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Tl;dr: Due to quantum computers' abilities to compute multiple superpositions in parallel it seems possible that the capability of a quantum computer to generate utility grows exponentially with the size of that quantum computer. If this exponential conjecture is true, then very near term quantum computers could suffer more than all life on Earth has in the past 4 billion years.
Introduction
Quantum computing (QC) is a categorically different form of computation. It is capable of tackling certain problems exponentially faster than its classical counterparts. The bounty QC may bring is large: speedups in a broad range of topics, from drug discovery to reinforcement learning. What's more, these speedups may be imminent. Quantum supremacy[1] has already been crossed and the large quantum chip manufacturers are expecting the construction of...
Overview
Coordination problems in EA seem somewhat pressing, but we are lacking a structured way to think through different kinds of coordination challenges and bottlenecks.
In this post we
- Introduce a way to categorize and understand coordination services within the EA community: ecosystem & community member services
- Present different potential services in these categories
- Present a way to categorize coordination bottlenecks into three functional areas: knowledge, infrastructure and support
Our intention with this post is mainly to open up a discussion about this topic so that everyone can contribute to it and understand it better.
Introduction
The importance of coordination & coordination challenges has been periodically discussed for several years in the EA movement. In recent years, it seems that these challenges are becoming more acute - in November 2020 Benjamin Todd mentioned that currently,...
I completely agree, I've thought this ever since I joined the EA movement in 2013, and think this space (among others) is exceptionally neglected.
Some public examples of work I've done in this space include thinking about how to improve funder, project, and volunteer/team coordination as well as providing specialized services to the community. Given that this is a neglected area with little time and money available for people to make progress on it, I think it's no surprise that the space has "a large 'graveyard' of untried proposals or projects." I think ... (read more)
Back in the old ages, shopping was a hobby, not a science.
People used to lazily stroll through supermarkets with their baskets, looking around to see if anything caught their eyes. Whenever something did, they'd plop it into their basket without thinking twice and continue loafing across the tile with a superficial smile.
Rather than analyze quality, people picked the products with shiny labels, bright colors, and sexy fonts, the ones that gave them a visceral dopamine burst, the ones that evoked a pure but fleeting sense of glee. They shopped for the packaging without giving any attention to what was inside. They would occasionally show off this packaging to their friends and family, as an expression of personal identity. Look at me, they said, I'm the kind of...
I think this is a very cute, clever story! I appreciate it and have upvoted it! I don't think I have any clever comments, though I'll let you know if I think of any.
This term I took a reinforcement learning course at my university, hoping to learn something useful for the directions of research that I'm considering to enter (one among which is AI safety; others are speculative so I'm not listing them).
I'm about to start coding my first toy model, when I suddenly recalled something that I previously read: Brian Tomasik's Which Computations Do I Care About? and Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning. So I re-read the two essays, and despite dissenting on many of the points that Brian had made, I did become convinced that RL agents (and some other algorithms too), in expectation, deserve a tiny yet non-zero moral weight, and this weight can accumulate over the many episodes in the training process to become significant.
This...
Thanks for the answers, they all make sense and upvoted all of them :)
So for a brief summary:
- The action that I described in the question is far from optimal under EV framework (CarlShulman & Brian_Tomasik), and
- Even it is optimal, a utilitarian may still have ethical reasons to reject it, if he or she:
- endorses some kind of non-traditional utilitarianism, most notably SFE (TimothyChan); or
- considers the uncertainty involved to be moral (instead of factual) uncertainty (Brian_Tomasik).
We are excited to announce the launch of The Nonlinear Library, which allows you to easily listen to top EA content on your podcast player. We use text-to-speech software to create an automatically updating repository of audio content from the EA Forum, Alignment Forum, LessWrong, and other EA blogs.
In the rest of this post, we’ll explain our reasoning for the audio library, why it’s useful, why it’s potentially high impact, its limitations, and our plans. You can read it here or listen to the post in podcast form here.
Listen here: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Apple
Or, just search for it in your preferred podcasting app.
Goal: increase the number of people who read EA research
An EA koan: if your research is high quality, but nobody reads it, does...
Possibly, it is enough to just have a disclaimer like "by submitting, you agree to have this turned into an audio format" to satisfy copyright laws?
While global demand for meat continues to grow, conventional production methods are associated with problems of enormous scale, driving climate change and environmental degradation, antibiotic-resistant disease, and animal suffering. However, the development of plant-based and cultivated cell-based meats offer promising solutions.
Join Effective Altruism UQ online to learn about alternative meats from a variety of speakers all working to revolutionize food!
Speakers:
Ruth Purcell – Precision Fermentation & State of the Industry in Australia
Prof. Jason Stokes – Taste vs Texture in Plant-based Meat Engineering,
Dr. Felix Septianto – Consumer Acceptance of Cultured Meats
Dr Mark Allenby – Engineering Lab-Grown Tissues
Tuesday 26 October, 6PM (UTC+10)
Event link: https://uqz.zoom.us/j/83675715923
It's hard to have a discussion about this in the open because many EAs (and presumably some non-EAs) with biosecurity expertise strongly believe that this is too dangerous a topic to talk about in detail in the open, because of information hazards and related issues.
Speaking for myself, I briefly looked into the theory of information hazards, as well as thought through some of the empirical consequences, and my personal view is that while the costs of having public dialogue about various xrisk stuff (including biorisk) are likely underestimated, the ... (read more)
Imagine you are in charge of running the EA forum/LessWrong Petrov Day game. What would would you do?
Upvote answers you agree with and add your own.
I think it's cool that the forum runs big events like this and I've enjoyed this one. Thanks to the team at CEA. I think it's fun to imagine what each of us would do if we were in charge.
This years game is described here.
Here a user asks for clarification on the purpose of the game.
I pointed out my issues with the structural dissimilarities between Petrov Day celebrations and what Petrov actually faced before here, here, and here (2 years ago). I personally still enjoyed the game as is. However I'm open to the idea that future Petrov Days should look radically different, and wouldn't have a gamefying element at all.
But I think if we want a game that reflects the structure of Petrov's decision that day well in an honest way, we probably want something like:
1. Petrov clearly has strong incentives and social pressures to push the ... (read more)
If the Everett interpretation is true, then all experiences are already amplified exponentially. Unless I'm missing something, a QC doesn't deserve any special consideration. It all adds up to normality.