MperorM

He is the leader of the Copenhagen Consensus Center https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/

Which does research into the most cost-effective ways to fight global poverty. Absolutely marvellous work.

Why not? They have many things in common. For example make they both make you sick, often with similar symptoms.

If you're arguing that you shouldn't dismiss the danger of covid because of its flu like nature, then be my guest but asking not to make comparisons between things doesn't strike me as a very smart thing to do.

Covid can be dangerous and similar to the flu at the same time.

I completely agree, I merely meant to point out that making decisions based on the absolute pollution of something will lead you horribly astray.

That said a carbon tax certainly does limit shipping, as some of it will no longer be profitable. Fortunately when doing it with a carbon tax, it just so happens to be the shipping that we shouldn't have been doing in the first place!

no, it is absolutely the marginal numbers that matter. All else equal, starting anywhere but the place with the most pollution per $ produced is a sub-optimal place to start.

In a world that has climate change under control, there's for sure going to be a reduction in pollution produced by global shipping, but in the world we live in there's much better places to start than by limiting global shipping.

We should be concerned about both.

That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering.

Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand?

It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration.

Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering.

I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.

coordination problem. Europe provides no competitive advantage to any first mover.

If you remove the bay from the equation, the US starts looking much more like the rest of the world. I now live in Copenhagen Denmark but still maintain a decent network in the bay. The difference of culture is astounding.

More than anything else the bay created a culture of innovation and excellence that cannot be found anywhere in Europe. That it happened to be the bay area that became this hub and not eg. Copenhagen, while not a coincidence, is still somewhat arbitrary.

If the great minds of the bay collectively moved to Europe, I feel very certain they would be just as innovative in Copenhagen as they were in silicon valley. EU's most innovative and bright minds move elsewhere to be part of a culture where they feel at home. Until they decide to stay and help cultivate such a culture in Europe, there will be little innovation.

Trade agreements don't need to be symmetric to be beneficial for both parties. Even if China didn't buy a single American good, it is beneficial for US to sell to china.

Export is what you pay for import. If China sells goods to US they will get dollars in return. These dollars are worthless except for buying American goods.

Even if China can't buy American goods, they can buy some other country's goods using their newly acquired dollars. Eventually someone somewhere will use those dollars to buy American goods.

Spreadsheets and finance has tremendous value!

Or do like apple and charge both!

That was exactly my experience.

Sold off every keyboard except one with sentimental value. Typing this from a macbook keyboard.

If India requires twitter murder a child every time someone tweets, I sure hope they don't just say: "Well, I guess that's just their way of life" and continue operating.

Obviously India is requiring no such thing, but what about when China wants google to build them a censored search engine?

we torture and kill so many more animals to eat meat and dairy, than we do to conduct science.

While I share your view, I think it's important to point out that this really isn't the best place to start if you want to reduce animal suffering.

Am I the only one who barely understands anything from that show?

Every episode I hear a dozen barely explained confusing terms with quantum this and higgs-field that.

I feel like they care more about impressing me with how complicated this stuff is than they do about actually teaching me much. Maybe I'm just not the target audience :(

I'm Danish and live in Denmark.

Please keep your next bigoted comment to yourself, they don't belong on this forum.

This is the same argument often made against prediction markets. I remain unconvinced this is a significant issue, but I'm always open to changing my mind :)

Yeah that's right.

I am somewhat torn on where to stand on this. On one hand I do see why we would want regulation against insider trading & pump and dumps, on the other hand I worry that regulation isn't preventing either, and society quickly would become inoculated if we legalized it.

When I read Robin Hanson's paper on insider trading and prediction markets, I became much more uncertain about whether we should regulate this area than I used to be.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228340813_Insider_T...

How is that perverted? Shorting a stock is fundamentally no different than other types of debt.

Imagine an economy of 3 people, A, B and C.

A has $5.

B borrows $5 from A.

C borrows $5 from B.

A borrows $5 form C.

The economy started with $5 and $0 debt, the economy ends with $5 and $15 debt. Despite the fact that the society's total debt is now 300% the size of its economy, it is no different than how it started. Debt isn't inherently bad. Debt is a tool that allows us to collaborate.

why is shorting a company perverted? I would argue it's a great asset to society.

Eg. those who shorted stock because they expected covid-19 to cause a market dip, sent a giant signal to the entire world that covid was going to be a big problem.

No, the opposite. Google aren't allowed to tell you how you can socialize with your colleagues outside of work

What other things were terrible about the biography? It's my favorite biography of all time. I'd love to know better what important parts were left out.

The best steelman I can come up with is that it's very difficult to give away that many billions effectively.

Give one billion to every charity on givewell's list, and now those have more money than can effectively spend in the foreseeable future. Yet you wil have spent nowhere close to your entire fortune.

While I don't understand why billionaires haven't done so yet, I can understand why it may make sense to be patient and search for great charitable opportunities.

I don't understand why this exact pattern of argument happens so much in online debate, but I really despise it.

Acrobatic_Road makes a reasonable point that they don't feel they were given the proper means to express their policy preferences, and reasonably calls it 'undemocratic'.

After all the reason we want democracy in the first place is so that ordinary citizens can influence the policy.

Chillwaves reasonably points out that America is a representative democracy and so you vote for candidates whom you trust to vote in accordance to your policy preferences.

That's two great points! We should be able to have an interesting discussion right? For example we could discuss ways in which the US system of representative democracy is failing Acrobatic_Road. We could also discuss why we might like it despite its failings.

But for some reason, online debate seemingly always end up in an inane discussion debating definitions with one side claiming X is not truly Y while the other side claims X lives up to standard definition of Y.

Nobody is any smarter. We entirely failed to learn anything from each others perspective.

We can be better than this :(

I find it pretty amusing that your last post was advocating for why we should hire you :D

To her defense, she was working on ethics in AI. What ethics to adopt inherently comes down to ideology.

While I don't really understand the emissions argument, the rest strikes me as very defensible. If the best language models need giant datasets to excel, it is very difficult to ensure your AI is trained on reasonable data.

I wouldn't want an AI therapist to be trained on 4chan. Now obviously nobody would be that stupid, but unfortunately it seems we are not far from it.

Unless we build models that rely on less data, it will be difficult to prevent problematic biases in the AI we put into production.

If that is the argument Timnit makes, I think that's the exact type of work I would expect from an AI ethics department. And good work at that.

I think this is a great comment, that would do a lot of people a lot of good to read.

That said, how should a person like Yann LeCun argue his case? Namely that biased models are the result of bad datasets more so than the result of bad algorithms.

I don't think Yann would disagree that biased datasets is a large systemic issue. How should a person like Yann make his point?

It doesn't seem to me that Yann and Timnit disagree all that much. They both agree biased datasets is a problem. They both agree it's a systemic problem. They both agree it does tremendous harm when these biased models are deployed.

I'm very confused as to why there even could be debate between these two people. I cannot find any meaningful difference in their views.

I wouldn't frame it as 'giving up' when you stop playing, rather you achieved what you set out to do.

I think there's something to be argued that reaching a high level in any competitive game or sport has merit.

I've learned more valuable lessons from competing in Starcraft than I can count. Without knowing the exact opportunity cost, I think trading my highschool grades for the competitive experience was worth it.

The biggest mistake I think I made was not cutting games out completely after having learned those lessons.

Growing up my mother let us feed our dog whatever leftovers we had after our dinner, which would sometimes be half a steak that one of my siblings didn't finish or a bowl of liver-paté growing stale in the fridge. She'd make up the difference with generic dog food.

Our dog had a clear preference for our food, and it felt deeply wrong when we would feed it only dog food. It was a part of our family why should it not eat like we did?

If I ever adopt a dog for my family, it will be fed the same way.

The author, Ida Augen is without a doubt one of Denmark's most respectable and intelligent politicians.

The article sohuld not be read as an endorsement of that future. It's her prediction of what the world is going to look like, for better or for worse.