conformist

If you ask people “what is a smart sounding answer to this question” you may well arrive at this result more often than when asking for their actual opinion?

It isn’t really controversial, of course, but it’s interestingly subtly sycophantic and self-promoting? You can see why RLHF might lead to such answers.

How about the scenario where they are already better if you give them more time/tokens/…? Would it be a more relatable concern in that case?

Yes, I guess it matters a lot whether this was quite close to the best they could do or the best they could do given specific resource constraints or whether they just didn’t bother to try doing better (eg to invest more tokens into readable papers)?

In this hypothetical case funding agencies would probably happily pay for “alien maths translation grants” and you could write papers about advances in that field and get jobs etc. So arguably for better or worse it would create a specialised academic cottage industry that somehow interfaces with the rest of maths.

Yes sure but they are different surnames and pronounced differently.

Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations. However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution tends to get. Some of the most impactful things I’ve donated to (imo) have a chance of moving some large scale donations (think Gates) into a marginally more impactful direction.

Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically. If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)

Isn’t the point more “it’s easy to fall into the trap to believe that predicting when the sigmoid is going to bend is possible and the right heuristic is to instead extrapolate locally”?

That aside, I’d question whether applying the Lindy effect in particular to something that’s not really a life expectancy but more a growth rate is credible… or perhaps a bit circular since it “assumes away” the ceiling.

Yes it does sound like his approach is quite smart and altruistic, but it’s a shame that that aspect just isn’t covered in more detail.

It is great that he’s doing this and it’s making the world a better place.

It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has. We should ultimately judge people by that, not abstractly by “charity == good”? If a billionaire donates millions to the Against Malaria Foundation I would judge that differently than a donation to an art museum in a developed country - and I think people should, and it matters morally.

The difference between for profit and non-profit isn’t really important either compared to “what concretely did they spend money on and what does that plausibly achieve”.

(Tbc some cause areas he donates to are explained, and they seem reasonable and close to his life, but unfortunately not in any depth).

I think what would be great is to have eg a concise example where it works well for you and a concise example where it doesn’t. This shows you have explored it and thought about it enough to explain interesting observations. It’s good to then be ready to go deeper if of interest.

By this logic a lot of applied maths papers become “does not compile” :D

Yes in theory, but not yet in practice because not everything is fully formalised.