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
Comments2506
Topic contributions20
Bird flu is probably fine right now. Let's not cry wolf.
I've been looking into H5N1 bird flu and built this dashboard (https://birdflurisk.com)
To me the indicators suggest it's likely gonna be fine. You can see the forecasts are pretty low and even if these resolve positive it probably won't be a big deal to humans (see note in a sec)
I think it's worth becoming well calibrated on risk ie only crying wolf when there is a wolf and right now I see no wolf, so as a community we improve our calibration by saying "bird flu will almost certainly be fine"
That said, it probably will involve farms full of chickens being tortured to death if they catch the disease. This is tragic. I suggest it requires a different comms strategy though.
Also there may be inflation with the political ramifications of that.
Let me know what would make the dashboard more useful to you.
I like this, and have been trying a similar visual approach using squiggle. I agree that LLM estimation using squiggle seems tractable and that it could help turn many text outputs into quantifiable/comparable numerical outputs.
I am interested in creating a space to compare/rank these outputs. @Ozzie Gooen do you see squiggle hub as the space for this?
I have made many markets about important people, whether they will do crimes, whether things were crimes, whether there will be conflict, whether things will replicate or are accurate.
In at least 3 cases from people telling me it was extremely costly to this person or that person emotively or with blaming.
Ok so where to donate? I don't have a good systematic take in either the animal space or the AI space unfortunately, but here's a shot:
I think I am happy to take this as the point I am trying to make. I don't see a robust systematic take on where to donate in animals and AI.
Isn't it reasonable to expect the EA community to synthesise one of these, rather than each of us having to do our own?
Holding powerful people accountable.
Reposted from a twitter thread.
I have made a number of prediction markets holding powerful people accountable[1]. Powerful people (and their friends) really can exert a lot of pressure with an angry email or dm (n = 2-5). If you are powerful, please consider how big your muscles are before you give pushback
I have quite thick skin, but I don't know whether such people are going around dming everyone like this. Likewise, this is a flaw I sometimes have and I have learned to be very light tough on pushback to non-friends.
Strangely, the kinds of people (or their friends) who message me are often close enough to pay lip service to "good epistemic practices".
It really isn't very fun to hold powerful people accountable. I get little thanks for it and burn valuable relationship capital. If you are powerful you probably have to be a bit more careful than you think. Perhaps make this clear to your allies also.
I can't deny I take some pleasure from it, it feels good to be a martyr, but I think it performs a good social function also. But many who criticise would, I think, say they are open to criticism or accountability. Seemingly however, only on their own terms.
Again. I likely have this flaw too. I've had at least one anon feedback that I pushed back too hard against criticism. It's easy to do, and I do not want to behave like that.
- ^
I do not necessarily not endorse having created all these markets. In general I think the markets I create are good, but some I am unsure of.
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.