Thanks for the comment! The reasoning looks good, and was thought-provoking.

If I instead go for the best of both worlds, it seems intuitively more likely that I end up with something which is mediocre on both axes - which is a bit better than mediocre on one and irrelevant on the other

I think I disagree with you here. I model being bad at choosing good interventions as randomly sampling from the top n% (e.g. 30%) from the distribution when I'm trying to choose the best thing along the axis of e.g. non-x-risk impact. If this is a good way of thinking about it, then I don't think that things change a lot—because of the concavity of the frontier, things I choose from that set are still going to be quite good from a non-x-risk perspective, and pretty middling from the x-risk perspective.

I am very unsure about this, but I think it might look like in this image:

When you choose from the top 30% on popularity, you get options from the purple box at random, and same for options in the green box for effectiveness.

If you want to push axes, I guess you're going to aim for selecting from the intersection of both boxes, but I'm suspicious you actually can do that, or whether you end up selecting from the union of the boxes instead${}_{60\%}$. Because if you can select from the intersection, you get options that are pretty good along both axes, pretty much by definition.

I could use my code to quantify how good this would be, though a concrete use case might be more illuminating.

Huh, the convergent lines of thought are pretty cool!

Your suggested solution is indeed what I'm also gesturing towards. A "barbell strategy" works best if we only have few dimensions we don't want to make comparable, I think.

(AFAIU It grows only linearly, but we still want to perform some sampling of the top options to avoid the winners curse?)

I think this link is informative: Charitable interventions appear to be (weakly) lognormally distributed in cost-effectiveness. In general, my intuition is that "charities are lognormal, markets are normal", but I don't have a lot of evidence for the second part of the sentence.

My current understanding is that he believes extinction or similar from AI is possible, at 5% probability, but that this is low enough that concerns about stable totalitarianism are slightly more important. Furthermore, he believes that AI alignment is a technical but solvable problem. More here.

I am far more pessimistic than him about extinction from misaligned AI systems, but I think it's quite sensible to try to make money from AI even in worlds from high probability of extinction, since the market signal provided counterfactually moves the market far less than the realizable benefit from being richer in such a crucial time.

Thanks for tagging me! I'll read the post and your comment with care.

Not central to EA, but there's Gwerns open questions.

I'd be curious about a list of topics they would like others to investigate/continue investigating, or a list of the most important open questions.

Due to the sudden work of unsung heroes, he was cryopreserved despite not having been signed up at the time of his deänimation.

See also Breeding happier animals: no futuristic tech required (Carl Shulman, 2012)

I wonder whether the lives of those moths were net negative. If the population was rising, then the number of moths dying as larvae might've been fairly small. I assume that OPs apartment doesn't have many predatory insects or animals that eat insects, so the risk of predation was fairly small. That leaves five causes of death: old age, hunger, thirst, disease and crushing.

Death by old age for moths is probably not that bad? They don't have a very long life, so their duration of death also doesn't seem very long to me, and couldn't offset the quality of their life.

Hunger and thirst are likely worse, but I don't know by how much, do starved moths die from heart problems? (Do moths have hearts?)

Disease in house moth colonies is probably fairly rare.

Crushing can be very fast or lead to long painful death. Seems the worst of those options.

I think those moths probably had a better life than outside, just given the number of predatory insects; but I don't think that this was enough to make their lives net-positive. But it's been a while since I've read into insect welfare, so if most young insects die by predation, I'd increase my credence in those moths having had net-positive lives.

More:

• Speculations on Invertebrate Population Dynamics Relevant to Reducing Suffering (Brian Tomasik, 2019), sections Should we err on the side of not squishing healthy insects due to r-selection? and Should we (humanely) squish non-predator insects?
• Killing Animals and Turnover (Brian Tomasik, 2014)