I definitely being near AI hubs is helpful, and I’d be interested in supporting any credible new groups that started in other hubs.
Thanks for that extra info on CHAI staff. In general my objections to the bay area are partly about the EA/LW culture there, and partly about the broader culture. I did end up donating to CHAI despite this!
Thanks! I have fixed most of the typos.
Especially as in recent years investor preferences for lower risk, low beta, low vol, higher yield stocks (like utilities and staples) has been well documented as strong.
One related fact is that (at least some of the banks) feel like they haven’t gotten credit for the risk reductions they have done. Given their lower leverage now, they feel like they should have higher multiples, whereas actually their relative multiples have compressed vs the market vs pre-crisis. Of course, this may be because their risk was under-estimated pre-crisis, so their relative multiple was too high.
At least in public equity markets the size premium is very weak. My team looked at it and decided not to use it as a factor to guide our investing. It’s closely correlated to an illiquidity premia, which I do believe in.
Update: Jeff says they only ever sent him part of his data.
Nick’s space papers are largely about how to harvest large amounts of utility from the galaxy, not about how to increase humanity’s robustness. And yes, there are some Xrisks (including the one I am focused on) that space colonies do not help with, but the reader may not be convinced of these, so it is surely worth mentioning that some risks would be guarded against with interstellar diversification. If nothing else you should probably argue that space colonization is not an adequate solution for these reasons.
A study by the investment-research firm Strategas which was cited in The Economist and the Washington Post compared the 50 firms that spent the most on lobbying relative to their assets, and compared their financial performance against that of the S&P 500 in the stock market; the study concluded that spending on lobbying was a “spectacular investment” yielding “blistering” returns comparable to a high-flying hedge fund, even despite the financial downturn of the past few years.
I think I read this research while I was a Strategas client; if I’m remembering it correctly it was extremely poorly done. Short back test (just a few years), garden of forking paths, etc. Most sell-side research is not epistemically rigourous and Strategas is not one of the better firms. I would not put much weight on this research.
There is widespread agreement that a key ingredient in effective lobbying is money. This view is shared by players in the lobbying industry.
Well of course lobbyists would say they’re worth the money!
This, by the way, explains my intuitive dislike for some types of moral realism. If there are true objective moral facts that humans can access, then whatever process counts as “accessing them” becomes… a local stopping condition for defining value.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here. Yes, they are both local stopping conditions, but there seems to be a clear dis-analogy. The other local stopping conditions seem to be bad not because they are stopping conditions, but because most contemporary people don’t want to end up as Lotus-Eaters, or as mindless outsourcers. We would oppose such a development even if it wasn’t stable! For example, a future where we oscillate between lotus-eaters and mindless outsourcers seems about as bad as either individual scenario. So it’s not really the stability we object to.
But in that case, it’s not clear why we should be opposed to the moral realism. After all, many people would like to go there, even if we are presently a long way away.
the one academic doing good work in the area is Sheffer, who is running a longitudinal survey which may or may not have enough statistical power to rule out particularly dramatic variances in outcomes. (Sheffer mentions the selection bias problem but seems to have the attitude that it’s not a problem for her work.)
Was there any follow-up here?
The bioterminist’s guide is now 5 years old. Does anyone know of an updated version?
Thanks, I’m honoured! I’ve sent you a private message.
In our house we started a tradition of holding hands and taking turns saying something we’re grateful before dinner each night. We then soft-evangalise this by having guests over and including them—most notably to hundreds of people at our wedding.
Yup, just logged back in to make that guess. Would also explain the Japan commentary.
Great article, and I’m glad to see you’ve returned to Less(er)wrong.
One very very small question: speaking as one of the hedge fund guys you mention who happened to be long MSFT into a very successful quater on friday, why did your Microsoft example use a share price of $37.70? We’re at $83.81 now!
Presumably it would also lead us to think that having lots of free time, or being very concerned about [clothes/wit/grades] was better—but this does not seem to be obveously the case.
First of all, thanks for making this all! :)
One suggestiong: coudl we hvae a sepll-ckecher for the cmmonent box?
Thanks for sharing, seems like a reasonable take to me.