MichaelDickens
Bio
I do independent research on EA topics. I write about whatever seems important, tractable, and interesting (to me). Lately, I mainly write about EA investing strategy, but my attention span is too short to pick just one topic.
I have a website: https://mdickens.me/ Most of the content on my website gets cross-posted to the EA Forum.
My favorite things that I've written: https://mdickens.me/favorite-posts/
I used to work as a software developer at Affirm.
Posts 55
Comments705
I'm confident in PauseAI US's ability to run protests and I think the case for doing protests is pretty strong. You're also doing lobbying, headed by Felix De Simone. I'm less confident about that so I have some questions.
- There are no other organized groups (AFAIK) doing AI pause protests in the US of the sort you're doing. But there are other groups talking to policy-makers, including Center for AI Policy, Center for AI Safety, and Palisade (plus some others outside the US, and some others that focus on AI risk but that I think are less value-aligned). What is the value-add of PauseAI US's direct lobbying efforts compared these other groups? And are you coordinating with them at all?
- What is Felix's background / experience in this area? Basically, why should I expect him to be good at lobbying?
Given that a protein needs a very exact number of each amino acid to be synthesized, for essential amino acids like Methionine, I would expect their consumptions to be a bottleneck for muscle building which needs protein. Even if all the other proteins are in good amounts and thus the PDCAAS score is decent, you can drown in a river that's on average 20cm deep.
I could be misreading but it sounds like you're misunderstanding how PDCAAS works. If a food contains lots of every other essential amino acid but only (say) 30% of the required amount of methionine, then its PDCAAS will be 30. If the PDCAAS is (say) 90%, that means it contains at least 90% of the requirement for every essential amino acid, not just 90% on average.
You can buy methionine pills or powder: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=methionine&ref=nb_sb_noss
I believe they make methionine via chemical synthesis so it's vegan.
For me personally, I get most of my daily protein from soy so I don't worry about methionine, but I do have some methionine pills for when I need them. I also have lysine pills which pair well with wheat protein.
Recently I was annoyed at how difficult it was to figure out the protein quality of my diet so I built a calculator: https://mdickens.me/2024/08/29/DIAAS_calculator/
For me this seems more useful as a modus tollens: economists generally treat utility functions as isoelastic[1], which implies that opportunities are Pareto-distributed.
But it's also useful as a sanity check: it's intuitive to me that utility is isoelastic, and also that opportunities are Pareto-distributed, so it's nice that these two intuitions are consistent with each other.
[1] Although this might be more out of convenience than anything else, since isoelastic utility functions have some nice mathematical properties.
Upvoted and disagree-voted.
Do you have any particular reason to believe that EAs overweight large problems?
Take the animal welfare vs global health debate: are we sometimes biased by the sheer magnitude of animal suffering numbers, rather than other relevant factors?
EAs donate much more to global health than to animal welfare. Do you think the ratio should be even higher still?
This principle has seemingly strange implications: