Hello Internet!

As I promised, the "weird" shop is now live. It is an experiment of mine in which I take a regular online shop but instead of treating it as my source of income I turn it into something more communitarian. The shop sells my drawings, nothing special, except for two things: a 51% donation of all profits and a ceiling to my income.

So, any item bought in that shop will have 51% of its profits spent with some truly good thing, at this moment a donation to Against Malaria Foundation. When my income hits the ceiling, then 100% of profits are devoted to the cause until the current month closes.

Why I am doing this?

In short, because I always wanted my art to go beyond aesthetics and...

TL;DR: Many people aren’t sure if it would be more impactful for them to earn to give or to work at an EA aligned org. I suggest a solution to solve this problem quickly: Ask the org.

What to ask?

“Would you prefer to hire me, or to hire your next best candidate and have me donate [as much as you’d donate]?”

My prior on their answer

I think big longtermism/meta orgs will definitely prefer to hire you if you’re their top candidate.

Not sure about other orgs.

Ask!

I asked Ben West from the Centre for Effective Altruism

Ben:

1. I personally previously averaged ~$2M/year EtGing but think my labor at CEA is more valuable.
2. I can't think of an instance where I thought someone shouldn't have applied to CEA because EtG was so obviously better.
3. I can

P(misalignment x-risk | AGI) is high. 

Intent alignment should not be the goal for AGI x-risk reduction. If AGI is developed, and we solve AGI intent alignment, we will not have lowered x-risk sufficiently, and we may have even increased it higher than it would have been otherwise.
 

P(misalignment x-risk | intent-aligned AGI) >> P(misalignment x-risk | societally-aligned AGI). 

The goal of AI alignment should be alignment with (democratically determined) societal values (because these have broad buy-in from humans).
 

P(misalignment x-risk | AGI) is higher if intent alignment is solved before societal-AGI alignment. 

Most technical AI alignment research is currently focused on solving intent alignment. The (usually implicit, sometimes explicit) assumption is that solving intent alignment will help subsequently solve societal-AGI alignment. This would only be the case if all the humans...

This is cross-posted from the AI Impacts blog

This is going to be a list of holes I see in the basic argument for existential risk from superhuman AI systems¹. 

To start, here’s an outline of what I take to be the basic case²:

I. If superhuman AI systems are built, any given system is likely to be ‘goal-directed’

Reasons to expect this:

1. Goal-directed behavior is likely to be valuable, e.g. economically. 
2. Goal-directed entities may tend to arise from machine learning training processes not intending to create them (at least via the methods that are likely to be used).
3. ‘Coherence arguments’ may imply that systems with some goal-directedness will become more strongly goal-directed over time.

II. If goal-directed superhuman AI systems are built, their desired outcomes will probably be about as bad as an empty...

This post argues that P(misalignment x-risk | AGI) could be lower than anticipated by alignment researchers due to an overlooked goal specification technology: law. 

P(misalignment x-risk | AGI that understands democratic law) < P(misalignment x-risk | AGI) 

To be clear, this post does not argue that P(misalignment x-risk | AGI) is negligible – we believe it is much higher than most mainstream views. A purpose of this post is to shed light on a neglected mechanism for lowering the probability of misalignment x-risk.

The mechanism that is doing the work here is not the enforcement of law on AGI. In fact, we don’t discuss the enforcement of the law at all in this post.[1] We discuss AGI using law as information. Unless we conduct further research and development on how to...

I have just published my new book on s-risks, titled Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe. You can find it on Amazon or read the PDF version.

The book is primarily aimed at longtermist effective altruists. I wrote it because I feel that s-risk prevention is a somewhat neglected priority area in the community, and because a single, comprehensive introduction to s-risks did not yet exist. My hope is that a coherent introduction will help to strengthen interest in the topic and spark further work.

Here’s a short description of the book:

From Nineteen Eighty-Four to Black Mirror, we are all familiar with the tropes of dystopian science fiction. But what if worst-case scenarios could actually become reality? And what if we could do something now to put the world on a

As part of my work with the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, I am experimenting with speculative evaluations that could be potentially scalable. Billionaires were an interesting evaluation target because there are a fair number of them, and at least some are nominally aiming to do good.

For now, for each top 10 billionaire, I have tried to get an idea of:

1. How much value have they created through their business activities?
2. How much impact have they created through their philanthropic activities

I then assigned a subjective score based on my understanding of the answers to the above questions. Overall I've spent in the neighborhood of 20 hours (maybe 7 to 40 hours) between research and editing, so this is by no mean the final word on this topic.

Elon Musk (B)

Elon Musk...

I invite you to ask anything you’re wondering about that’s remotely related to effective altruism. There’s no such thing as a question too basic.

Try to ask your first batch of questions by Monday, October 17  (so that people who want to answer questions can know to make some time around then).

Everyone is encouraged to answer (see more on this below). There’s a small prize for questions and answers.

This is a test thread — we might try variations on it later.^[1]

How to ask questions

Ask anything you’re wondering about that has anything to do with effective altruism.

More guidelines:

1. Try to post each question as a separate "Answer"-style comment on the post.
2. There’s no such thing as a question too basic (or too niche!).
3. Follow the Forum norms.^[2]

I encourage everyone to view asking...