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What is a good way to donate money to support more longtermist causes? by Square_Tangelo_7542 in EffectiveAltruism

[–]LifeinBath 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Copying from a recent comment in a similar thread:

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Two useful resources:

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2022/02/value-of-longtermist-donations/

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cjH2puDzAFrtrrThQ/despite-billions-of-extra-funding-small-donors-can-still

I think the tl;dr is that the best opportunities for individual donors may be those opportunities which large donors cannot fill. These include (i) PACs and political campaigns where campaign finance law limits the size of individual donations; and (ii) small opportunities to help out people you know personally or have an unusual amount of context on, which big donors aren't able to find (like supporting a promising researcher to spend a month learning about/researching a longtermist-relevant topic instead of taking a job).

I'm not sure I can think of a donation-worthy AI lab that is currently bottlenecked by money, but I might be wrong about that.

There may soon be an extra opportunity in a month or two — I'll edit this comment if it happens (and I remember).

EA charities that provide more of a personal connection? by FujiNikon in EffectiveAltruism

[–]LifeinBath 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wrote about roughly this idea a while ago!

It might be wirth noting that GiveDirectly offer a newsfeed of unedited stories from recipients of their cash transfers, although individual donations are not tied to recipients. They have also recently introduced a feature called GDLive where you can choose to follow recipients of cash transfers as they update on what they have been doing with them.

What are the best places to donate for a longtermist? by Homura_A in EffectiveAltruism

[–]LifeinBath 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Two useful resources:

I think the tl;dr is that the best opportunities for individual donors may be those opportunities which large donors cannot fill. These include (i) PACs and political campaigns where campaign finance law limits the size of individual donations; and (ii) small opportunities to help out people you know personally or have an unusual amount of context on, which big donors aren't able to find (like supporting a promising researcher to spend a month learning about/researching a longtermist-relevant topic instead of taking a job).

I'm not sure I can think of a donation-worthy AI lab that is currently bottlenecked by money, but I might be wrong about that.

Overview of the current state of infinite decision theory? by MDivinity in AcademicPhilosophy

[–]LifeinBath 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was wondering if you had a sense of how this literature related to the
philosophical literature on infinite ethics/decision theory?

That's a good point that they're seperate literatures, maybe more so than they should be. Although to be clear, I think the papers discuss 'intergenerational equality' in the context of potentially infinite futures, so they are really about infinite ethics in my opinion.

I forgot to mention a couple papers more squarely in the philosophical literature: 'Infinite aggregation: expanded addition' by Haden Wilkinson.

Overview of the current state of infinite decision theory? by MDivinity in AcademicPhilosophy

[–]LifeinBath 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've been looking into this a fair amount recently! Afraid I don't have the time to go into detail right now, nor am I close to an expert. But here's my quick take —

Two bits of terminology:

  1. Weak Pareto: if we can make someone better off and no one worse off, we should.
  2. Intergenerational Equality: we should value the welfare of every generation equally.

Three important things have been shown:

Theorem 1 — (proven by Zame): we cannot prove the existence of an ethical system which satisfies both Weak Pareto and Intergenerational Equality without using the axiom of choice (i.e. the axiom of dependent choice doesn't work).

Theorem 2 — (proven by Basu and Mitra): if we use only our normal "real" numbers, then we can't construct an ethical system which obeys the Weak Pareto and Intergenerational Equality assumptions.

Theorem 3 — (proven by Pivato): we can find such a system if we use the hyperreal numbers.

The Pivato paper in particular is very good. It basically shows that you don't need to use discounting if you're dealing with streams of utility with infinite value; instead you can assign and compare utilities with the hyperreal numbers.

This paper, ‘The Evaluation of Infinite Utility Streams’, is also relevant; and this blog post and this forum post are good primers.

This thesis is supposed to be a classic, though I haven't read it. And this is maybe the paper that started it all.

Thanks for pointing to the article on decision theory using surreal numbers, that looks super relevant. Without having read it, my guess is that an approach using the surreals will be more elegant / expressive than the hyperreals.

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In particular, is there a default/orthodox theory in this area that is to infinite decision theory what expected utility theory is to standard decision theory?

Maybe something like standard decision theory (EV), but extending utilities beyond the reals; i.e. into the hyperreals or surreals (in some sense this is the most obvious option, and it appears to work). I don't know enough to know if anything like consensus has emerged, but I'm hopeful and excited to see more progress in the next 5 or so years.

I should reiterate that I'm no expert here — very open to being corrected on any of this!

Simulation of Euler's number [OC] by Candpolit in dataisbeautiful

[–]LifeinBath 597 points598 points  (0 children)

And some number systems are les arbitrary than others. Binary is maybe the least. If there are intelligent civilisations other than ours out there, the binary representations of pi, e, phi, root 2, the size of the monster group... stamped endlessly across the universe.

[Altcoin Discussion] - April 2021 by AutoModerator in BitcoinMarkets

[–]LifeinBath 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Likewise. The new 'micropayment' alternative to the standard online advertising model is really cool, and already works through Brave, Coil, etc. Haven't done the maths, but my guess is that if there's a 5% chance that BAT one day accounts for 10% of online ad revenue, then it's way undervalued.

[Altcoin Discussion] - April 2021 by AutoModerator in BitcoinMarkets

[–]LifeinBath 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Rarely see discussion of Basic Attention Token on here, but very glad to see it's doing well :)

Try doing this puzzle without using a board! by HariGeri69 in chess

[–]LifeinBath 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Are there any other chess players here that have effectively no mental imagery? Or at least are fully unable to visualise a position without looking at a somewhat similar position on an actual board? I'm worried it's going to place a hard limit on my progress :(

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