Quick Reminder That Your Ability to Do Good Is Ridiculous

April 17, 2021Posted inMinorTags:
Epistemic status: definitely old hat, certainly not my original thoughts, but you know it's worth reiterating every now and then. The Effective Altruism movement in general tends to have problems with feelings of powerlessness. People feel that even if they are on a high-impact track, they still won't be able to make a dent in the global scale of problems. Even worse, people feel that if they aren't a genius…

DIY Asymmetric Weapons With Symmetric Weapons And Bayescraft

April 9, 2021Posted inMajorTags:
Epistemic status: Follow-up to this post. Fairly well considered, few hours total epistemic effort. Substantially more confident than before that this is correct, but still feel very ick about it. An asymmetric weapon is any strategy that has a higher probability of winning p(Win) if it is aligned with one side its axis of asymmetry than with the other. In other words, p(Win | X) > p(Win | ~X). This…

The “Ratchets vs Springs” Heuristic

April 3, 2021Posted inMinorTags:
Epistemic status: this feels like it's been helpful for me to allocate my time better, but I have very scarce concrete support for that. Reasoning feels clean from the inside though. A lot of the problems I face day-to-day can be boiled down to figuring out how to spend some finite pool of resources to maximize some function. When deciding what course I want to take on this kind of…