NunoSempere

Director, Head of Foresight @ Sentinel
13973 karmaJoined
nunosempere.com/blog

Bio

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:

  • I disagree with the EA Forum's moderation policy—they've banned a few disagreeable people whom I like, and I think they're generally a bit too censorious for my liking.
  • The Forum website has become more annoying to me over time: more cluttered and more pushy in terms of curated and pinned posts (I've partially mitigated this by writing my own minimalistic frontend)
  • The above two issues have made me take notice that the EA Forum is beyond my control, and it feels like a dumb move to host my research in a platform that has goals different from my own. 

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:

  • Before Sentinel, I set up my own niche consultancy, Shapley Maximizers. This was very profitable, and I used the profits to bootstrap Sentinel. I am winding this down, but if you have need of estimation services for big decisions, you can still reach out.
  • I used to do research around longtermism, forecasting and quantification, as well as some programming, at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI). At QURI, I programmed Metaforecast.org, a search tool which aggregates predictions from many different platforms—a more up to date alternative might be adj.news. I spent some time in the Bahamas as part of the FTX EA Fellowship, and did a bunch of work for the FTX Foundation, which then went to waste when it evaporated. 
  • I write a Forecasting Newsletter which gathered a few thousand subscribers; I previously abandoned but have recently restarted it. I used to really enjoy winning bets against people too confident in their beliefs, but I try to do this in structured prediction markets, because betting against normal people started to feel like taking candy from a baby.
  • Previously, I was a Future of Humanity Institute 2020 Summer Research Fellow, and then worked on a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to do "independent research on forecasting and optimal paths to improve the long-term."
  • Before that, I studied Maths and Philosophy, dropped out in exasperation at the inefficiency, picked up some development economics; helped implement the European Summer Program on Rationality during 2017, 2018 2019, 2020 and 2022; worked as a contractor for various forecasting and programming projects; volunteered for various Effective Altruism organizations, and carried out many independent research projects. In a past life, I also wrote a popular Spanish literature blog, and remain keenly interested in Spanish poetry.

You can share feedback anonymously with me here.

Note: You can sign up for all my posts here: <https://nunosempere.com/.newsletter/>, or subscribe to my posts' RSS here: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/index.rss>

Sequences
3

Vantage Points
Estimating value
Forecasting Newsletter

Comments
1294

Topic contributions
14

I'm frustrated that this answer got downvoted to zero.

  • Your "q<p and Q<P" example is a case where we can compare imprecise "EVs".

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)

 

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: 

  • Your argument seems to be pretty strong insofar as you point that many times we don't really know what the expected value of an action is.
  • It is defused if we can retain some notion of "a is better than b" without needing to defend that we can compute the expected values to any degree of granularity.
  • Stochastic dominance and similar concepts provide a way to do this in a way that may be apparent to many readers. We can be confident that a is stochastically dominant over b while being extremely uncertain about their respective expected values. The space of problems over which we are able to make decisions expands.

Thanks. I reworked the point and added a footnote to make clearer what I was pointing at.

When you model this out sometimes you find that you are better off dividing the purely profit maximization part of it and the donation part of it, i.e., Warren Buffett + donations to AMF beat Yunus

I saw you linked to a previous comment of mine. My personal strategy in life these last few years has been:

  • Move to Paraguay, which is extremely low cost of living, extremely low tax rate
  • Save 80-90% of my earnings while there
  • Use the slack to be able to do illegible bets (e.g., early on I incubated Sentinel with my consulting profits, though eventually I did raise funding)
  • Visit the US/Europe for a bit in the summer (also modellable as consumption).

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.

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