nunosempere.com/research/index.md

For forecasting related research, see [forecasting](/forecasting)

## Current projects

I'm currently doing [private consulting](https://nunosempere.com/consulting/), and writting up my desillusionment with EA:

- [Some melancholy about the value of my work depending on decisions by others beyond my control](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/07/13/melancholy/)
- [Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger?](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/07/19/better-harder-faster-stronger/)
- [Brief thoughts on CEA’s stewardship of the EA Forum](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/10/15/ea-forum-stewardship/)
- [Hurdles of using forecasting as a tool for making sense of AI progress](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/11/07/hurdles-forecasting-ai/)

## Past projects

_Estimation of values_

I spent a few years of my life grappling with EA (effective altruism) being nominally about doing the most good, but it not having good tools to identify and prioritize across possible interventions. Eventually I gave up when I got it through my thick head that despite my earlier hopes, there wasn't much demand for the real version of this—as opposed to the fake version of pretending to evaluate stuff, and pretending to be "impact oriented". Still, I think it's an interesting body of research.

- [Five steps for quantifying speculative interventions](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hH9NRqzGam65mgPG/five-steps-for-quantifying-speculative-interventions)
- [A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h2N9qEbvQ6RHABcae/a-critical-review-of-open-philanthropy-s-bet-on-criminal)
- [An experiment eliciting relative estimates for Open Philanthropy’s 2018 AI safety grants](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EPhDMkovGquHtFq3h/an-experiment-eliciting-relative-estimates-for-open)
- [A flaw in a simple version of worldview diversification](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/25/worldview-diversification/)
- [Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xmmqDdGqNZq5RELer/shallow-evaluations-of-longtermist-organizations)  
- [2018-2019 Long Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ps8ecFPBzSrkLC6ip/2018-2019-long-term-future-fund-grantees-how-did-they-do)  
- [Find a beta distribution that fits your desired confidence interval](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/03/15/fit-beta/)
- [Valuing research works by eliciting comparisons from EA researchers](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hrdxf5qdKmCZNWTvs/valuing-research-works-by-eliciting-comparisons-from-ea)
- [External Evaluation of the EA Wiki](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kTLR23dFRB5pJryvZ/external-evaluation-of-the-ea-wiki)  
- [Use a less coarse analysis of AMF beneficiary age and consider counterfactual deaths](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2022/09/28/granular-AMF/)
- [Simple comparison polling to create utility functions](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9hQFfmbEiAoodstDA/simple-comparison-polling-to-create-utility-functions)  
- [A Bayesian Adjustment to Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range Estimates](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/19/bayesian-adjustment-to-rethink-priorities-welfare-range-estimates/)
- [Relative Impact of the First 10 EA Forum Prize Winners](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pqphZhx2nJocGCpwc/relative-impact-of-the-first-10-ea-forum-prize-winners)  
- [An estimate of the value of Metaculus questions](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zyfeDfqRyWhamwTiL/an-estimate-of-the-value-of-metaculus-questions)   
- [Relative values for animal suffering and ACE Top Charities](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/05/29/relative-value-animals/)
- [Some estimation work in the horizon](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/03/20/estimation-in-the-horizon/)
- [Estimation for sanity checks](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/03/10/estimation-sanity-checks/)
- [Pathways to impact for forecasting and evaluation](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oXrTQpZyXkEbTBfB7/pathways-to-impact-for-forecasting-and-evaluation)  
- [Building Blocks of Utility Maximization](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8XWi8FBkCuKfgPLMZ/building-blocks-of-utility-maximization)  
- [Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2022/10/21/brief-evaluations-of-top-10-billionnaires/) 
- [Use of "I'd bet" on the EA Forum is mostly metaphorical](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/03/02/metaphorical-bets/)
- [Things you should buy, quantified](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/06/things-you-should-buy-quantified/)
- [People’s choices determine a partial ordering over people’s desirability](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/06/17/ordering-romance/)
- [Impact markets as a mechanism for not loosing your edge](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/07/impact-markets-sharpen-your-edge/)
- [Updating in the face of anthropic effects is possible](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/05/11/updating-under-anthropic-effects/)

_Red teaming_

If you are trying to be as effective as you can, wouldn't you like someone to point out where you might be going wrong? Not so!

- The [NegativeNuno](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/negativenuno) EA Forum account covers negative criticism that I'm uncertain about.
- A past piece on this topic is [Frank Feedback Given To Very Junior Researchers](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7utb4Fc9aPvM6SAEo/frank-feedback-given-to-very-junior-researchers)
- [A Bayesian Adjustment to Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range Estimates](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/19/bayesian-adjustment-to-rethink-priorities-welfare-range-estimates/)
- [A flaw in a simple version of worldview diversification](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/25/worldview-diversification/)
- [Review of Epoch’s Scaling transformative autoregressive models](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/28/expert-review-epoch-direct-approach/)

_Shapley values_:

If you care about doing good together, you should care about how to coordinate on who does which projects. Shapley values solve this, as does adjusting the counterfactual value to be more like Shapley values. I named my consultancy after this concept.

- [Shapley Values: Better Than Counterfactuals](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XHZJ9i7QBtAJZ6byW/shapley-values-better-than-counterfactuals) 
- [Shapley Values and Philanthropic Coordination Theory](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3NYDwGvDbhwenpDHb/shapley-values-reloaded-philantropic-coordination-theory-and) 
- [A Shapley Value Calculator](http://shapleyvalue.com/)  

_Economic models of social movement growth_:

You can make progress on gnarly economics questions by [throwing](https://github.com/NunoSempere/ReverseShooting/tree/master) compute at [it](https://github.com/NunoSempere/LaborCapitalAndTheOptimalGrowthOfSocialMovements/tree/master). Unfortunately, reality is complicated enough that these models won't capture all the assumptions you care about, and so might not be all that informative in real life.

- [A Model of Patient Spending and Movement Building](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FXPaccMDPaEZNyyre/a-model-of-patient-spending-and-movement-building)
- [Labor, Capital, and the Optimal Growth of Social Movements](https://nunosempere.github.io/ea/MovementBuildingForUtilityMaximizers.pdf)

_Categorization of new causes_:

Let's just create some obvious infrastructure to track suggestions that people make!

- [Big List of Cause Candidates](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SCqRu6shoa8ySvRAa/big-list-of-cause-candidates)
- [A Funnel for Cause Candidates](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iRA4Dd2bfX9nukSo3/a-funnel-for-cause-candidates)
- [International Supply Chain Accountability](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4zE34KBSYnt6hGp/new-top-ea-cause-international-supply-chain-accountability)  
- I am paying someone to update this list with causes proposed in 2021.

_Technological discontinuities_:

People are talking about "technological discontinuities". How often do they happen?

- [A prior for technological discontinuities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaCqw2x59ZFhMXJr9/a-prior-for-technological-discontinuities)
- [Discontinuous trends in technological progress](https://nunosempere.github.io/rat/Discontinuous-Progress.html)  

_AI-related_

Is this AI thing going to doom us all?

- [Hurdles of using forecasting as a tool for making sense of AI progress](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/11/07/hurdles-forecasting-ai/)
- [My highly personal skepticism braindump on existential risk from artificial intelligence](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/23/my-highly-personal-skepticism-braindump-on-existential-risk/)
- [A concern about the "evolutionary anchor" of Ajeya Cotra's report](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2022/08/10/evolutionary-anchor/)
- [There will always be a Voigt-Kampff test](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/21/there-will-always-be-a-voigt-kampff-test/)
- [A basic argument for AI risk](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2022/12/23/ai-risk-rohin-shah/)
- [Can GPT-3 produce new ideas? Partially automating Robin Hanson and others](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/11/can-gpt-produce-ideas/)
- [Review of Epoch's *Scaling transformative autoregressive models*](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/04/28/expert-review-epoch-direct-approach/)
- [Straightforwardly eliciting probabilities from GPT-3](https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/09/straightforwardly-eliciting-probabilities-from-gpt-3/)
- [Military Global Information Dominance Experiments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vDvKWdCCNo9moNcMr/us-military-global-information-dominance-experiments)  
- [AI race considerations in a report by the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87aqBTkhTgfzhu5po/ai-race-considerations-in-a-report-by-the-u-s-house)  

_The fate of social movements_:

- [Why do social movements fail: Two concrete examples](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7Pxx7kSQejX2MM2tE/why-do-social-movements-fail-two-concrete-examples)  
- [Why did the Spanish Enlightenment movement fail? (1750-1850)](https://nunosempere.github.io/rat/spanishenlightenment)
- [Why did the General Semantics Movement Fail?](https://nunosempere.github.io/rat/general-semantics)  

_Global health and development_, and as part of that, _survey-making_

- [A review of two books on survey-making](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DCcciuLxRveSkBng2/a-review-of-two-books-on-survey-making)  
- [A glowing review of two free online MIT Global Poverty courses](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S3vAPRp2XQ9BdDbPz/a-glowing-review-of-two-free-online-mit-global-poverty) 
- [EA Mental Health Survey: Results and Analysis.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FheKNFgPqEsN8Nxuv/ea-mental-health-survey-results-and-analysis) (and a more recent [update](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GWBsDeQTjFM8YXtrv/2021-ea-mental-health-survey-results?commentId=XQSiuNuiti9BLpmrR#comments=)

I also have some minor pieces which I still want to index:

- [A quantification of a miliNazi](https://nunosempere.github.io/misc/miliNazis)  
- [Reasons why upvotes on the EA forum and LW don't correlate that well with impact](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GseREh8MEEuLCZayf/nunosempere-s-shortform?commentId=kLuhtmQRZBJpcaHhH)  
- [Prizes in the EA Forum and LW](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GseREh8MEEuLCZayf/nunosempere-s-shortform?commentId=WPStS4qhJS7Mz6KCA)  
- [Thoughts on EA literature](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bc8J5P938BmzBuL9Y/when-can-writing-fiction-change-the-world?commentId=RnEpvpozD5tEEsM9b)