Nathan Young

Project manager/Director @ Frostwork (web app agency)
17187 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)London, UK
nathanpmyoung.com

Bio

Participation
4

Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity. 

How others can help me

Talking to those in forecasting to improve my forecasting question generation tool

Writing forecasting questions on EA topics.

Meeting EAs I become lifelong friends with.

How I can help others

Connecting them to other EAs.

Writing forecasting questions on metaculus.

Talking to them about forecasting.

Sequences
1

Moving In Step With One Another

Comments
2482

Topic contributions
20

Interesting take. I don't like it. 

Perhaps because I like saying overrated/underrated.

But also because overrated/underrated is a quick way to provide information. "Forecasting is underrated by the population at large" is much easier to think of than "forecasting is probably rated 4/10 by the population at large and should be rated 6/10"

Over/underrated requires about 3 mental queries, "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks" "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks?" "Am I gonna have to be clear about what I mean?"

Scoring the current and desired status of something requires about 20 queries "Is 4 fair?" "Is 5 fair" "What axis am I rating on?" "Popularity?" "If I score it a 4 will people think I'm crazy?"...

Like in some sense your right that % forecasts are more useful than "More likely/less likely" and sizes are better than "bigger smaller" but when dealing with intangibles like status I think it's pretty costly to calculate some status number, so I do the cheaper thing.

 

Also would you prefer people used over/underrated less or would you prefer the people who use over/underrated spoke less? Because I would guess that some chunk of those 50ish karma are from people who don't like the vibe rather than some epistemic thing. And if that's the case, I think we should have a different discussion.

I guess I think that might come from a frustration around jargon or rationalists in general. And I'm pretty happy to try and broaden my answer from over/underrated - just as I would if someone asked me how big a star was and I said "bigger than an elephant". But it's worth noting it's a bandwidth thing and often used because giving exact sizes in status is hard. Perhaps we shouldn't have numbers and words for it, but we don't.

Argument: The money can be spent over a long time and like will be able to be spent.  

The footnote on the main question says:

In total. You can imagine this is a trust that could be spent down today , or over any time period

Likewise @Will Howard🔹 argues that this isn't that significant an additional amount of money anyway:

"$100m in total is not a huge amount (equiv to $5-10m/yr, against a background of ~$200m). I think concern about scaling spending is a bit of a red herring and this could probably be usefully absorbed just by current intervention"

I want to note that this is more consensus than I thought in favour of the proposition. I would have guessed the median was much nearer 50% than it is. 

I want to once again congratulate the forum team on this voting tool. I think by doing this, the EA forum is at the forefront of internal community discussions. No communities do this well and it's surprising how powerful it is. 

I do give a fraction to animal welfare and if I changed my mind I would give it to global health.

The question of capacity seems unrelated to the crux to me. I'm pretty confident that if it were known that there was 100mn to spend then people would spin up orgs. I guess there is a question whether all those would be more effective on the margin than global health, but I dunno, it seems to be missing the bit that I care about most. 

I didn't realise the comments were from that initially. Thanks.

Seems likely correct. I'm not fully certain because I wouldn't be that surprised to be wrong. It is much easier to help animals than people on the margin.

I update a bit more because I haven't read good arguments against and have seen some possible arguments debunked.

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