NunoSempere

Director, Head of Foresight @ Sentinel
13030 karmaJoined
nunosempere.com/blog

Bio

I run Sentinel, a team that seeks to anticipate and respond to large-scale risks. You can read our weekly minutes here. I like to spend my time acquiring deeper models of the world, and generally becoming more formidable.  I'm also a fairly good forecaster: I started out on predicting on Good Judgment Open and CSET-Foretell, but now do most of my forecasting through Samotsvety, of which Scott Alexander writes:

Enter Samotsvety Forecasts. This is a team of some of the best superforecasters in the world. They won the CSET-Foretell forecasting competition by an absolutely obscene margin, “around twice as good as the next-best team in terms of the relative Brier score”. If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”.


I used to post prolifically on the EA Forum, but nowadays, I post my research and thoughts at nunosempere.com / nunosempere.com/blog rather than on this forum, because:

  • I disagree with the EA Forum's moderation policy—they've banned a few disagreeable people whom I like, and I think they're generally a bit too censorious for my liking.
  • The Forum website has become more annoying to me over time: more cluttered and more pushy in terms of curated and pinned posts (I've partially mitigated this by writing my own minimalistic frontend)
  • The above two issues have made me take notice that the EA Forum is beyond my control, and it feels like a dumb move to host my research in a platform that has goals different from my own. 

But a good fraction of my past research is still available here on the EA Forum. I'm particularly fond of my series on Estimating Value.


My career has been as follows:

  • Before Sentinel, I set up my own niche consultancy, Shapley Maximizers. This was very profitable, and I used the profits to bootstrap Sentinel. I am winding this down, but if you have need of estimation services for big decisions, you can still reach out.
  • I used to do research around longtermism, forecasting and quantification, as well as some programming, at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI). At QURI, I programmed Metaforecast.org, a search tool which aggregates predictions from many different platforms—a more up to date alternative might be adj.news. I spent some time in the Bahamas as part of the FTX EA Fellowship, and did a bunch of work for the FTX Foundation, which then went to waste when it evaporated. 
  • I write a Forecasting Newsletter which gathered a few thousand subscribers; I previously abandoned but have recently restarted it. I used to really enjoy winning bets against people too confident in their beliefs, but I try to do this in structured prediction markets, because betting against normal people started to feel like taking candy from a baby.
  • Previously, I was a Future of Humanity Institute 2020 Summer Research Fellow, and then worked on a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to do "independent research on forecasting and optimal paths to improve the long-term."
  • Before that, I studied Maths and Philosophy, dropped out in exasperation at the inefficiency, picked up some development economics; helped implement the European Summer Program on Rationality during 2017, 2018 2019, 2020 and 2022; worked as a contractor for various forecasting and programming projects; volunteered for various Effective Altruism organizations, and carried out many independent research projects. In a past life, I also wrote a popular Spanish literature blog, and remain keenly interested in Spanish poetry.

You can share feedback anonymously with me here.

Note: You can sign up for all my posts here: <https://nunosempere.com/.newsletter/>, or subscribe to my posts' RSS here: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/index.rss>

Sequences
3

Vantage Points
Estimating value
Forecasting Newsletter

Comments
1220

Topic contributions
14

Seems true assuming that your preferred conversion between human and animal lives/suffering is correct, but one can question those ranges. In particular, it seems likely to me that how much you should value animals is not an objective fact of life but a factor that varies across people.

Reminds me of 2019, strongly upvoted and sent to a few people.

Some thoughts that come to mind:

  • Should we work with EA-aligned orgs to support them methodologically with their impact management and MEL, or with non-EA orgs to motivate them to shift towards a more EA-aligned approach regarding impact management? Either is fine, or rather, both are broken in their own ways :)
  • In practice, impact measurement and related concerns seem to become more salient when people are trying to fundraise. You might want to time your appeals with funding rounds. For instance, offer to help people think through their theory of impact as they are applying to an SFF round.
  • My intuition might be to seek to attach yourself to large orgs (Charity Entrepeneurship, Animal Charity Evaluators, Anima International, Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, etc.) that might have a larger appetite for the type of service you are offering.
  • How much do you charge?

The SFF has a section on what they would do with more money, which you could use to cooperate with them if you wanted to. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2024-further-opportunities

I've known Jaime for about ten years. Seems like he made an arguably wrong call when first dealing with real powaah, but overall I'm confident his heart is in the right place.

I am extremely sympathetic to vNM, but think it's not constructive. I think the world is too high-dimensional, and in some sense we are low compute agents in a high compute world. See here for a bit more background.

  • For example, there are lotteries L and M which are complex enough that a) I would express a strong preference if given enough time to parse it, b) the best option is not to actually choose between them but do something else.
  • For continuity, you can't necessarily know which p it is.
  • If you want to extract someone's utility function, this is an ~nlogn operation (using mergesort where each ordering step ellicits a numerical comparison). This line of research is interesting to me, but because of the expense it only works with enough buy in, which one may not have.

In practice, I think vNM works as an idealization of the values of a high or infinite compute agent, but because making it constructive is very expensive, sometimes the best action is not to go through with that but to fall back on heuristics or shortcuts, heuristics which you won't be sure of either (again, as low compute agents in a higher complexity world).

Did you get this sorted?

Load more