wish he had been given a better life. Here is a poem he wrote about his mother:

  
  
  When your mother has grown older,
  When her dear, faithful eyes
  no longer see life as they once did,
  When her feet, grown tired,
  No longer want to carry her as she walks -

  Then lend her your arm in support,
  Escort her with happy pleasure.
  The hour will come when, weeping, you
  Must accompany her on her final walk.

  And if she asks you something,
  Then give her an answer.
  And if she asks again, then speak!
  And if she asks yet again, respond to her,
  Not impatiently, but with gentle calm.

  And if she cannot understand you properly
  Explain all to her happily.
  The hour will come, the bitter hour,
  When her mouth asks for nothing more.

  If there is any reason for hate it is to spur action. Im a proud Communist. I’m very proud of my comrades in the Garman communist party. A shocking fraction of German communists took active action to resist the Reich. Many were awarded medals. Their bravery makes me cry whenever I think about them. But Hitler is dead, he cant do anymore harm. In my heart of hearts, I hope that on some other spin of the wheel we can be friends. I love painting. My father abused me too. If Hitler is in any sense around, perhaps in some other world I wish him only the best. If I ever simulated Hitler I would only give him the most joyful life I could.