Spencer Greenberg
Article
Spencer Greenberg is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between December 28, 2021 and March 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Spencer Greenberg, $40,000, as seed money for his project to produce rapid replications of high-impact social science papers”; “Spencer Greenberg is a former ACX Grants winner and generally great person. He is now running a mini-grants-program of his own”; “Thanks to everyone who applied last week to Spencer Greenberg’s grants round”. It most often appears alongside ACX, Lars Doucet, 1DaySooner.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: December 28, 2021
- Last seen: March 20, 2024
Appears In
- ACX Grants Results
- Open Thread 232
- Open Thread 233
- Open Thread 243
- ACX Grants: Project Updates
- The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
Related Pages
-
- ACX (3 shared issues)
-
- Lars Doucet (3 shared issues)
-
- 1DaySooner (2 shared issues)
-
- ACX Grants (2 shared issues)
-
- African Swine Fever (2 shared issues)
-
- Alex Hoekstra (2 shared issues)
-
- Alice Evans (2 shared issues)
-
- ALLFED (2 shared issues)
-
- Allison Berke (2 shared issues)
-
- Astralcodexten Com (2 shared issues)
-
- Australia (2 shared issues)
-
- Beny Falkovich (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Spencer Greenberg, $40,000, as seed money for his project to produce rapid replications of high-impact social science papers. Right now, when a new social science paper comes out, we often have to wait as long as several months to discover that it was false. Spencer and his team dream of a world where we can learn that almost immediately, soon enough that it's within the same news cycle and the journals involved feel kind of bad about it. This money will sponsor a pilot, after which he’ll be seeking additional funding - if you think you can help, you can reach him here. Spencer's been involved in rationality and EA about as long as either has existed, blogs at Optimize Everything, is the founder of ClearerThinking.org (which offers free digital tools related to rationality, decision-making and happiness) and runs the Clearer Thinking podcast, with guests including Daniel Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
1: Spencer Greenberg is a former ACX Grants winner and generally great person. He is now running a mini-grants-program of his own. He encourages applications from “anyone who has a project or idea aimed at having a big positive impact on the future of the world (grant sizes starting at $10,000, but going up to a conceivable maximum of $500,000)”. Read more and apply here.
Inline links: here
4: Thanks to everyone who applied last week to Spencer Greenberg’s grants round. It is closing soon, and I won’t be doing another ACX Grants for at least a few months, but if any of you want to pursue urgent opportunities in AI alignment, biosecurity, or similar fields before then, and find that some 4-5 digit amount of money would help, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I will try to connect you to relevant funders.
3: Speaking of interesting epistemic institutions, Spencer Greenberg is running a prediction market tournament to decide what charities to fund. It uses play money, is free to join, and winners will get real-money prizes. You can learn more and start participating here.
Inline links: learn more and start participating here
15: Rapid Replications Of New Psychology Papers (6/10) Spencer Greenberg and his ClearerThinking.org org want to attempt to replicate psychology papers shortly after they are published in the most prestigious journals to help improve scientific incentives. They say they’ve finished their first three replications and are working on launching the site (at which point those first three will become publicly available and they’ll keep working on others). ETA two months or so.
Inline links: ClearerThinking.org
The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong Thanks to Sebastian Jensen for pointing this out! He writes: A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article]. The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [psychometric test], [GCSE grades]. This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability. In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has changed over time due to changes in the content of the test. Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient. Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124. So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start! Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is. Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly. He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100. But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110. This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay. But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong? Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find: People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.