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Commenting here after recently listening to the podcast audio. I really liked this. Thanks for writing and for narrating it.
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I think I relate to the ending sentiment about motherly love rather surprisingly in my attitude to my home metropolises of the Bay Area and Atlanta. Focusing on the Bay, which will probably be more familiar to readers of this comment, the good things about it (lively techno-optimistic subcultures, the earnestness of almost everyone I meet) are reasons for pride, but while the bad things (overall governance structures and dynamics in California have not been producing good results) are reasons for disappointment, they do not overall reduce my love of my homeland.
And, crucially, there's some spiritual-adjacent nature of that love for my homeland. I admittedly haven't spent much time thinking about the problem of evil as applied to "existentially positive" spirituality. But I think I buy that the motherly love dynamic may have an important role to play, and my feelings about California seem to me to provide some evidence.
In addition, we are issuing a warning to sergia, for this and other comments. Sergia, please read the EA Forum norms post and, if you're in doubt of whether your comment is meeting those norms, please wait for a while and revise your comment.
This subthread seems to be going in a bad direction. I would encourage those wanting to discuss the net-value of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel on the world to do so elsewhere.
Good footnotes. See y'all in London.
Note from the Forum team: The Forum was intermittently down for roughly an hour and change last night/this morning, due to an issue with our domain provider.
Another mod here. We think that discussion has not centralized there. That's ok — there are different flavors of conversation it kind of makes sense to have on these different posts. We've unpinned this comment.
We have thought about that. Probably the main reason we haven't done this is because of this reason, on which I'll quote myself on from an internal slack message:
Currently if someone makes an anon account, they use an anonymous email address. There's usually no way for us, or, by extension, someone who had full access to our database, to deanonymize them. However, if we were to add this feature, it would tie the anonymous comments to a primary account. Anyone who found a vulnerability in that part of the code, or got an RCE on us, would be able post a dump that would fully deanonymize all of those accounts.
This sucks. See the Slate Star Codex post(s) (which I sadly cannot now find) about how payment processors end up being enforcers of the law instead of the government. And it's not a good situation, since they:
- Have the incentive to be overly cautious with respect to the law
- Have no appeal, really
- Are fundamentally not part of the democratic thing, for whatever that means to you
[Edit: FWIW, I think Stripe/Visa/Banks are fundamentally subject to incentives created by regulators to do this, and would probably be shut down if they did not.]
As an aside: I believe this will work right up until you submit it, but am not sure.
Hi Hauke. Sadly that's an admin-only feature that involves editing raw HTML.[1] We use it for Holden's posts because he's crossposted them from his own blog where he uses them. We have talked about adding Forum-native collapsable sections — I'll take your question as an endorsement.
- ^
There are multiple reasons this can't be opened up to all uses. The first albeit surmountable one is that it is relatively easy to add cross site scripting vulnerabilities when editing raw HTML.
We also just deployed something that makes them somewhat more prominent. (For example, blue instead of grey.)
Back in 2019 it was impossible to do "soft-filtering" (aka tag weighting). So it was an all or nothing approach.
It seemed a natural fit for community to use the tagging system instead of re-using the 'meta' flag which (because LessWrong used the 'meta' flag to mean something else) was an absolute mess engineering-wise. Then, once it was a tag, we could totally continue to do the thing where it was a separate page and set the tag to hidden. However, now that we had the option to use tag-weighting, Aaron and I decided to go with that instead of a completely separate page.
(Technical difficulties, please stand by.) Edit: This crosspost is now correctly displaying the contents from LW. Apologies for the disruption.
I think this is roughly right.
(That said, it's a balance, and three-quarters of the way to 100% EA dedicate-ism will sometimes feel and look quite a lot like crazy sacrifice, IMO.)
I like the way you summarized this, thanks!
FWIW, CEA solves this issue by saying:
The salary range in Oxford is £49,000 to £77,000, depending on prior experience, skills, and location. There may be flexibility in salary for exceptional candidates. [...]
Congrats on updating! (Your mind not the title.)
The author of this comment has privately communicated to me that they believe someone is creating fraudulent Forum accounts. If someone DM's you, please consider that they might be a journalist looking to quote you uncharitably, a scammer trying to get personal information, etc.
We have no evidence that we have suffered a breach of our security in the traditional sense of the word (e.g. database being hacked).
Forum dev here. The author of this comment has privately communicated to me that they believe someone is creating fraudulent Forum accounts. If someone DM's you, please consider that they might be a journalist looking to quote you uncharitably, a scammer trying to get personal information, etc.
We have no evidence that we have suffered a breach of our security in the traditional sense of the word (e.g. database being hacked).
Forum dev here. The author of this comment has privately communicated to me that they believe someone is creating fraudulent Forum accounts. If someone DM's you, please consider that they might be a journalist looking to quote you uncharitably, a scammer trying to get personal information, etc.
We have no evidence that we have suffered a breach of our security in the traditional sense of the word (e.g. database being hacked).
Forum dev here. ...I have no idea what you're talking about? I would expect to know if someone was DDoSing us. And even if so, why would a DDoS mean you shouldn't post looking for career advice? Do you mean metaphorically? If so I would also think this is bad advice. I am very confused.
I thought of that. The reason I didn't suggest that approach was rather mundane. This post needs to have the "Nick Bostrom" tag. Currently, someone who wants to hide all Bostrom-email content from the frontpage can hide the Bostrom tag, and it will hide this post as well. In the approach where we default-hide the Nick Bostrom tag, we would need to do some ugly kludge to make it so that, by default, this post shows up on the frontpage. The approach taken was simpler. Maybe in the future it'd be worth it to do that ugly kludge? I'm unconvinced, but that's a pretty lightly held view.
This comment is a community service.
You could temporarily set the "Nick Bostrom" tag to "Hidden" on your frontpage.
I have good news for you! LessWrong has developed this feature. You can access the feature by going to your settings and checking "opt-in to experimental features."
You might think that this will lead to a "party-of-1" dynamic, but due to the way it's implemented (check out the above post), quoted text in comments will lead to side comments for you.
I liked the linked audio and I also liked your edit. Great post!
I really appreciate your straightforwardness and honesty here. It would be very easy for you to give lip service to Chana's goals, but you said what you believe and I respect that. ... However I very much disagree with your conclusion. Most issues are not like flat-earthers. Most of the time you will have a much better time debating against the ideas you disagree with than writing PSAs about them.
This link explains some of my thinking in the area. Some of the ideas are applicable, but please don't take the obvious analogy too directly. (Also: apologies for the length of the piece. In an ideal world I would write more of my own thoughts.)
I disagree with partner!Will's implication that Michael's comment is unconstructive. I think it is very blunt, but that seems fine to me. I have not-settled opinions about the content of Michael's comment.
Ideally, the forum team would consciously trade off between growth and average post quality [emphasis added]
I disagree. I think the metric I care about is “quality of the average post that a person reads.”
The Forum will have a long tail of posts that are written by newbies just exploring some area for the first time, or are kinda confused, or are bad takes, etc. Many of these posts are net positive! I’m rather in favor of people having their learning experiences in public. Many times the comments on those posts are good places to recapitulate the best of EA. The good news is that most of those posts don’t get much karma or readership. I’m sure you can think of posts that you don’t like that got lots of karma. There’s a complex conversation to be had there, I hope Lizka will post her draft on that soon. But I’m talking more about the much more common post that sits at 0-20 karma. There are lots of them. But they’re by and large pretty harmless. I don’t want my metric to be reducing them.
I just want to say, I found this to be a super interesting comment. Thanks!
Jim Babcock and I built this feature! You can enable it in your account settings, under Site Customizations. Let me know if you have any feedback!
(Because it un-blinds you based on mouse-hovers, you will not be able to un-blind yourself well on mobile.)
(I actually built it ~a month ago but forgot to write about it here.)
I agree with you about particulates and VOCs[1], however I want to push back on:
There’s good evidence that higher ambient CO2 [...] meaningfully impair cognition & productivity
I believe that a reasonable interpretation of the evidence would suggest the evidence mixed at best. I am personally quite skeptical.
***
In JP's memory of the situation there were a few bad studies a while back that found enormous (I might provocatively say implausible) effect sizes. Having not done a strong literature review, I am not aware of any that have found anywhere near the original effect size. Recently I went quickly looking to see if someone had found any more evidence and found this:[2]
The effect of the indoor concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is smaller and only matters during phases of the game when decisions are taken under high time stress.
...Which, yeah, sounds like p-hacking to me. At the very least, not consistent with a large effect size from CO2.
Scott Alexander agrees with me, and did a self experiment with a null result, which I would have expected to come out positive in the event of a large effect size from CO2.
***
In the end this debate isn't especially action-relevant. You should probably buy that air monitor. And pay attention to the CO2 as a measure of outdoor air exchange. Indoor air pollution is a big deal, even when you think it's fine. But it's probably not the CO2 directly doing the work.
- ^
Which cannot generally be filtered out with an air filter, and as such, improving ventilation matters for. Also airborne pathogens are a thing.
- ^
This study seems pretty cool to me (though I haven't done a thorough skeptical evaluation), and is consistent with, "indoor air pollution is a big deal, yo".
Woah. TIL.
What a fantastically beautiful website. The illustrations (Kate Rodman is cited) are great, and the aesthetics as a whole fit together fantastically. I don't know if I've ever seen a site I like better visually.
I'm also a fan of the content.
Congrats!
Congrats on posting your draft!
Ultimately I agree with: "x-risk is high", "the long-term is overwhelmingly important", and "we should use reason and evidence to decide what is most important and then do it", so what I choose to emphasize to people in my messaging is a strategic consideration about what I think will have the best effects, including convincingness. (I think you agree.)
One reason why the EA community seems to spend so much energy on the EA-principle thing is that we've figured out that it's a good meme. It's well-exercised. Whereas the "x-risk is high" message is less-well validated. I would also share you concern that it would turn people off. But maybe it would be good? I think we should probably try more on the margin!
I do think "the long-term is overwhelmingly important" is probably over-emphasized in messaging. Maybe it's important for more academic discussions of cause prioritization, but I'd be surprised if it deserved to be as front-and-center as it is.
I'm so excited to see you posting here! I found this to be a really good read. I think the most interesting piece for me was* learning the extent to which your positive press was helpful.
The last four paragraphs are really moving to me. 🥲
* (potentially a bit sadly given my predispositions)
Does anyone have a recommendation for a resource to read on dependency injection?
I'm considering whether to add the pattern to the ForumMagnum codebase. My current state is that I have a tentative grasp of the concept and roughly the pros and cons, but not really a practical grasp of it, or of how it's played out in a typescript codebase.
This has now been implemented. You cannot strong upvote your own comments, nor vote along the agreement axis.
really good link, thanks :)
You could also enter into "other" a factor less than one if you want to multiply, rather than add or subtract, the karma. You might try entering in .25 if you want to see 1 or 2 FTX Crisis posts. Clicking "Reduced" corresponds to a factor of .5.
Thanks a bunch! This is really helpful.
The algorithm will be able to decide what is relevant to it and will simply ignore the rest.
Do you have a citation or epistemic status for this? I'm happy to deploy the PR as-is on the basis of your recommendation, but I'd be even happier with more knowledge of how confident to be.
Hi there,
Thanks a bunch for this info! I'm thinking about adding this to the Forum. I'm considering the problem of the fact that most of our content isn't academic, and I don't want Google's algorithm to think that I'm trying to spam them. Since you seem knowledgeable, do you think think I should enable this for all posts and let google decide if they're legit, or have some annoying manual process that will probably miss many actual academic posts?
(An additional note: many of our users, present company included, do not use their real names on the Forum.)
I think that's too simplistic a read of Levine's article. It's hard to summarize as good a writer as Matt Levine, but I will try:
- Many exchanges took customer deposits and invested them speculatively, like a bank would do. FTX did not do that.[1]
- FTX offered leveraged financial products. When doing so, you are loaning people money. Fortunately, you are loaning some people Bitcoins secured by $s and other people $s secured by Bitcoin. So you loan them each-other's money. This is entirely expected.
- The surprising thing is that FTX had a bunch of loans out in $s and Bitcoin secured by FTT. The problem with that is that "If people start to worry about the [FTX]'s financial health, [FTT] will go down, which means that its collateral will be less valuable, which means that its financial health will get worse, which means that [FTT] will go down, etc. It is a death spiral."
FTX is (was?) in the business of trading customers' money in one currency for customers' money in other currency. With the benefit of hindsight[2] we can say that they should not have allowed a large chunk of the money they ended up with to be FTT. That is the "magic beans" that Matt is referencing.
Edit: After writing the above, I read that Nathan's market "By April, will evidence come out that FTX gambled deposits rather than keeping it in reserves?" contains "This includes lending deposits to Alameda on a 'fully collateralized' loan, and Alameda doing things with the deposits." I would bet for a yes resolution on that market. However, I would note: Alameda was playing within the same structure as any other depositor. FTX allowed people to make leveraged bets on FTT, and Alameda took them up on it.
- ^
I'll bet with people at pretty good odds about this. (However, see my edit.)
- ^
Possibly with only foresight one could have said that! I don't know, I wasn't in a position to say! Matt Levine doesn't seem particularly impressed with that decision. I would not make confident claims either way at the moment.
And the things about built environment, and better PPE, are also, in this view, most useful for preventing an infection from ever getting off the ground?
I would really expect PPE to be a mitigation as well.
Cool, that makes sense. However, here's a point I want to make: in effective altruism (and I would say, in the world at large) one needs to focus on tractability to make the base for an intervention to be an ethical priority. Otherwise, you as an agent with non-infinite resources would do better to focus on another way of achieving your goals.
To a large extent you can say, "yep, if we had more space we would devote more effort to that." But to this audience, who is already sympathetic to the in-theory benefits of nuclear energy, I doubt you have done much to convince me / them.
Wait that's so confusing. What? Have I missed something? I'm just going to flail in writing here in hopes that someone can explain why the eff Binance would not want to acquire it's largest competitor for peanuts.
Agreed.
Matt Levine seems to think it was the leveraged derivatives. I will quote him at length:
One question that might be too early to answer is: Why was there a liquidity crunch in the first place? A crypto exchange is a weird sort of business, in many ways more like a brokerage than a traditional exchange. The simplest way to run the business is to take deposits from customers, buy crypto for the customers, keep everything segregated, and make money on commissions. Coinbase Global Inc.’s balance sheets are public, and pretty simple: It has about $101 billion of customer cash and crypto assets, and about $101 billion of offsetting customer liabilities. If the customers asked for their $101 billion back, presumably Coinbase would just give it to them.
A more complicated way to do it is to provide leverage to customers: Instead of taking $100 of customer cash to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin, you take $100 of customer cash to buy $200 worth of Bitcoin. A lot of FTX’s business is in perpetual futures, a leveraged product, sometimes levered 20 to 1. If you are an exchange and you are in this sort of business, you will need to come up with the extra $100 to lend to your customer. Presumably that doesn’t come from your equity: You are doing some sort of borrowing, perhaps from other customers, perhaps from outside financing sources, perhaps from your affiliated hedge fund, etc. You will have some customers who owe you money, and others whom you owe money. You will be like a bank. If everyone to whom you owe money demands their money back at once, you will need to get the money back from the ones who owe you money, which might be hard. (You might not have a contractual right to demand the money back right away, or it might be rude and bad for business, or you might have to liquidate them to get the money back and that would blow up the value of your collateral.) In broad strokes this is a reasonable description of what happened to Bear Stearns, a brokerage that financed its customers’ positions. If you are a crypto exchange that provides leverage, then you are probably bank-like enough for a run on the bank.
Another complicated way to do it is that you take your customers’ assets and go invest them in whatever sounds good to you. You’re holding Solana tokens for a customer, you invest them in some yield-farming thing to make some extra cash, if the customer asks for the tokens back you don’t have them, etc. This is more or less what brought down the Celsiuses and Voyagers and BlockFis of the world, but I would not have expected it from FTX. “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings,” Bankman-Fried tweeted yesterday. “We don’t invest client assets (even in treasuries).”
It's important that this is not an ad hominem.
I'm torn between:
- It is pretty annoying when Nathan has come in with a best-guess doc, being very transparent, to get such a blanket and vague statement argued from authority. An EA community that lost its ability to have open discussion and relied on authority like that would be a worse one indeed. And:
- If Jonas has received a tip from someone, but does not want to reveal his source, and his source does not want to post more details, this is the best Jonas can do. Jonas has added information to the commons, and been rewarded by losing karma.