Benjamin Lay — "Quaker Comet", early (radical) abolitionist, general "moral weirdo" — died on this day 267 years ago.  I shared a post about him a little while back, and still think of February 8 as "Benjamin Lay Day".  ... Around the same time I also made two paintings inspired by his life/work, which I figured I'd share now. One is an icon-style-inspired image based on a portrait of him[1]: The second is based on a print depicting the floor plan of an infamous slave ship (Brooks). The print was used by abolitionists (mainly(?) the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade) to help communicate the horror of the trade.  I found it useful to paint it (and appreciate having it around today). But I imagine that not everyone might want to see it, so I'll skip a few lines here in case you expanded this quick take and decide you want to scroll past/collapse it instead. . . . 1. ^ The original (see post) was commissioned by Deborah Read as a gift for her husband Benjamin Franklin, who also Benjamin Lay’s friend.

Why don’t EA chapters exist at very prestigious high schools (e.g., Stuyvesant, Exeter, etc.)? It seems like a relatively low-cost intervention (especially compared to something like Atlas), and these schools produce unusually strong outcomes. There’s also probably less competition than at universities for building genuinely high-quality intellectual clubs (this could totally be wrong).

Recent generations of Claude seem better at understanding blog posts and making fairly subtle judgment calls than most smart humans. These days when I’d read an article that presumably sounds reasonable to most people but has what seems to me to be a glaring conceptual mistake, I can put it in Claude, ask it to identify the mistake, and more likely than not Claude would land on the same mistake as the one I identified. I think before Opus 4 this was essentially impossible, Claude 3.xs can sometimes identify small errors but it’s a crapshoot on whether it can identify central mistakes, and certainly not judge it well. It’s possible I’m wrong about the mistakes here and Claude’s just being sycophantic and identifying which things I’d regard as the central mistake, but if that’s true in some ways it’s even more impressive. Interestingly, both Gemini and ChatGPT failed at these tasks. (They can sometimes directionally approach the error I identified, but their formulation is imprecise and broad, and they only have it in a longer list of potential quibbles rather than zero in on the most damning issue).  For clarity purposes, here are 3 articles I recently asked Claude to reassess (Claude got the central error in 2/3 of them). I'm also a little curious what the LW baseline is here; I did not include my comments in my prompts to Claude. https://terrancraft.com/2021/03/21/zvx-the-effects-of-scouting-pillars/ https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/what-can-a-single-data-point-teach-you https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vZcXAc6txvJDanQ4F/the-median-researcher-problem-1 

Here’s a random org/project idea: hire full-time, thoughtful EA/AIS red teamers whose job is to seriously critique parts of the ecosystem — whether that’s the importance of certain interventions, movement culture, or philosophical assumptions. Think engaging with critics or adjacent thinkers (e.g., David Thorstad, Titotal, Tyler Cowen) and translating strong outside critiques into actionable internal feedback. The key design feature would be incentives: instead of paying for generic criticism, red teamers receive rolling “finder’s fees” for critiques that are judged to be high-quality, good-faith, and decision-relevant (e.g., identifying strategic blind spots, diagnosing vibe shifts that can be corrected, or clarifying philosophical cruxes that affect priorities). Part of why I think this is important is because I generally think have the intuition that the marginal thoughtful contrarian is often more valuable than the marginal agreer, yet most movement funding and prestige flows toward builders rather than structured internal critics. If that’s true, a standing red-team org — or at least a permanent prize mechanism — could be unusually cost-effective. There have been episodic versions of this (e.g., red-teaming contests, some longtermist critiquing stuff), but I’m not sure why this should come in waves rather than exist as ongoing infrastructure (org or just some prize pool that's always open for sufficiently good criticisms).

I like Scott's Mistake Theory vs Conflict Theory framing, but I don't think this is a complete model of disagreements about policy, nor do I think the complete models of disagreement will look like more advanced versions of Mistake Theory + Conflict Theory.  To recap, here's my short summaries of the two theories: Mistake Theory: I disagree with you because one or both of us are wrong about what we want, or how to achieve what we want) Conflict Theory: I disagree with you because ultimately I want different things from you. The Marxists, who Scott was originally arguing against, will natively see this as about individual or class material interests but this can be smoothly updated to include values and ideological conflict as well. I polled several people about alternative models for political disagreement at the same level of abstraction of Conflict vs Mistake, and people usually got to "some combination of mistakes and conflicts." To that obvious model, I want to add two other theories (this list is incomplete). Consider Thomas Schelling's 1960 opening to Strategy of Conflict I claim that this "rudimentary/obvious idea," that the conflict/cooperative elements of many human disagreements is structurally inseparable, is central to a secret third thing distinct from Conflict vs Mistake. If you grok the "obvious idea," we can derive something like Negotiation Theory(?): I have my desires. You have yours. I sometimes want to cooperate with you, and sometimes not. I take actions maximally good for my goals and respect you well enough to assume that you will do the same; however in practice a "hot war" is unlikely to be in either of our best interests.  In the Negotiation Theory framing, disagreement/conflict arises from dividing the goods in non-zerosum games. I think the economists/game theorists' "standard models" of negotiation theory is natively closer to "conflict theory" than "mistake theory." (eg, often their models assume rationality, which means the "ca