Myron Hedderson

Karma: 212

Myron Hedderson 13 Mar 2026 13:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
You seem to be describing a situation where there is a temporary absence of sufficient funds for a UBI (the “big gap in the middle”) after which there’s plenty of money to fund the UBI, potentially at a higher level than people’s original income.

The generic solution for a temporary lack of necessary funds with lots of funds being available in the future is getting a loan to be paid off when the money comes in. This consumption-smoothing would be good from the perspective of the AI companies as well, as “everyone is out of work and has no money to spend”, if it persists for long enough for people to burn through their savings, predictably leads to “the revenue streams of the AI companies collapse”.
How it would work out in detail is unclear, but if AI companies end up with a lot of economic power, I’d expect that gets taxed in some form by whoever’s providing the UBI, and in the meantime the UBI provider goes into a bit of debt.

Myron Hedderson 9 Mar 2026 15:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pattern here?
Ok, now you’ve gone on to “modern culture is worse than earlier culture”. I don’t feel like I have a good handle on the culture to which you refer, so I can’t really comment, in the sense of going “you think modern culture is like X, but I think modern culture is like Y, let’s discuss”. You seem quite sure of your opinions, but I don’t know what your evidence is.

I will disagree with this, though:
The reason we feel less shame is because we removed weight from sexual relationships.
When I spoke about people feeling less shame around having experienced sexual assault now than in the past, it was definitively not because they came to place less weight on sexual relationships. Maybe different generations have different opinions on sex, but I’m skeptical that the people I grew up with have radically different views on sex now than they did when we were younger. The reason for reduced shame around having been sexually assaulted was common knowledge that it was happening to many people, and the women who had experienced it feeling less alone. I base this statement on conversations with women I know, before and after 2016 (the MeToo thing was when common knowledge of a societal problem was established). It is possible that young people today place less weight on their sexual relationships, I don’t know, but that sounds like a talking point a Catholic might have made about what would happen when birth control was new technology in the 1960′s and early 1970′s—I don’t see a technological reason why it should be the case now. And statistically, surveys appear to show that young people are having less sex than prior generations, which isn’t what I would expect if they were like “meh, sex isn’t a weighty matter”.

I have seen opinions like “modern people are weak degenerate hedonistic cowards who revel in copious casual sex” expressed online, but I’m aware that attention-based filters are being applied to what I see, and also 90+% of all comments are made by a small number of constantly online people with an axe to grind. So I don’t consider what I see online as strong evidence of what the culture I live in is actually like. I weight more heavily the conversations I have with people around me, or people I know well who have moved away but we keep in touch, or statistical research with some attempt at rigor. And the people I have spoken to, are generally not weak degnerate cowards who treat sex lightly. I know people both young (in their 20′s) and old (in their 80′s), and the young people seem basically good, and the old people seem proud of their grandchildren’s many virtues, and generally impressed with the younger generation, relative even to their own kids in some cases.

Separately from what you see online from people unknown to you, what are the people you talk to offline, or know well, like? If you were to base your statements about what people are like only on what you know about people you know fairly well, what conclusions would you draw about what people are like in society today? The same as above? (It is of course possible that the people I know aren’t representative of society as a whole, and neither are the small number of people you will know personally, but I’m curious what your experience has been).

Myron Hedderson 8 Mar 2026 17:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pattern here?
Indeed, but that does not make such regulations objectively good to me. And try asking older people who did things which are now considered bad or unsafe if they regret their actions or if they’re happy that one cannot have their experiences and memories anymore. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken with prefer the past (random example—many have fond memories of playing multiplayer games back when harsh insults were a core part of the experience, and find themselves repulsed by modern over-regulation)

I think you’d get different answers from older people depending on which bad/dangerous thing you were talking about. Smoking and not wearing seatbelts are two things that immediately came to mind as things that are now regulated away in lots of places and this is an improvement which even former smokers and people who at first protested against seatbelts would generally acknowledge as good. Likewise leaded gasoline and paint, and strong social and criminal penalties for drunk driving. The fact that kids can’t go play together in the local area without adult supervision, in many places, is obviously bad, even though there is risk involved. The fact that your example relates to multiplayer games, suggests you might think of me as an old person—my childhood was before they existed. I mean, there were board games, of course, and like, 2-4 player video games. But the experience of freedom to say socially inappropriate things (I’m pretty sure even the people saying them understood they shouldn’t say them in front of their mother, that’s why being able to say them elsewhere might have been thrilling) during online gaming is one from the generation you’d call older, but I’d call younger. My generation’s internet was dialup, and the thrilling thing (for some people) was to say trollish things on online forums (this was pre-social-media, Facebook got popular after I graduated university). And if I’m correct that you’d count me among the old, I for one would not want to go back. Half of the girls I knew well at all in high school got sexually assaulted by a classmate, but didn’t feel comfortable to tell anyone about it except close friends, who they would swear to secrecy, and worried it was their fault or that they’d somehow brought it on by dressing wrong or smiling when they shouldn’t have smiled. I’d trade a lot of “people have to be more careful what they say” for a little bit of “but the sexual assault rate goes down, and when something like that does happen people can talk about it with less shame”.

”People think of the past as better than the present” is a true fact about human psychology in general, but it does not imply that the past actually was better than the present—nostalgia is a label that exists for a reason. Ask those same people which year they’d like to time travel back to, if they could time travel. Many will say something like a year of their childhood, but then remind them of some good things that have changed since then, and see if they still want to go. And anyone who reads enough history to know what life might have been like before they were born, would not say something like “I want to go back to the 1800′s when tradition and the family were stronger, and people had more freedom”. Because after a bit of reflection, they’d be like “oh yeah, no antibiotics or washing machines, and if I’m put into the body of a random person, I’m 90%+ likely to be toiling on a farm and die in my 40′s, and my main (unlikely) hope will be that none of my kids die before adulthood and my wife survives all the childbirths, and that’s if I’m lucky enough to be embodied as a man ”.

EDIT to add: I’ll also flag that “what it is socially permissible to say while gaming” is a change in social norms, rather than a change in technology/technical capabilities. We’ve drifted rather far from the original point, which was around technology improving or not improving life much for most people, to a more general discussion of whether the past was better or worse than the present, for whatever reason.

Myron Hedderson 6 Mar 2026 13:39 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pattern here?
I find it hard to disagree with anything you wrote, and yet, technological advancements does not really seem to improve life for people. We’ve getting quite efficient at making food, but it doesn’t seem to be getting cheaper over time. I don’t think car prices or phone bills are decreasing meaningfully either. Bus and train fares have been steadily increasing over time. The internet makes it possible to communicate with people far away which I value a lot, but it does not seem to have improved socialization in general.
The pattern of “benefits erase themselves” seems to apply so broadly that it feel like a mathematical law more than a result of greed.
These seem to be at the core of what you’re trying to express, so I’ll share some thoughts focused on them.

Point 1: I think it depends on your baseline/what you’re comparing to for the purpose of determining whether an improvement has occurred. For me, I was born in the early 1980′s and live in Canada, so my baseline is kind of like “what things were like in the early 1990′s in Canada”. And against that baseline, many technological improvements have occurred and the benefits are widely diffused. And if I compare the life I have now with the life my parents had when they were kids (they were born in the mid 50′s, and the power grid mostly expanded throughout North America in the 1960′s, so “we lived 3 people to a bedroom, had to relieve ourselves in an outhouse, and remember when the lights first turned on” is a common experience for many people born in the 50′s) But for someone who was born 20 years later than me and their main comparison year is say 2010-2015, it can seem like things have gone downhill recently. I might argue that they’re wrong (stories of the form “things have gotten worse” are much more transmissible than “things have gotten better”, and statistics have all kinds of issues, so you have to carefully check you facts and can’t reliably just go on vibes) but the differences are less stark, and on some metrics things have unambiguously gotten worse in some places that are at the technological frontier or where local governance has had a setback/been bombed into a problematic situation (although for the world as a whole/humanity in aggregate, the story is still firmly “things are getting better”, and I think I could make that case). If your baseline is “America immediately pre-pandemic” or more recent than that, yeah, it’s a lot muddier.

A second thought: I have a simple model that predicts that if you’re comparing what we’ve achieved through technology to what could (one would think) be achieved by using our technological capabilities optimally, it’s always going to seem like we’re far from where we could be, and the distance is increasing over time. My model is: Technological progress is a one-way ratchet giving us new capabilities (mostly—we do sometimes forget or lose technological capabilities, but with a growing population and economy, this is rare). Regulatory burden is another one-way ratchet (usually, in practice—it’s a lot less likely for regulators to decide to remove a regulation that exists than to create a new one), which puts certain things we could do off-limits. Whether a particular regulation is good or bad on net is a matter for debate, but the net effect is that over time absent a civilizational reset, there’s going to be an increasing gap between what’s technologically possible and what we actually do. If we get too carried away, we could even foreclose so many options that what we actually do gets worse, but I’d expect mostly our trajectory of improvement is less steep than it could be. So if your baseline is “look how much less we’re doing than we could be!”, I mean, yes, that seems correct—although I’d also note how far we are from the worst we could be doing, to balance that out.

Re: benefits erase themselves. Not exactly. We just, use the slack offered by technological improvements in unexpected ways. For computers, in the 1980′s it took about 5 minutes for my home computer to load, in 2005 I remember it taking 15 for my work computer to load some days because there were a bunch of GPOs being applied on each login very inefficiently, in 2016 my HDD-based laptop loaded in 3 minutes 30 seconds, and now my work laptop (SSD based, but slow processor and tiny hard drive with a lot of swapping I think) takes a minute or two, and my home laptop boots in under 30 seconds (I’m making the distinction between home and work computers because work computers tend to be slower, for various reasons). So, there’s been some decrease, but it hasn’t been commensurate with the increase from “33mhz processor, single core” in 1985 to “2ghz, 20 cores”. Lots of the processing power and other improvements have gone to things other than making the boot process faster—like, for example, doing millions of background checks per minute to make sure the computer doesn’t do something that crashes it. Or things being written in memory-safe and auto-garbage-collected languages. It’s expensive to move from “the computer does exactly what the assembly language programmer says it should do, even if that results in problems” to “a high-level language program is written and then automatically compiled into inefficient but working assembly language and many, many automated checks are done to prevent problems that used to be common”. Also there are all kinds of malicious code checks running in the background, and hundreds of other processes running doing various things that are mostly helpful. And also, doing high definition video at megapixels of resolution at 60 frames a second with 16 million colour options per pixel is just several orders of magnitude harder than doing VGA graphics at 640x480 with a 256 colour palette. Also, software installs have gotten easier and more likely to just work rather than causing problems that require deep experience with computers to diagnose and fix, and this is partially downstream of “there is more hard drive space, so each program now gets its own sandboxed set of files and directories, rather than having to share bits of code”. Would I trade faster loading for “but there are fewer software programs and the computer crashes so often I have a ‘save your work every 30 seconds’ reflex because software programming that doesn’t crash the computer takes a lot more skill and programming in a lower-level language just takes longer, and also I have to carefully manage drivers and occasionally open my computer up and do something to one of the dip switches so that the sound will work in my new program”? Nah. I think a computer that boots up in under 30 seconds is good enough, and at a certain point it’s OK to focus hardware improvements on other things.

One could even argue that absent technological improvement, we couldn’t afford the level of regulation we have—and if you think that many of the regulations we have exist for reasons like “improves human safety and health, at a cost” or “makes a complicated society easier for less-capable people to exist in without catastrophe, because certain exploits are forbidden and failure-cases are handled”, you could think of this as an improvement downstream of a technology improvement. The benefits may exist, but just may not be highly visible. Like “computers crash less because there are a bunch of background processes running that enforce things like “non-admins can’t do a bunch of things” and “software applications can only do very specific things with the hardware” and “memory leaks are handled automatically” and “even though there are 300 processes running at once and that would be totally impossible for a human to code up such that they didn’t interfere with each other, automated checks make sure they don’t interfere with each other very much”. There are parallels in other areas of society—cars would probably be cheaper if we didn’t have a bunch of safety testing and failure analysis going on, and the burden of the safety measures that are required has gone up over time (when I was a kid, airbags and crumple zones weren’t a thing, and cars used to occasionally explode if you bumped them the wrong way (a slight exaggeration)) - but more people would die in the absence of those regulations. Is that a net benefit relative to a less regulated world? Hard to say, the answer is complex.

Myron Hedderson 5 Mar 2026 13:17 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pattern here?
Those who make technology worth 4000$ are not going to sell it sold at 2000$, making everyone better off. The gap between the value we find in things, and the value we pay for it, will be exploited by companies until it almost disappears. They will sell it at 3950$, or sell it at 3500$ and fill it with advertisements (whatever makes it just barely worth it for the buyer) For as long as it’s a good deal, there’s more value to extract! And once 95% of the value has been extracted, the new technology only benefits everyone 5% of what it could have. (This pattern doesn’t apply when the technology is sufficiently easy to mass-produce
I was with you up until “by companies” (and generally agree with most of your post up until that point, I’m focusing on an area of disagreement). And your 5% estimate for consumer surplus seems far off what I experience. Two caveats which mean I may be misunderstanding:

1. People don’t sell “technology”, typically they sell the product of a technology (a good or service which is enabled to exist or be produced less expensively by some new knowledge or way of making things) and when I’m thinking of consumer surplus (“the value we find in things, and the value we pay for it”), I’m thinking of how much things are worth to me, relative to how much I have to pay for them, not how much the underlying production method is worth to the person who originally invented it or the factory-owner who uses it to set up a system for producing things. There are some edge cases where the value of a new technology can be monetized, like, patents are worth money and so people who invent a new technology can, by legal convention, sell the use of that technology/idea for a limited amount of time. But I think you’re not making the distinction between “technology” and “things typically sold to consumers”. Ideas are non-rivalrous (you knowing about and making use of an idea doesn’t inherently stop me from also knowing about and using that idea) unlike physical goods or personal services.

2. “(This pattern doesn’t apply when the technology is sufficiently easy to mass-produce”… a) as above, a technology is an idea about how to do things, so mass producing it seems like a category error. But if you mean that the idea that companies will extract 95% the value out of the goods and services they produce leaving end-consumers with only 5%… but this pattern doesn’t apply to mass produced goods or services… then I notice that most things are mass-produced, and thus most of my counter-examples to your point are excluded. I feel like I would if you had said “I have a theory about how the economy generally works, but it doesn’t apply to anything produced in the G7 countries, but it does apply to the economy in general”. And “things that aren’t mass produced, but are produced by companies rather than individuals” would be an even smaller section of the economy.

Maybe the reason I’m going “I don’t agree” is rooted in you thinking of technology differently than I do, but, if we’re talking about the consumer surplus for goods or services, I find that the price I pay for things is typically much, much lower than the value they provide to me (the price I would be willing to pay, if that’s what companies were charging, and still feel like I got some value out of the purchase). I actually think that the causality runs the other way—a lot of useful things don’t get produced because it’s hard for the inventors or producers to capture enough of the value to make it financially worthwhile for them, given competitive pressures. If an entrepreneur wants to produce a new thing that would be valuable to a consumer, they have to think “OK, I have talked to some people who say they would buy this at $1,000, and I can produce it in my garage for $900, but as soon as I produce it for $900, I have to consider that some large corporation is going to set up a factory producing it for $850, and the actual cost of the raw materials is $50, so competitive pressures will drive it down to maybe being sold for $50 plus a small margin over time, and if I can’t get the capital to be the person who produces it at that price, I’m not going to capture much of the value, and I’m taking a lot of risk to set up the production at $900 and quit my job, so probably not worth it.” And then, someone not thinking clearly about the competitive pressures starts a company producing the thing at $900, the new venture isn’t financially viable (the vast majority of new businesses fail within a couple years), and 5 years later consumers can buy a thing they typically value at $1,000 for $60.

A concrete example: When I was a kid, standard jeans cost $50 a pair, which was 3-4 hours work for me at the wage I made at the time. Now, 30 years later, I can get a standard pair of jeans for $15-20, which is ¹⁄₃ of an hour of work at my current wage, or 1 hour at my 30-years-ago wage. So even if it was the case that I had 0 consumer surplus for jeans 30 years ago and my wage hadn’t gone up, I’d have a ~~66%~~ EDIT: 300% consumer surplus now. I know, jeans are mass produced, but, so are most things that aren’t public goods, where it’s even harder for the producers of those goods to capture the value (which is why governments have to pay for them). I tried to think of examples where the consumer surplus is low, and the only ones I could come up with quickly were potentially housing, and potentially art to put on my walls.
In general, there are goods available in the marketplace that cost more than I would value them, but I don’t have to buy them, so I don’t. And this is true of everyone. So generally, it should be the case that consumer surplus is always positive for any voluntary transactions that take place. And for companies selling to a mass market where there is competition (whether or not they’re mass producing) they have to set their prices as low as they can. Given that different people value various things different amounts (rather than everyone valuing everything the same) it’s not possible for companies to decide “this is how much everyone values this good, and so I can set my price at 95% of that and collect most of the value”. Say that price, if we averaged what everyone valued the good or service at, is $100 for a particular good or service. Some people in the market are going to value it at $5, and some are going to value it at $1,000, and so the company, to get as much volume as they can (and drive down unit costs) is going to price it at under $100, and most buyers are going to get a large consumer surplus.
What I have seen in the direction of reducing consumer surplus is moves by online sellers to price-discriminate (guessing that I will pay more for a good and charging me more for it, because I don’t see the same webpage that another person may see, or offering coupons and discounts with some friction, so that people who have more money than time get some of the value extracted, while people who are very price sensitive still get sold goods, but at a lower margin). Also, in an economy that wasn’t based on offering goods at set prices, but there was haggling over everything, sellers would be able to capture more of the value of their goods or services. So in subsections of the economy where buyer and seller negotiate price for each sale, I would expect the consumer surplus to be less. And I note that that applies to housing and (non-mass-produced) art.

Myron Hedderson 26 Feb 2026 12:41 UTC
3 points
0
on: Changing the world for the worse
Generalizing, this looks like the gambler’s ruin (even positive EV bets can be bad bets, if the losses would be unrecoverable—“quadruple or nothing at 50%, but you’re betting all you have” predictably ends with you having nothing if you keep playing long enough). Except not with units of money, but units of motivation, or feeling like a good person.
If the bet is “amazingly good impact or ruinously bad impact”, you probably shouldn’t take that bet unless you’re pretty certain it’s not going to turn out ruinously bad. And more generally, you shouldn’t take bets you can’t afford to lose, except in some edge cases.
I think those who have a hubristic level of certainty that their AI impact will be good, are in some cases gambling with other people’s money/lives, and that’s bad. If it’s bad for me to bet everything I have unless I’m pretty sure I’m going to win, it’s extra-bad for someone to take all my money without my consent and make a bet that they are just kinda sure is probably positive EV, but could leave me with nothing. And gambling with my life is worse than gambling with my money.

On the other hand, if you’re betting with your own resources, or resources someone has willingly given you knowing the risks, and the upside is big and the downside is big but not ruinously so, I’d say go for it if you feel like it.

Myron Hedderson 22 Jan 2026 19:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
Retracted, because after conversation on Ben’s blog, it’s not a matter of thinking marginal costs will go down with scale—rather, he treats “funding gap” more strictly than I would, something like “the amount of money charities can absorb and deploy at approximately present marginal costs per life saved”. And if you define the funding gap as “the amount of money that can be deployed at approximately present marginal costs, or better”, then “assume marginal cost does not go down at all” is indeed the most generous assumption.

Myron Hedderson 22 Jan 2026 13:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
Thanks. Side note (I posted another comment about this just now, because it just clicked for me this morning): I think Ben Hoffman thinks (or thought, when he wrote his blog posts) that when you treat more malaria cases or do other philanthropy, marginal cost goes down. He says:
If we assume that all of this is treatable at current cost per life saved numbers—the most generous possible assumption for the claim that there’s a funding gap
When in fact it’s the least generous, under the assumption that marginal cost goes up. If you think marginal costs will only go down from current levels as we scale, then it is indeed suspicious that nobody’s decided to just dump all their money into scaling.

Myron Hedderson 22 Jan 2026 13:25 UTC
1 point
0
on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
I think I’ve found a crux that makes things make sense today, that didn’t make sense to me yesterday as I was reading the first linked blog post. When trying to think about the existence or nonexistence of a funding gap, Ben says:
If we assume that all of this is treatable at current cost per life saved numbers—the most generous possible assumption for the claim that there’s a funding gap
And my brain skipped a beat, and went “no, the opposite, that’s the least generous possible assumption. As we treat more, the next treatment becomes more expensive, not less. Maybe that’s what he meant to say?” And then the rest of the blog post just seemed sorta wrong. I was like “maybe he doesn’t get that this is marginal cost?”. But that’s not it, I realized as I was laying in bed thinking about this.
If you’ve been steeped enough in standard economics which talks about producing widgets, your mental association between “marginal cost” and “as you produce more, marginal cost goes down” is strong. Because usually, there are economies of scale which mean that’s what happens. From memory, I recall seeing something that said that every time the number of solar panels produced doubles, the cost per panel goes down by 20%, for example.
If you’re thinking “$5,000 is the current marginal cost, and therefore the most saving a life with a malaria net will ever cost, the more life-saving we do, the less it will cost”, then everything else he says follows. The right strategy for someone with a lot of money would be to scale this intervention to the max and drive costs down. And the fact that billionaire philanthropists aren’t doing this is suspicious, suggests that they don’t really believe the conclusions Givewell has put out. EDIT TO ADD: And the fact that marginal costs have been going up over time as we do more philanthropy, rather than being exactly what you would expect to happen, suggests that Givewell got its initial estimates wrong and what’s happening is as we learn more, we learn that everything is more expensive than we thought. There are not in fact any cheap drowning children to save, and never were.
If instead you think of the marginal cost as “the cost to pick the lowest hanging fruit, will go up when we pick that fruit” then you reach different conclusions.

Myron Hedderson 21 Jan 2026 17:51 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
An analogy:
We are in the “you can save a drowning child for an affordable price” world. In this world (or a hypothetical one for the purpose of this analogy), 1,000 infants are being dumped in a large lake per day. Some of them are right by the shore, easy to get to like the drowning child thought experiment postulates, some are out in deeper water. I’m a strong swimmer, and could save any of those infants, but I can’t save all of them by myself, and if I try to save as many as I can today, I will exhaust and potentially injure myself, meaning I can save fewer tomorrow. I estimate I could save 100 today if I put forth all the effort I can, saving the ones that are easier to reach first. But there are some people who aren’t as good at swimming as I am, so maybe I should swim further out, save 10, and let the 90 I chose not to save that I could have, hopefully be taken up by others. But in that case, I’m still exhausted, and can do less tomorrow. So maybe I save 5, every day, a mix of easy ones and harder ones to demonstrate what’s possible and encourage others to join in, and spend some of my energy and time trying to figure out how to solve the underlying problem here, rather than just pulling people out of the lake. And then someone says “looks like it’s not true that it’s easy to save a drowning child, if it was true this guy would have saved more lives”. And what it looks like to “go hard” at this problem is not obvious, but “save a few, leave room for others, try and solve the underlying problem” is one plausible strategy. And because I can’t save them all “I need more people to help with this” is a thing I should say to anyone who will listen.

Myron Hedderson 21 Jan 2026 14:42 UTC
22 points
4
on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
It seems like 3 things are simultaneously true:
1) It’s not possible to eradicate malaria for $5,000/life saved (that’s the marginal cost, approximately, ballpark estimate with lots of wiggle room in the number). This generalizes to all other currently known interventions to make people’s lives better at low cost—it’s relatively cheap now, but one should expect that saving the last life that would otherwise have died from malaria, or helping the last person who can be helped with some other intervention that is currently near the best marginal cost, will cost a lot more than $5,000. I feel like Givewell et. al. are clear about this, or at least this is the understanding I came away with when reading their stuff, rather than being a surprise I discovered from other sources.
2) If we did assume that we could save all the savable lives for $5,000 apiece per year (again, this is false, but as a way of ballparking how much is definitely not enough to solve all problems), taking the number of 10 million deaths per year of communicable disease (referenced in Ben’s blog post, and noting that “communicable disease” and “all problems” are not the same) at face value, we get $50 billion per year. As I understand it, the amount of philanthropic wealth to eventually give away in places like the Gates Foundation and Good Ventures and affiliates is on the order of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, not trillions. So spending $50 billion/year is not sustainable, and even at the marginal cost of $5,000 per life saved, there’s still going to be a long term funding gap.
3) Having recently done a deep dive into Givewell’s recommendations for a presentation to a local community group, I notice that their recommendations and methodologies are still developing. The basic ideas like “there are opportunities in poor countries that don’t exist in rich countries” and “malaria is bad, and helping with it on the margin is cheap” have stayed the same, but they flag lots of places where their ways of analyzing things have changed over the past 5-10 years, and generically for any page that hasn’t been updated in a few years, they put a disclaimer at the top that the analysis may not reflect the present situation or Givewell’s best understanding. Also new cause areas in EA are coming up every few years, and there are a lot of “more research needed” tags around most conclusions. My takeaway is that we know a lot more now about how to use money to do good, than we did 10 years ago, and I expect that 10 years from now, we’ll have similarly improved our knowledge-base, and may have uncovered better opportunities than are currently known. So it makes sense to hold some money in reserve pending that further research.
With this as background, if I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who has $10 billion and wants to do maximally good things with it, it makes sense not to spend it all immediately on malaria, even though that would save a bunch of lives. And it makes sense not to fund the crap out of all the marginally most effective interventions until all my money is gone this year, driving the marginal cost of various outcomes up to some multiple of its current level which makes it so everyone else feels like contributing to this effort is some multiple less useful than it was last year—and then my money runs out, all the orgs who got a bump in funding are scrambling for next year’s funds, the rest of the philanthropic community feels less interested, and chaos ensues. Clearly a suboptimal approach.
Just out of curiosity, I googled how much has been spent on Polio (almost, but not quite, eradicated), and estimates are on the order of $20 billion over the past 37 years (not adjusted for inflation) with the 2022-2029 budget being $7 billion (so the last few cases are going to be super expensive). So I would be unsurprised if solving all communicable disease had a cost on the order of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, and couldn’t be done tomorrow or this year even if I had $100 trillion to spend on it.
This seems to be a core of your argument:
The big weird thing is that it seems like difficulties were found in the early picture of how much good was in fact being done thru these avenues, and this was quietly elided, and more research wasn’t being done to get to the bottom of the question, and there’s also various indicators that EA orgs themselves didn’t really believe their numbers for how much good could done.
...
Givewell advising Open Phil to not fully fund things is the main “it seems like the parties upstream of the main message don’t buy their main message enough to Go Hard at it”.
Whereas to me, I don’t see evidence that difficulties were found in the cost effectiveness estimates (it was never claimed that marginal cost could just be multiplied by number of cases to get total cost) that advice from GiveWell makes sense, doesn’t seem weird, and doesn’t seem like the parties upstream of the main message don’t buy it. “Going hard” with $10-100 billion, when the total cost to solve all extreme problems is going to be trillions of dollars and tens of years at least and we’re constantly learning as we go, looks (to me) like approximately what the 10-billionaire philanthropists are doing. At least, a better strategy, if Givewell’s recommendations are basically sound, doesn’t immediately occur to me.

Myron Hedderson 13 Jan 2026 18:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
If most failures of rationality are adaptively self-serving motivated reasoning
I would say that most failures of rationality were adaptive in the ancestral environments, but I wouldn’t say they all count as “motivated reasoning”.

Simple example: Seeing a snake in the grass, and responding as if there is a snake in the grass, in the presence of ambiguous stimuli that have only a 10% chance of being a snake, could well result in more surviving offspring than a more nuanced, likely slower, and closer-to-correct estimation of the probability there is a snake. But this is not a result of motivated reasoning where someone is advocating for their interests, it’s just a hack that our evolved brains have for keeping us alive using minimal energy and time for computation because calories were scarce and snakes sometimes moved quickly.

My understanding is that many failures of rationality are adaptive in this way—trading off getting the right answer (in terms of the answer that will cause there to be most offspring in future generations, not in terms of the answer that would count as “winning” by the lights of the human involved, necessarily—evolution doesn’t care a whit about whether I feel like I’ve won or lost or advanced what I see as my interests, as a result of something my brain’s biased towards or away from) against energy and time costs. One thing that could be different now is, the situations where we will starve are fewer, and the time we have to think before deciding what to do is often more.

Motivated reasoning is a specific relatively small subset of the biases our brains are subject to, not the main handle for biases in general, I think?

Myron Hedderson 8 Jan 2026 13:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: On Owning Galaxies
The key intuition about the future might be simply that humans being around is an incredibly weird state of affairs. We shouldn’t expect it to continue by default.
I mean, yes this seems right. In which case, taking it as a premise that this weird state doesn’t last long, it follows that there’s no point trying to plan for a future where human-like things continue to exist. BUT: from where we stand right now, we do actually have some control over whether everybody dies and nothing human-like continues into the future. The simplest plan to avoid extinction by AI is “don’t build the thing that kills us”, but there are more sophisticated options too. As unlikely as it was for such a situation to arise in the first place, as weird as it is to be here, here we are. And we can try to aim, from here, for a future state that is vanishingly unlikely to happen by chance or by default, such as “not human extinction”.

I think the speculation about owning galaxies starts from the assumption that we succeeded in aiming the future in such a direction. And although that assumption may not be what actually happens, it would be unfortunate to get to that future state and then not have thought through what to do next because we didn’t think it was likely so we never planned for the possibility.
The whole thing people are doing when they’re talking about good futures and how to get there, is a process of trying to design a path towards an unlikely future that is emphatically not the default outcome without humans trying to make it happen.

Myron Hedderson 25 Nov 2025 1:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
How rare good people are depends heavily on how high your bar for qualifying as a good person is. Many forms of good-person behaviour are common, some are rare. A person who has never done anything they later felt guilty about (who has a functioning conscience) is exceedingly rare. In my personal experience, I have found people to vary on a spectrum from “kind of bad and selfish quite often, but feels bad about it when they think about it and is good to people sometimes” to “consistently good, altruistic and honest, but not perfect, may still let you down on occasion”, with rare exceptions falling outside this range.

Myron Hedderson 24 Nov 2025 20:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
Also, if it is true that a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people, I am unclear where the confusion comes from. Good behaviour gets rewarded from childhood, and bad behaviour gets punished. Not perfectly, of course, and in some places and times very imperfectly indeed, but being seen as a good person by your community’s definition of “good” has many social rewards, we’re social creatures… I am unclear where the mystery is.
Were the confused people raised by ~~wolves~~non-social animals?
I don’t actually buy the premise that a lot of people are confused by moral courage, on reflection.

Myron Hedderson 24 Nov 2025 20:09 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
This doesn’t match my experience of what good people are generally like. I find them to be often happy to do what they are doing, rather than extremely afraid of not doing it, as I imagine would be the case if their reasons for behaving as they do were related to avoidance of pain.
There are of course exceptions. But if thinking I had done the wrong thing was extremely painful to me, literally “1000x more than any physical pain” I predict I’d quite possibly land on the strategy “avoid thinking about matters of right and wrong, so as to reliably avoid finding out I’d done wrong.” A nihilistic worldview where nothing was right or wrong and everything I might do is fine, would be quite appealing. Also, since one can’t change the past, any discovery that I’d done something wrong in the past would be an unfixable, permanent source of extreme pain for the rest of my life. In that situation, I’d probably rationalize the past behaviour as somehow being good, actually, in order to make the pain stop… which does not pattern-match to being a good person long term, but rather the opposite, being someone who is pathologically unable to admit fault, and has a large bag of tricks to avoid blame.

Myron Hedderson 18 Nov 2025 1:34 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: “But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? … Right?”
Another thought I had: Likely if you had grown up with functional oxytocin receptors, your values would be different than how they are now, sure—you’d value a thing you have no reason to value right now, and that likely would have had many effects on the path your life has taken. But that doesn’t imply that if, as an adult, you get functional oxytocin receptors somehow, you will become the person you would have been if you’d grown up with them from birth. Think less vampire-transformation, more “I didn’t realize my nose was plugged, this food actually does taste good now”.

Myron Hedderson 18 Nov 2025 1:08 UTC
5 points
0
on: “But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? … Right?”
It seems to me like you’re overestimating the value people place on companionate love/the “warm fuzzy” feeling many people get from physical and sometimes emotional closeness to another (which is what I associate with oxytocin). It’s a mild nice feeling, not an “oh my god I must have more of this right now and forever” feeling that would hijack your brain and value system in the way you speculate that trying heroin might.

I can’t comment very well on whether heroin actually would hijack my values if I tried it, although I remember in a drugs and behaviour class I took once there were anecdotes of doctors who were fully functional with easy access to and frequent use of heroin, in the time before it was illegal, and also stories about Rat Park, where the idea was that rats in a deprived environment took water laced with cocaine excessively, but those in an enriched environment were less interested in that. I speculate that many people place a high value on companionate love having been through significant periods of loneliness, rather than because the experience of a hit of oxytocin is much like the stories I’ve heard some people tell about what a hit of heroin is like. Also I note that you sometimes say “love” when you mean companionate love specifically, and many people who say something like “love is very important to me” aren’t being as precise in their language or thought as you tend to be, and conflate companionate love, libido-rooted sexual desire, limerance, and social acceptance into one thing, and say they value that. And there are definitely a lot of people who do some pretty insane-seeming things in pursuit of a combination of sexual attraction, limerance, and a feeling of closeness which is antithetical to loneliness. But just the warm fuzzy feeling? Less so.

I also think the stories of people throwing away large amounts of things you value and putting up with situations which to you would be strongly net-negative “for love”, aside from being about the more imprecise conception of love most people use, are also salient to you because they’re dysfunctional. There are, I expect, many people who have functional oxytocin receptors and just live their lives in perfectly sensible ways that wouldn’t come to your attention as a problem, or even very notable. Companionate love is just one feeling among many. Many/most people start out with little ability to regulate their emotions, as small children, and then grow and mature and by adulthood, throw fewer tantrums and handle their emotions better. And I expect if you gained the ability to feel the emotion(s) corresponding to oxytocin, you would handle them with about the same level of maturity that you manage with the other emotions you have. It is true that some people do stupid things because they don’t know how to integrate their emotions and their thoughts into a sensible response to the world around them, quite a few people seem to struggle with their feelings, but this isn’t just true with respect to companionate love, it’s also true of anger, sadness, shame, limerance… etc. Having experienced both limerance and companionate love, I think if you can handle the former, you can handle the latter—limerance definitely feels stronger and more cognition-distorting in my experience.

With all that said, your post does make sense to me, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t felt a common emotion. If you were, say, someone who had never felt anger, you could likewise look at the world around you and go “wow, people sure are doing some insane things while under the influence of this emotion, I’m glad I don’t have it”. And that would be pretty accurate, and likely true of most emotions.

I say most of this to suggest that if there is, in future, the ability to give yourself functional oxytocin receptors, you probably have less to fear from that than from other mind-altering interventions you might think of. It’s pretty mild, and most people in a good life situation with a decent amount of maturity can handle a warm feeling in their chest without throwing their life away in pursuit of more. Our culture is not good at saying “be reasonable about your pursuit of love”, or even teasing apart different aspects of the culturally-approved thing-you’re-supposed-to-throw-your-life-away-for-like-in-the-movies, which is unhelpful to those trying to navigate new emotions as teenagers, but I bet if you felt a warm fuzzy feeling one day, you’d be just fine.

Myron Hedderson 3 Nov 2025 14:55 UTC
0 points
−1
on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
This was informative for me. One of my best friends from elementary school got back in touch last year after 30+ years, and is currently in the process of mtf transition. I don’t think that her reasons for transitioning match or parallel yours, but I don’t fully know what her reasons are in the level of detail you’ve shared about yours—I feel like now is not the time to ask questions that might come across the wrong way if I’m not careful. And your explanation of how things are for you makes me go “OK, that makes sense”, which transitioning hadn’t for me up until this point.

Re: “Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition.”… I did not know that. My friend is pretty introspective, and she’s the only trans person with whom I have enough direct experience to assess level of introspective ability. Although my model of “trans people in general” won’t get a strong update from your description of your motives and thought process (I figure your experience is that of one subgroup of mtf trans people), this fact that you who are in a position to know claim is famously generally true, will update my general model.

I would personally have been hesitant to speculate about motives along these lines, because the generic line of ~~reasoning~~ speculation “people are doing a thing I don’t understand because they’re <insert something with negative connotations, like mental illness or being socially ostracized>” is an easy answer to jump to that makes one feel superior, but is often wrong. So hearing your reasons were rooted in finding social acceptance is extra useful, because I would have just not allowed myself to put much probability on that unless I’d heard from someone directly that it was true for them.

I see below that some people on twitter have apparently pushed you to delete links to this essay or the essay itself. I vote you keep it up.

Myron Hedderson 13 Oct 2025 13:03 UTC
9 points
3
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Don’t Mock Yourself
Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is “can’t stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like ‘I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me’ does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she’s wrong about the negative thoughts”. It’s like this person can’t occupy the mental territory “I’m OK, mostly good” it’s either “I am fantastic” or “I am terrible”.
I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.