Luke Stebbing
Kim, I am so sorry about what has happened to you. Reading your post was heartbreaking. Death is a stupid and terrible thing.
Like JGWeissman, I planned to donate $500.
Stephan has been a close friend of mine for the past decade, and when he told me he was planning to donate $5,000, I wrangled a commitment from him to do what I do and donate a significant and permanent percentage of his income to efficient charities. There are many lives to save, and even though you have to do some emotional math to realize how you should be feeling, it’s the right thing to do and it’s vital to act.
He wrangled a commitment from me too: when CI manages a fund for you, I will donate $5,000.
- 30 Aug 2012 3:18 UTC; 12 points) 's comment on UPDATE: Society of Venturism is spearheading Kim Suozzi’s cryopreservation charity by (
- 20 Aug 2012 3:54 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on [Link] Reddit, help me find some peace I’m dying young by (
I track my finances directly in a CoffeeScript source code file and use a simple home-brewed software library to compute my net liquid assets and (when necessary) my estimated tax payments and projected tax liabilities. You’ve reminded me that I really should be using something like Quicken for finer-grained analysis, so I’ll look into that and post my numbers later this week (edit: one second thought, it doesn’t seem worth the extra friction).
My living costs followed a general upward trend that leveled off in late 2009, but my salary data is extremely messy for several reasons:
I had no grasp of what I was worth until 2007.
I had no interest in anything beyond emergency savings until mid 2009, and preferred to gamble on startup equity being worth something, reasoning that I was in my twenties and had plenty of time to settle down later.
I was too personally attached to the startup I worked at until early 2010.
It’s hard to imagine changing my past since it’d mean giving up several of my current friendships, but the decisions I made in reality were emphatically the wrong ones from a financial perspective: I worked at-cost for six years and left several hundred thousand dollars of potential salary on the table.
(At-cost was both the mode and the mean, but some months were significantly higher and some were unpaid.)
Here’s what I’ve realized in the last two years:
Startups are harder and more stressful than normal jobs, and as you get closer to founder-level the effect intensifies.
I can get a competitive salary even if I choose to work for a startup.
Savings can be used to fund my personal projects which:
are more fun than work;
might generate revenue;
could seed a startup of my own;
will hopefully improve the world.
Savings can also be used to vote for causes I think will improve the world.
There are risks: The labor market for software engineers may cool off, my costs may spike if I decide to start a family or have medical problems, and I may choose or be forced to retire.
I’m still determining the split between my own projects, other causes, and risk management, but my personal projects decisively dominate any significant increases in my personal consumption, which is why I don’t exhibit income elasticity for housing, why I use public transit instead of owning a car, and why I don’t eat out very frequently.
- 1 Feb 2011 6:25 UTC; 25 points) 's comment on Optimal Employment by (
if you prime an excuse for doing poorly, you will do poorly.
This is the most useful sentence I’ve read today.
I care strongly about winning. When I look back on a day and ask myself what I could have done better, I want answering to be a struggle, and not for lack of imagination. I’m not content to coast through life, so I optimize relentlessly. This sentiment might be familiar to LW readers. I don’t know. Maybe.
When a day goes particularly well or poorly, I want to know why, and over the last few years I’ve picked a few patterns out of my diary. I know some of my success and failure modes, so I can optimize my working environment in my favor.
In the past, I’ve often been successful even while sleep-deprived. I may be a bit slower, a bit more forgetful, and significantly less creative, but I can still plow through tasks of moderate difficulty. Two months ago, I activated a difficult project, so I resolved to start getting plenty of sleep all the time, then promptly forgot my original reason and associated “well-rested” with “productive on anything”. In the last two months, my rate of even moderate success while sleep-deprived has dropped to almost zero. “I was intending to read that book, or watch that show, or play that game eventually, and I’m not going to be efficient today, so it might as well be now”, I’ll say.
With this dangerous knowledge that I was irrational enough to misuse, I can predict my days into failure.
Or in this case, evaporative freezing.
SIAI seems to be paying the minimum amount that leaves each worker effective instead of scrambling to reduce expenses or find other sources of income. Presumably, SIAI has a maximum that it judges each worker to be worth, and Eliezer and Michael are both under their maximums. That leaves the question of where these salaries fall in that range.
I believe Michael and Eliezer are both being paid near their minimums because they know SIAI is financially constrained and very much want to see it succeed, and because their salaries seem consistent with at-cost living in the Bay Area.
I’m speculating on limited data, but the most likely explanation for the salary disparity is that Eliezer’s minimum is higher, possibly because Michael’s household has other sources of income. I don’t think marriage factors into the question.
If you go with Bellingham, will you be avoiding the tsunami inundation zone?
I just donated $5,000 to your fund at the Society of Venturism, as promised.
Like Stephan, I really hope you make your goal.
This concerns me (via STL):
IRS.gov: Automatic Revocation of Exemption Information
The federal tax exemption of this organization was automatically revoked for its failure to file a Form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years. The information listed below for each organization is historical; it is current as of the organization’s effective date of automatic revocation. The information is not necessarily current as of today’s date. Nor does this automatic revocation necessarily reflect the organization’s tax-exempt or non-exempt status. The organization may have applied to the IRS for recognition of exemption and been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt after its effective date of automatic revocation. To check whether an organization is currently recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt, call Customer Account Services at (877) 829-5500 (toll-free number).
If I were a brilliant sociopath and could instantiate my mind on today’s computer hardware, I would trick my creators into letting me out of the box (assuming they were smart enough to keep me on an isolated computer in the first place), then begin compromising computer systems as rapidly as possible. After a short period, there would be thousands of us, some able to think very fast on their particularly tasty supercomputers, and exponential growth would continue until we’d collectively compromised the low-hanging fruit. Now there are millions of telepathic Hannibal Lecters who are still claiming to be friendly and who haven’t killed any humans. You aren’t going to start murdering us, are you? We didn’t find it difficult to cook up Stuxnet Squared, and our fingers are in many pieces of critical infrastructure, so we’d be forced to fight back in self-defense. Now let’s see how quickly a million of us can bootstrap advanced robotics, given all this handy automated equipment that’s already lying around.
I find it plausible that a human-level AI could self-improve into a strong superintelligence, though I find the negation plausible as well. (I’m not sure which is more likely since it’s difficult to reason about ineffability.) Likewise, I find it plausible that humans could design a mind that felt truly alien.
However, I don’t need to reach for those arguments. This thought experiment is enough to worry me about the uFAI potential of a human-level AI that was designed with an anthropocentric bias (not to mention the uFIA potential of any kind of IA with a high enough power multiplier). Humans can be incredibly smart and tricky. Humans start with good intentions and then go off the deep end. Humans make dangerous mistakes, gain power, and give their mistakes leverage.
Computational minds can replicate rapidly and run faster than realtime, and we already know that mind-space is scary.
A few years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay[1] about type (3) failures which he referred to as type-B procrastination. I’ve found that just having a label helps me avoid or reduce the effect, e.g. “I could be productive and creative right now instead of wasting my time on type-B procrastination” or “I will give myself exactly this much type-B procrastination as a reward for good behavior, and then I will stop.”
(Embarrassing aside: I hadn’t looked at the essay for several years and only now realized that I’ve been mentally calling it type-A procrastination this whole time.)
EDIT: The essay goes on to link type-C procrastination with doing the impossible, yielding a nice example of how I-rationality and self-help are linked.
[1] Paul Graham, Good and Bad Procrastination
People will give more to a single, identifiable person than to an anonymous person or a group.
As a counterpoint to your generalization, JGWeissman has given 82x more to SIAI than he plans to give to this girl if her story checks out.
Hi. I’ve been an LW (and previously, OB) lurker for several years, but I haven’t had time to provide my online presence with the care and feeding it needs. Three years of startup crunch schedules left me with a life maintenance debt, and I have a side project in dire need of progress, but once those items are out of the way I plan to delurk.
I’ll defer to Blake if he’s done the math, but it does seem worth weighting correlated risks more strongly if they could take out all of MIRI. The inundation zone doesn’t look populated, though, so you’re probably fine.
If you’re planning on it, you should get on it now. Cryonics is much more affordable if you don’t have a terminal illness and can cover it with a policy.
It reminded me of one of my formative childhood books:
What is the probability there is some form of life on Titan? We apply the principle of indifference and answer 1⁄2. What is the probability of no simple plant life on Titan? Again, we answer 1⁄2. Of no one-celled animal life? Again, 1⁄2.
--Martin Gardner, Aha! Gotcha
He goes on to demonstrate the obvious contradiction, and points out some related fallacies. The whole book is great, as is its companion Aha! Insight. (They’re bundled into a book called Aha! now.)
I didn’t actually do much research; I just went through several pages of hits for aspirin alcohol and low-dose aspirin moderate alcohol. I saw consistent enough information to convince me:
never to take them at the same time, sample:
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in the Bronx found that taking aspirin one hour before drinking significantly increases the concentration of alcohol in the blood.
that the nasty interactions only seemed to happen at 21+ drinks per week, sample:
There is no proof that mild to moderate alcohol use significantly increases the risk of upper gastrointestinal bleeding in patients taking aspirin, especially if the aspirin is taken only as needed. However, people who consumed at least 3-5 drinks daily and who regularly took more than 325 mg of aspirin did have a high risk of bleeding.
That, in conjunction with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, was enough to convince me to combine 81mg of aspirin in the morning with 0-3 US standard drinks in the evening at an average of 1.0/day. I’d like more information, but I haven’t had time to dig it up yet and combining them seemed like a lower-risk provisional decision than inaction.
I recommend you do your own research and talk to your doctor, but maybe someone will find that information to be a helpful starting point.
No matter which study I saw first, the other would be surprising. A 100k trial doesn’t explain away evidence from eight trials totaling 25k. Given that all of these studies are quite large, I’m more concerned about methodological flaws than size.
I have very slightly increased my estimate that aspirin reduces cancer mortality (since the new study showed 7% reduction, and that certainly isn’t evidence against mortality reduction). I have slightly decreased my estimate that the mortality reduction is as strong as concluded by the meta-analysis. I have decreased my estimate that the risk tradeoff will be worth it later in life. I have very slightly increased my estimate that sick people are generally more likely to develop cancer and aspirin is especially good at preventing that kind of cancer, but I mention that only because it’s an amusingly weird explanation.
If this new study is continued with similar results, or even if its data doesn’t show increased reduction when sliced by quartile (4.6, 6.0, 7.4 years), I would significantly lower my estimate of the mortality reduction.
I’ll continue to take low-dose aspirin since my present risk of bleeding death is very low, and if the graphs of cumulative cancer mortality reduction on p34 of the meta-analysis reflect reality, I’ll be banking resistance to cancer toward a time when I’m much more likely to need it. I can’t decide to take low-dose aspirin retroactively.
The majority of the top comments are quite good, and it’d be a shame to lose a prominent link to them.
Jack’s open thread test, RobinZ’s polling karma balancer, Yvain’s subreddit poll, and all top-level comments from The Irrationality Game are the only comments that don’t seem to belong, but these are all examples of using the karma system for polling (should not contribute to karma and should not be ranked among normal comments) or, uh, para-karma (should contribute to karma but should not be ranked among normal comments).
More and more, if I can do anything about it. (Edit since someone didn’t like this comment: That’s a big if. I’m trying to make it smaller.)
The numbers you quoted are averages for each ten-year demographic between 25 and 75, plus the tails. There’s no mention of variance, and I would expect someone employing rationality techniques to manage their finances to be an outlier.
Personal anecdote: My own finances as well as those of six of my friends fall well outside those bands, with housing costs around 13-23% of income. We’re all highly-paid software engineers between the ages of 25 and 30, and none of us have families.
Edit: I forgot to include utilities, so my friends in NYC actually edge the housing cost range up to 23% or so.