On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

Or even setting abortion aside, you’d think longtermists might express concern about the decline in fertility in industrialized countries, a question that some rationalists like Hanson have explored but EAs—80 percent of whom are childless, according to Alexander’s survey[*23]—rarely do, perhaps because it codes as conservative. At other times, tho

of being sentenced to at least twenty years in prison. And yet he hesitated. “I’d have to think about exactly what that meant,” he said after a long pause.

You could tell that the Manifest conference was a rationalist rather than an EA event because of the presence of people who were either considered unwoke (like Hanson, who told me he’d basically been canceled from EA events since a 2018 blog post in which he wrote sympathetically about the idea of redistributing sex to incels),

worth literally trillions, which he claimed he could put toward EA-related causes. Who knows what the limits were; he’d even told Ellison there was a 5 percent chance he could become president of the United States. His utility function was “closer to linear,” he explained; the trillionth dollar really was almost as good as the first. Technically sp

roon is a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, or at least that’s how The Washington Post describes him.

He cited a forecast from a different play-money prediction market site called Metaculus. “What’s the chance of FTX defaulting on any customer deposit in 2022? It was like one point three percent,” MacAskill recalled.

But Sam Bankman-Fried, of course, thought the Kelly criterion had you wagering far too little. He thought it was for wimps.

who had a rapid run of success in poker tournaments between 2015 and 2018 before leaving to go into effective altruism–related jobs.

“The superforecasters see the doomsters as somewhat self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, messianic, saving-the-world types,”