I run Sentinel, a team that seeks to anticipate and respond to large-scale risks. You can read our weekly minutes here. I like to spend my time acquiring deeper models of the world, and generally becoming more formidable. I'm also a fairly good forecaster: I started out on predicting on Good Judgment Open and CSET-Foretell, but now do most of my forecasting through Samotsvety, of which Scott Alexander writes:
Enter Samotsvety Forecasts. This is a team of some of the best superforecasters in the world. They won the CSET-Foretell forecasting competition by an absolutely obscene margin, “around twice as good as the next-best team in terms of the relative Brier score”. If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”.
I used to post prolifically on the EA Forum, but nowadays, I post my research and thoughts at nunosempere.com / nunosempere.com/blog rather than on this forum, because:
But a good fraction of my past research is still available here on the EA Forum. I'm particularly fond of my series on Estimating Value.
My career has been as follows:
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Noted on your other points. I think this one is the most substantive:
- Several of your proposed counterexamples to the premises, if I understand them correctly, are claims that we can still compare two options with imprecise "EV" in principle. Which I don't deny.
- Your "q<p and Q<P" example is a case where we can compare imprecise "EVs".
- Same with "I can have beliefs about me being able to lift less than a really buff guy even if I am uncertain about how much each of us could lift". This is not a counterexample to P3 — it's a case where the quantity in question is not so coarse-grained that the consequent of P2 ("A’s and B’s 'EVs' are incomparable") applies.
I don't think that you are answering my point, which is that I don't use "EVs" at all, rather I am able to compare different options regardless of how coarse "EVs" are by making reference to other points. See this comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7yrwPySYdzmzKepre/comments-on-the-summary-of-the-unawareness-argument?commentId=gaNyg2mDaNjcNxrwh so as to not repeat myself
the argument is very nuanced, and it's important to look at the full sequence to understand how the epistemology I'm arguing for works
I don't buy this, from my perspective you are tangling yourself in knots as a result of imprecise language, and this is a symptom.
The difference is:
I saw you linked to a previous comment of mine. My personal strategy in life these last few years has been:
This has had tradeoffs. Ultimately my impact might have been higher in the US if this had resulted in me raising more funding/coordinating more with donors, but I didn't really feel particularly welcome (as opposed to evaluated) when I visited.
I'm frustrated that this answer got downvoted to zero.
We do not have to compare imprecise "EVs" and hence coarseness doesn't come into it. We are directly assessing the preferability of one over the other. In the two images below the "EV" of each option is completely undefined (or +-infinite)