NunoSempere
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>
Posts 114
Comments1238
Topic contributions14
My team has published estimates for precursors of xrisk and has weekly updates that usually contain forecasts. Could be of interest, not sure if that's the kind of thing you are asking about.
Phil Trammell has some good work on this topic, here and here.
Therefore, a patient philanthropist can typically do more good (from her perspective) by investing for the sake of future spending than by spending immediately. She should only begin spending under two circumstances. First, she should spend once she, and any other patient funders in an area she wishes to support, have grown wealthy enough relative to the area’s impatient funders that even the impatient are spending at less than the patient-optimal rate for the collective (patient plus impatient) budget. Second, she should spend if she finds a fleeting opportunity to achieve sufficiently outsized long-term impact: if the vegetable shop, as it were, is having a steep enough sale.
But altruistic actors currently disagree about whether there is such a fleeting opportunity right now, and thus whether the investment rate should be more like an inflation adjusted 2%[1] or like a 20%.
One could make a case for 0.2% as well if one thought that risk of expropriation &c was very low, but geopolitical & monetary instability is high enough that I don't think that is the case. ↩︎
It's a great question. I looked into it a few weeks ago:
In the current political praxis of the United States, there are various workarounds that the government can pursue in order to take illegal or unconstitutional actions. Examples of such actions that previous administrations have taken include keeping prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in order to delay habeas corpus petitions, conditioning highway funding to force state compliance, and torturing the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to regulate local matters. The point is that the US has some constitutional guarantees, but the mechanisms to protect the citizens from the government are imperfect and typically involve slow remedies. And requiring federal employees to defer to the President’s interpretation of the law—presumably when they believe that the administration is doing something illegal—weakens those checks and balances.
via Sentinel minutes.
I see that you are getting some downvotes, and while I disagree with this comment in particular I'm glad that you are there in the arena strongly pushing your vision of the good :)