Writings on philosophy, investing, and altruism from a person with some thoughts on philosophy, investing, and altruism
I wrote a report giving a high-level review of what work people are doing in AI safety. The report specifically focused on two areas: AI policy/advocacy and non-human welfare (including animals and digital minds).
You can read the report below. I was commissioned to write it by Rethink Priorities, but beliefs are my own.
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The problem with most “lazy cooking” advice is that it’s not lazy enough. Today I bring you some truly lazy ways of eating healthy.
This is the advice that I would’ve liked to hear when I was a lazy teenager. I’m still lazy, but I’m better at making food now. (I’m not going to say I’m better at cooking, because the way I make most food could only very generously be described as “cooking”.)
All my lazy meals are vegan because I’m vegan, but if anything, that works to my advantage because the easiest animal foods still take more work than the easiest plant foods. (You can eat raw vegetables but you can’t eat raw chicken.1)
Or, more accurately, the fact that he said the Avengers only won once can’t be taken as evidence about what he really saw.
This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
Continue readingOn most questions about the future, I don’t hold a strong view. I read the aggregate prediction of forecasters on Metaculus or Manifold Markets and then I pretty much believe whatever it says.
Various attempts have been made to forecast existential risk. I would like to be able to form views based on those forecasts—especially on non-AI x-risks, because I barely know anything about synthetic biology or nuclear winter or catastrophic climate change. Unfortunately, none of the aggregate forecasts look reliable.
Continue readingIt’s common for monthly subscription services to offer a discount if you pay annually instead. That might be a bad deal.
Example: Suppose a one-month subscription costs $10/month and one-year subscription gives you a 10% discount, which averages out to $9/month. Say you expect to maintain a subscription for about three years before canceling.
A one-year subscription will save you about $36 ($1 per month for 36 months), but you can also expect to waste $54: when you decide to stop using it, you will still have (on average) six months of subscription left ($54 = $9/month for 6 months). So you end up spending $18 more than you would have with the monthly plan.
If you get a one-year subscription that you expect to last three years, then you will end up wasting 1/6 of the total amount you paid for (in expectation). That’s only worth it if the annual subscription offers a discount greater than 1/6.
If you expect to use the service for five years, you need to get at least a 10% discount to justify switching to an annual subscription.
In general, you need to use the subscription for at least N years to justify a discount of 1/(2N).
How do you guess how long you’ll keep using the service? According to the Lindy effect, you should expect that you will maintain a subscription for as long again as you’ve already had it for. Therefore, if you can get a 10% discount with an annual plan and you’ve already had the subscription for more than five years, you should go ahead and buy the annual plan.
Among people who have thought about LLM consciousness, a common belief is something like
LLMs might be conscious soon, but they aren’t yet.
How sure are we that they aren’t conscious already?
I made a quick list of arguments for/against LLM consciousness, and it seems to me that high confidence in non-consciousness is not justified. I don’t feel comfortable assigning less than a 10% chance to LLM consciousness, and I believe a 1% chance is unreasonably confident. But I am interested in hearing arguments I may have missed.
For context, I lean toward the computational theory of consciousness, but I also think it’s reasonable to have high uncertainty about which theory of consciousness is correct.
Continue readingConfidence: Likely.
I am here to clear fruit’s name against the accusations that have been made. Fruit is one of the healthiest types of foods—perhaps the healthiest food group—and we should bestow upon it the shining reputation it deserves.
Continue readingOn many occasions, I edit old posts to make additions, correct mistakes, etc. But there’s no way to know about updates unless you go digging through the archives. So I’m going to start publishing regular (perhaps quarterly) digests of the significant updates I’ve made to old posts.
Continue readingConfidence: Almost certain.
I kept telling myself I wouldn’t write this post because it doesn’t matter. But I’ve seen one too many smart people speaking favorably about ergodicity economics. I believe the concept of ergodicity has essentially nothing going for it, and in this post I will explain why.
Ergodicity economics is one of those rare theories that somehow manages to be both unfalsifiable and false.
I originally wrote that sentence as a joke, then I deleted it, then I re-wrote it because I realized it’s actually true. Ergodicity economics is sufficiently vague in general that it can’t be falsified, but it is commonly interpreted as making specific falsifiable claims that are, in fact, false.
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Edited 2025-05-26 to correct an inaccuracy—originally I said butter goes in the Dairy group but actually it goes in the Fats, Oils & Sweets group.
The original 1992 version of the USDA Food Pyramid was bad. So bad that people who scrupulously followed the guidelines were barely healthier than the people who ignored them.1
But the Food Pyramid was not just wrong: it was marvelously wrong. It was wrong in many ways simultaneously. It achieved levels of wrongness hitherto undreamed of.
What was wrong about it? I will start with the obvious answers, and move into the philosophical.
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