Nathan Young
Bio
Participation4
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.
Posts 141
Comments2497
Topic contributions20
I note that in some sense I have lost trust that the EA community gives me a clear prioritisation of where to donate.
Some clearer statements:
- I still think GiveWell does great work
- I still generally respect the funding decisions of Open Philanthropy
- I still think this forum has a higher standard than most place
- It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones
- I don't know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are
- I don't really know what orgs do all-considered work on this topic. I guess the LTFF?
- I am more confused/inattentive and this community is covering a larger set of possible choices so it's harder to track what consensus is
Where can i see the debate week diagram if I want to look back at it?
Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger[1] arguments for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level. I don't have time to write them all up, and in many cases they would be better written by someone with more expertise, but one issue is firmly in my comfort zone:
To the extent that we discuss this issue rarely it really ought to be worth someone's time to write up these supposed strong arguments. To the extent that they haven't, even after a well publicised week of discussion I will believe it more likely they don't exist.
If you publish a bad pieces and share them with millions of people, I don't really feel obliged to talk or listen to other things you write until you correct the inaccurate piece. I don't think any other community would and I think it's a bad use of our time to extend this absurd level of charity.
People are free to tell me the wired article wasn't inaccurate or lazy, but scanning it, it looks that way.
Here are quote I could find in 15 minutes from your first article that leave the reader with an inaccurate impression. I have not read this new article.
- "Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he believes" - has Musk acted on these supposed beliefs or is this just guilt by association?
- "comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over decades to spread Islamic fundamentalism around the world" - I can find many things that cost $46 but I note that you chose a terrorist ideology
- ""Insecticide-treated bed nets can prevent malaria, but they’re also great for catching fish. In 2016, The New York Times reported that overfishing with the nets was threatening fragile food supplies across Africa." " - my sense is that this is widely debunked. As a result of your article it was shared by Marc Adreessen. As you yourself note we should count harms as well as benefits. I could this as a harm to what I am confident is an effective way to stop malaria.
- 'In a subsection of GiveWell’s analysis of the charity, you’ll find reports of armed men attacking locations where the vaccination money is kept—including one report of a bandit who killed two people and kidnapped two children while looking for the charity’s money.' " - I think it's a bit absurd to imply that the norm is to count this stuff as the costs of aid. Perhaps it should be (and it's good that givewell mentioned it) but the implication that they are unusually bad for not doing so?
I could go on.
Leif, we do not owe you our time. You had the same social credit that all critics have and a large platform. You could have come here and argued your case. I am sure people would have engaged. But for me, you have burned that credit, sharing inaccuracies to millions of people. Your piece started a news cycle about the harms of bednets based on inaccurate information. That has real harms. So I don't care to read your piece.
I don't know whether I am the hero in my own story - I have done many things I regret - but I do know a thing or two about dealing with those I disagree with. I would not publish a piece with this amount of errors and if I did I wouldn't expect people to engage with me again. I do not understand why you think we would.
I hope you are well, genuinely.
I think there is something here about the kinds of people who are steady hands not necessarily having great leverage either in terms of pay or status. But realistically such a person may be very costly to replace or do a very valuable role.
In that way, a sensible organisation would increase their pay and (to the extent possible) status by reflecting not on the change of their output from year to year, but actually how difficult they are to replace, which might be weeks of hiring, months of training, months of management time and perhaps years of time passing to get back to the function working as well as it previously did.
It is tricky to think how such negotiations can take place properly, but it seems likely to me that the sort of person who is likely to be a steady hand might not be agitatng for such, but that in turn means those who would say if paid more, appreciated more, don't see that option available to them.
I sort of think this is a reason not to have EA-endorsed politicians unless someone has really done the due diligence. This is a pretty high trust community and people expect something someone says confidently to be rubustly tested but political recommendations (and some charity ones to be fair) seem much less well researched than general discussions on policy etc.
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.