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 133
Comments2307
Topic contributions19
I tried to find errors in this article and wasn't able. Though I didn't try that hard.
I am not sure I want to tweet it, since it seems very adversarially selected. But of similar magnitude is the issue that people quote torres as if they are a reasonable source when they aren't.
I wish someone would write a more balanced article. I don't think torres was being racist to boghossian's kid, for instance. I think they were harassing boghossian though, and making light of jokes about the kid. And that's bad enough.
I find it hard to know what one should do over the long term about a badly behaved actor criticized by other badly behaved actors.
@Lizka, the post doesn't say that Torres made racist comments about Boghossian's daughter it says they made light of making comments about Boghossian's daughter.
I really like the spectrum videos. I often think of how to get that kind of awareness of how we agree and disagree in an online setting. My tool viewpoints is one kind of push at this. viewpoints.xyz.
But there is something really fun about just seeing people share their views on specific points then move on.
I sense if we did it a lot we'd be a healthier community.
Solid piece. I like lists of things and I appreciate you taking the time to write one.
I sometimes wonder how to combine many qualitative impressions like this into a more robust picture. Some thoughts:
- Someone could survey groups on attrition rates
- Someone could ask how many people group leaders recalled who were in each group type
Currently 27-ish[1] people have responded:
Full results: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-sense-check/results
Statements people agree with:
Statements where there is significant conflict:
Statements where people aren't sure or dislike the statement:
- ^
The applet makes it harder to track numbers than the full site.
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.