I’m currently researching forecasting and epistemics as part of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.
ozziegooen(Ozzie Gooen)
Karma: 2,955
Mostly. The core math bits of Guesstimate were a fairly thin layer on Math.js. Squiggle has replaced much of the MathJS reliance with custom code (custom interpreter + parser, extra distribution functionality).
If things go well, I think it would make sense to later bring Squiggle in as the main language for Guesstimate models. This would be a breaking change, and quite a bit of work, but would make Guesstimate much more powerful.
Announcing Squiggle: Early Access
Really nice to see this. I broadly agree. I’ve been concerned with boards for a while.
I think that “mediocre boards” are one of the greatest weaknesses of EA right now. We have tons of small organizations, and I suspect that most of these have mediocre or fairly ineffective boards. This is one of the main reasons I don’t like the pattern of us making lots of tiny orgs; because we have to set up yet one more board for each one, and good board members are in short supply.
I’d like to see more thinking here. Maybe we could really come up with alternative structures.
For example, I’ve been thinking of something like “good defaults” as a rule of thumb for orgs that get a lot of EA funding.
- They choose an effective majority of board members from a special pool of people who have special training and are well trusted by key EA funders.
- There’s a “board service” organization that’s paid to manage the processes of boards. This service would arrange meetings, make sure that a bunch of standards are getting fulfilled, and would have the infrastructure in place to recruit new EDs when needed. These services can be paid by the organization.
Basically, I’d want to see us treat small nonprofits as sub-units of a smoothly-working bureaucracy or departments in a company. This would involve a lot of standardization and control. Obviously this could backfire a lot if the controlling groups ever do a bad job; but (1) if the funders go bad, things might be lost anyway, and (2), I think the expected harm of this could well be less than the expected benefit.
For what it’s worth, I think I prefer the phrase,
”Failing with style”
Minor point:
I suggest people experiment with holiday ideas and report back, before we announce anything “official”. Experimentation seems really nice on this topic, that seems like the first step.
In theory we could have a list of holiday ideas, and people randomly choose a few of them, try them out, then report back.
Interesting. Thanks!
The more sophisticated system is Squiggle. It’s basically a prototype. I haven’t updated it since the posts I made about it last year.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i5BWqSzuLbpTSoTc4/squiggle-an-overview
Update:
I think some of the graphs could be better represented with upfront fixed costs.
When you buy a book, you pay for it via your time to read it, but you also have the fixed initial fee of the book.This fee isn’t that big of a deal for most books that you have a >20% chance of reading, but it definitely is for academic articles or similar.
Why don’t governments seem to mind that companies are explicitly trying to make AGIs?
(Also want to say I’ve been reading them all and am very thankful)
I enjoyed writing this post, but think it was one of my lesser posts. It’s pretty ranty and doesn’t bring much real factual evidence. I think people liked it because it was very straightforward, but I personally think it was a bit over-rated (compared to other posts of mine, and many posts of others).
I think it fills a niche (quick takes have their place), and some of the discussion was good.
Good point! I feel like I have to squint a bit to see it, but that’s how exponentials sometimes look early on.
To be clear, I care about clean energy. However, if energy production can be done without net-costly negative externalities, then it seems quite great.
I found Matthew Yglesias’s take, and Jason’s writings, interesting.https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance
All that said, if energy on the net leads to AGI doom, that could be enough to offset any gain, but my guess is that clean energy growth is still a net positive.
but I think this is actually a decline in coal usage.
Ah, my bad, thanks!
They estimate ~35% increase over the next 30 years
That’s pretty interesting. I’m somewhat sorry to see it’s linear (I would have hoped solar/battery tech would improve more, leading to much faster scaling, 10-30 years out), but it’s at least better than some alternatives.
I found this last chart really interesting, so did some hunting. It looks electricity generation in the US grew linearly until around ~2000. In the last 10 years though, there’s been a very large decline in “petroleum and other”, along with a strong increase in natural gas, and a smaller, but significant, increase in renewables.
I’d naively guess things to continue to be flat for a while as petroleum use decreases further; but at some point, I’d expect energy use to increase again.
That said, I’d of course like for it to increase much, much faster (more like China). :)
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
I liked this post a lot, though of course, I didn’t agree with absolutely everything.
These seemed deeply terrible. If you think the best use of funds, in a world in which we already have billions available, is to go trying to convince others to give away their money in the future, and then hoping it can be steered to the right places, I almost don’t know where to start. My expectation is that these people are seeking money and power,
I’m hesitant about this for a few reasons.
Sure, we have a few billion available, and we’re having trouble donating that right now. But we’re also not exactly doing a ton of work to donate our money yet. (This process gave out $10 Million, with volunteers). In the scheme of important problems, a few (~40-200) billion really doesn’t seem like that much to me. Marginal money, especially lots of money, still seems pretty good.
My expectation is that these people are seeking money and power → I don’t know which specific groups applied or their specific details. I can say that my impression, lots of EAs really just don’t know what else to do. It’s tough to enter research, and we just don’t have that much in terms of “these interventions would be amazing, please someone do them” for longtermism. I’ve seen a lot of orgs get created with something like, “This seems like a pretty safe strategy, it will likely come into use later on, and we already have the right connections to make it happen.” This, combined with a general impression that marginal money is still useful in the long-term, I think could present a more sympathetic take than what you describe.
The default strategy for lots of non-EA entrepreneurs I know has been something like, “Make a ton of money/influence, then try to figure out how to use it for good. Because people won’t listen to me or fund my projects on my own”. I wish more of these people would do direct work (especially in the last few years, when there’s been more money), but can sympathize with that strategy. Arguably, Elon Musk is much better off having started with “less ambitious” ventures like Zip2 and Paypal; it’s not clear if he would have been funded to start with SpaceX/Tesla when he was younger.
All that said, the fact that EAs have so little idea of what exactly is useful seems like a pretty burning problem to me. (This isn’t unique to EAs, to be clear). On the margin, it seems safe to heavily emphasize “figuring stuff out” instead of “making more money, in hopes that we’ll eventually figure stuff out” However, “figuring stuff out” is pretty hard and not nearly as tractable as we’d like it to be.
“I would hire assistance to do at least the following”
I’ve been hoping that the volunteer funders (EA Funds, SFF) would do this for a while now. Seems valuable to at least try out for a while. In general, “funding work” seems really bottlenecked to me, and I’d like to see anything that could help unblock it.
definitely a case of writing a longer letter
I’m impressed by just how much you write on things like this. Do you have any posts outlining your techniques? Is there anything special, like speech-to-text, or do you spend a lot of time on it, or are you just really fast?
Thanks!
Just checking; I think you might have sent the wrong link though?
Quick question:
When you say, “Yuji adjustable-color-temperature LED strips/panels”Do you mean these guys?
https://store.yujiintl.com/products/yujileds-high-cri-95-dim-to-warm-led-flexible-strip-1800k-to-3000k-168-leds-m-pack-5m-reel
It looks kind of intimidating to setup, and is pricey, but maybe is worth it.
Not yet. There are a few different ways of specifying the distribution, but we don’t yet have options for doing from the 25th&75th percentiles. It would be nice to do eventually. (Might be very doable to add in a PR, for a fairly motivated person).
https://www.squiggle-language.com/docs/Api/Dist#normal
You can type in,
normal({p5: 10, p95:30}). It should later be possible to saynormal({p25: 10, p75:30}).Separately; when you say “25, 50, 75 percentiles”; do you mean all at once? This would be an overspecification; you only need two points. Also; would you want this to work for normal/lognormal distributions, or anything else?