Milan Weibel 🔹

Copresident @ AIS UC Chile
138 karmaJoined Pursuing an undergraduate degreeSantiago, RegiĂłn Metropolitana, Chile
weibac.github.io

Bio

Participation
4

CS, AIS, PoliSci @ UC Chile.

Comments
25

Weird off-the-cuff question but maybe intentionally inducing something like experimenter demand effects would be a worthwhile intervention? After figuring out a way of not making recipients feel cheated or patronized, of course.

Probably not, or to a much lesser extent.

I would expect those to be the same person if AI turns out to not be a huge deal, which for me is about 25% of futures.

While I agree that strong founder effects are likely to apply if SpaceX and/or NASA succeed in establishing a Mars colony, I expect that colony to be Earth-dependent for decades, and to be quite vulnerable to being superseded by other actors.

To put my model in more concrete terms: I expect whoever controls cislunar space in 2050 to have more potential for causal influence over the state of Mars in 2100 than whoever has put more people on Mars by 2040.

I think it would be a major win for animal welfare if the plant-based foods industry could transition soy-based products to low-isoflavone and execute a successful marketing campaign to quell concerns about phytoestrogens (without denigrating higher-isoflavone soy products).

I think it would be really hard (maybe even practically impossible) to market isoflavone-reduced products without hurting demand for non-isoflavone-reduced products as a side effect. 

If the plant-based food industry started producing and marketing isoflavone-reduced soy products, I am quite confident that it would counterfactually lower total demand for soy products in the short term, and I am very uncertain about the sign of impact over the long term.

Hi Juliana! Thank you for your response, it indeed answers my question quite clearly.

I love how thorough this post is. However, I'm not sure why you chose to research the production of vitamin D in an ASRS over other nutrients Pham et al. 2022 found would be deficient given adequate ASRS responses, such as vitamins E and K. ÂżAre the effects of vitamin D deficiency worse, or maybe it is more feasible to produce than vitamins E and K?

However, endorsing this view likely requires fairly speculative claims about how existing risks will nearly disappear after the time of perils has ended.

A note on this: the first people to study the notion of existential risk in an academic setting (Bostrom, Ord, Sandberg, etc.) explicitly state in their work many of those assumptions.

They chiefly revolve around the eventual creation of advanced AI which would enable the automation of both surveillance and manufacturing; the industrialization of outer space, and eventually the interstellar expansion of Earth-originated civilization.

In other words: they assume that both

  1. The creation of safe AGI is feasible.
  2. Extremely robust existential security will follow, conditional on (1.).

Proposed mechanisms for (2.) include interstellar expansion and automated surveillance. 

Thus, the main crux on the value of working on longtermist interventions is the validity of assumptions (1.) and (2.). In my opinion, finding out how likely they are to be true or not is very important and quite neglected. I think that scrutinizing (2.). is both more neglected and more tractable than examining (1.), and I would love to see more work on it.

  • I think it is very likely that the top American AI labs are receiving substantial help from the NSA et al in implementing their "administrative, technical, and physical cybersecurity protections". No need to introduce Crowdstrike as a vulnerability.
  • The labs get fined if they don't implement such protections, not if they get compromised.
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