Brief reflections on the Conjecture post and it's reception
(Written from the non-technical primary author)
* Reception was a lot more critical than I expected. As last time, many good
points were raised that pointed out areas where we weren't clear
* We shared it with reviewers (especially ones who we would expect to disagree
with us) hoping to pre-empt these criticisms. The gave useful feedback.
* However, what we didn't realize was that the people engaging with our post in
the comments were quite different from our reviewers and didnt share the
background knowledge that our reviewers did
* We included our end line views (based on feedback previously that we didn't
do this enough) and I think it's those views that felt very strong to
people.
* It's really, really hard to share the right level of detail and provide
adequate context. I think this post managed to be both too short and too
long.
* Short: because we didn't make as many explicit comparisons benchmarking
research
* Long: we felt we needed to add context on several points that weren't obvious
to low context people.
* When editing a post it's pretty challenging to figure out what assumptions
you can assume and what your reader won't know, because there's a broad range
of knowledge. I think nested thoughts could be helpful for making posts
reasonable length
* We initially didn't give as much detail in some areas because the other
(technical) author is time-limited and didn't think it was critical. The post
editing process is extremely long for a post of this size and gravity, so we
had to make decisions on when to stop iterating.
* Overall, I think the post still generated some interesting and valuable
discussion, and I hope it at the very least causes people to think more
critically about where they end up working.
* I am sad that Conjecture didn't engage with the post as much as we would have
liked.
* I think it's difficult to
You don't have to be an asshole just because you value honesty
In Kirsten's recent EA Lifestyles advice column
[https://ealifestyles.substack.com/p/ea-lifestyles-advice-column] (NB,
paywalled), an anonymous EA woman reported being bothered about men in the
community whose "radical honesty" leads them to make inappropriate or hurtful
comments:
An implication is that these guys may have viewed the discomfort of their women
interlocutors as a (maybe regretful) cost of them upholding the important value
of honesty. I've encountered similar attitudes elsewhere in EA - ie, people
being kinda disagreeable/assholeish/mean under the excuse of 'just being
honest'.
I want to say: I don't think a high commitment to honesty inevitably entails
being disagreeable, acting unempathetically, or ruffling feathers. Why? Because
I don't think it's dishonest not to say everything that springs to mind. If that
were the case, I'd be continually narrating my internal monologue to my loved
owns, and it would be very annoying for them, I'd imagine.
If you're attracted to someone, and they ask "are you attracted to me?", and you
say "no" - ok, that's dishonest. I don't think anyone should blame people for
honestly answering a direct question. But if you're chatting with someone and
you think "hmm, I'm really into them", and then you say that - I don't think
honesty compels that choice, any more than it compels you to say "hold up, I
just was thinking about whether I'd have soup or a burger for dinner".
I don't know much about the Radical Honesty movement, but from this article
[https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26792/honesty0707/], it seems like they
really prize just blurting out whatever you think. I do understand the urge to
do this: I really value self-expression. For example, I'd struggle to be in a
situation where I felt like I couldn't express my thoughts online and had to
self-censor a lot. But I want to make the case that self-expression (how much of
what comes to min
Suggestion for EA Forum posts: First Draft
Create a new type of post - a "First Draft" post, with it's own section "WIP".
Basically like the current collaborative draft mode editing, but public.
This could be a expansion / continuation of the "amnesty day" posts, but more
ongoing and more focused on changing the culture of the post.
* Looks like a google doc with easy commenting on specific sections, maybe more
voting options that have to do with feedback (e.g. needs more structure etc.)
* You can give suggestions on what people can post e.g. "Idea bunny" "post
outline" "unpolished draft" "polished draft" and give people options on the
kinds of feedback they could seek e.g. "copyediting / grammar" or "tone" or
"structure" or "factchecking" etc.
* Maybe Karma-free, or separate karma score so people don't worry about how
it'll be taken
* Maybe people who give comments and feedback can get some kind of "helper
karma" and be automatically tagged when the post is published and get credit
of some kind for contributing to common knowledge
* Potentially have it be gated in some way or have people opt-in to see it
(e.g. so more engaged people opt-in, so it becomes like the Facebook
peer-editing group), with regular pushes to get high karma / high engagement
forum users (especially lurkers who like and read a lot) to join
* Private by default (not searchable on web) but very clear that it's not
private private (e.g. since in practice people can always screenshot and
share things anyways)
* Feature interesting stories about where first drafts start and the posts they
become to encourage usage
* Get a bunch of high-status people / active forum folks to post their drafts
to get the ball rolling
SOME ALFRED WORKFLOWS (PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS)
Alfred [https://www.alfredapp.com/] is a pretty powerful Mac app which lets you
set hotkeys for a lot of things. Here are some workflows I use very frequently
that I would recommend others try out. If you have favorite Alfred workflows,
I'd love to hear about them in the comments!
For the record, my Alfred app thinks that I have used a hotkey or Alfred
expansion on average 9.3 times per day since March 2022.
KILL
I frequently get distracted or overwhelmed by having too many windows / tabs
open, and losing track of what I was supposed to be doing. Whenever I notice
that I am getting sidetracked, it’s extremely useful for me to have a ‘kill
switch’, which just closes down all of my tabs and lets me start over.
I now have a ‘kill’ Alfred hotkey set up to forcibly quit Chrome, Slack,
Microsoft suite products, various programming apps, etc., so that I can start
again from a blank slate. I use this hotkey multiple times a day on average
while working. In theory, if I need to find a Chrome tab again, I can always go
into my history / ‘recently closed tabs’ section — but I don’t ever recall
needing to do this since installing this hotkey over a year ago.
I used to be the person with 1,000 Chrome tabs open at all times. I now think
this is extremely damaging to my attention span and would lightly recommend
other people who rely heavily on tabs in their workflow to try out a
tab-limiting policy to see if it helps.
TZ
I work on a distributed team and have family around the world, so knowing the
current time in a few key timezones is often extremely helpful for coordination
purposes. The tz workflow
[https://github.com/jaroslawhartman/TimeZones-Alfred#readme] is really nice for
this.
I added a ‘tzdetail’ hotkey, which opens up a URL to an external website
[https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20230613&p1=224&p2=43&p3=136&p4=102&p5=240],
displaying the time across the day in major cities in all the tim
In a recent post on the EA forum (Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My
Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LqjG4bAxHfmHC5iut/why-i-spoke-to-time-magazine-and-my-experience-as-a-female]),
I couldn't help but notice that a comments from famous and/or well-known people
got lots more upvotes than comments by less well-known people, even though the
content of the comments was largely similar.
I'm wondering to what extent this serves as one small data point in support of
the "too much hero worship/celebrity idolization in EA" hypothesis, and (if so)
to what extent we should do something about it. I feel kind of conflicted,
because in a very real sense reputation can be a result of hard work over
time,[1] and it seems unreasonable to say that people shouldn't benefit from
that. But it also seems antithetical to the pursuit of truth, philosophy, and
doing good to weigh to the messenger so heavily over the message.
I'm mulling this over, but it is a complex and interconnected enough issue that
I doubt I will create any novel ideas with some casual thought.
Perhaps just changing the upvote buttons to something more like this content
creates nurtures a discussion space that lines up with the principles of EA? I'm
not confident that would change much.
1. ^
Although not always. Sometimes a person is just in the right place at the
right time. Big issues of genetic lottery and class matter. But in a very
simplistic example, my highest ranking post on the EA forum is not one of
the posts that I spent hours and hours thinking about and writing, but
instead is one where I simply linked to a article about EA in the popular
press and basically said "hey guys, look how cool this is!"
The Met (a major art museum in NYC) is returning $550K in FTX-linked donations;
article below includes link to the court filing. 100% return, donations were
outside of 90 days. This is the first court filing of this nature I'm aware of,
although I haven't been watching comprehensively.
A smart move for the Met, I think. I doubt it had any viable defenses, it
clearly has $550K to return without causing any hardship, that's enough money
for the FTX estate to litigate over, and it avoids bad PR by agreeing to turn
100% of the money over without litigation. Perhaps it could have negotiated a
small discount, but saving $50K or whatever just wouldn't have been worth it in
light of PR/optics concerns. (Plus, I think the Met was very likely obliged to
return the whole $550K from an ethical perspective anyway . . . . { edit:
perhaps with a small deduction for its legal expenses })
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/06/05/new-yorks-met-museum-agrees-to-return-550k-in-ftx-donations/
[https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/06/05/new-yorks-met-museum-agrees-to-return-550k-in-ftx-donations/]
I mostly haven't been thinking about what the ideal effective altruism community
would look like, because it seems like most of the value of effective altruism
might just get approximated to what impact it has on steering the world towards
better AGI futures. But I think even in worlds where AI risk wasn't a problem,
the effective altruism movement seems lackluster in some ways.
I am thinking especially of the effect that it often has on university students
and younger people. My sense is that EA sometimes influences those people to be
closed-minded or at least doesn't contribute to making them as ambitious or
interested in exploring things outside "conventional EA" as I think would be
ideal. Students who come across EA often become too attached to specific EA
organisations or paths to impact suggested by existing EA institutions.
In an EA community that was more ambitiously impactful, there would be a higher
proportion of folks at least strongly considering doing things like starting
startups that could be really big, traveling to various parts of the world to
form a view about how poverty affects welfare, having long google docs with
their current best guesses for how to get rid of factory farming, looking at
non-"EA" sources to figure out what more effective interventions GiveWell might
be missing perhaps because they're somewhat controversial, doing more effective
science/medical research, writing something on the topic of better thinking and
decision-making that could be as influential as Eliezer's sequences, expressing
curiosity about the question of whether charity is even the best way to improve
human welfare, trying to fix science.
And a lower proportion of these folks would be applying to jobs on the 80,000
Hours job board or choosing to spend more time within the EA community rather
than interacting with the most ambitious, intelligent, and interesting people
amongst their general peers.
I often hear (and sometimes think) that EA is still "mostly students" and that
means we need to outreach to "actual adults" more. I checked, and 45% of my
Twitter followers [https://twitter.com/Ollie_Base/status/1666410209579786242]
(EA-heavy, I think) thought the average was 25 or lower.
If EAG attendance is anything to go by, this picture seems basically false. The
median EAG attendee is 28.2 years old (mean 29.2). EAGx is not that far behind,
with a mean of 27. The average age of the 2022 EA survey respondent was 26
[https://twitter.com/peterwildeford/status/1667157891621478402].
Reflecting on the question of CEA's mandate, I think it's challenging that CEA
has always tried to be both, and this has not worked out well.
1) a community org
2) a talent recruitment org
When you're 1) you need to think about the individual's journey in the movement.
You invest in things like community health and universal groups support. It's
important to have strong lines of communication and accountability to the
community members you serve. You think about the individual's journey
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PbtXD76m7axMd6QST/the-funnel-or-the-individual-two-approaches-to-understanding#An_individual_approach]
and how to help addres those issues. (Think your local Y, community center or
church)
When you're 2) you care about finding and supporting only the top talent (and by
extension actors that aid you in this mission). You care about having a healthy
funnel
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PbtXD76m7axMd6QST/the-funnel-or-the-individual-two-approaches-to-understanding#The_Funnel_Model]
of individuals who are at the top of their game. You care about fostering an
environment that is attractive (potentially elite), prestigious and high status.
(Think Y-Combinator, Fullbright or Emergent Ventures Fellows).
I think these goals are often overlapping and self-reinforcing, but also at odds
with each other.
It is really hard to thread that needle well - it requires a lot of nuanced,
high-fidelity communication - which in turn requires a lot of capacity
(something historically short-of-stock in this movement).
I don't think this is a novel observation, but I can't remember seeing it
explicitly stated in conversation recently.
Quick updates:
* Our next critique (on Conjecture) will be published in 2 weeks.
* The critqiue after that will be on Anthropic. If you'd like to be a reviewer,
or have critiques you'd like to share, please message us or email
anonymouseaomega@gmail.com [anonymouseaomega@gmail.com].
In Twitter and elsewhere, I've seen a bunch of people argue that AI company
execs and academics are only talking about AI existential risk because they want
to manufacture concern to increase investments and/or as a distraction away from
near-term risks and/or regulatory capture. This is obviously false.
However, there is a nearby argument that is likely true: which is that
incentives drive how people talk about AI risk, as well as which specific
regulations or interventions they ask for. This is likely to happen both
explicitly and unconsciously. It's important (as always) to have extremely solid
epistemics, and understand that even apparent allies may have (large) degrees of
self-interest and motivated reasoning.
Safety-washing
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f2qojPr8NaMPo2KJC/beware-safety-washing]
is a significant concern; similar things have happened a bunch in other fields,
it likely has already happened a bunch in AI, and will likely happen again in
the months and years to come, especially if/as policymakers and/or the general
public become increasingly uneasy about AI.
TL;DR: Someone should probably write a grant to produce a spreadsheet/dataset of
past instances where people claimed a new technology would lead to societal
catastrophe, with variables such as “multiple people working on the tech
believed it was dangerous.”
Slightly longer TL;DR: Some AI risk skeptics are mocking people who believe AI
could threaten humanity’s existence, saying that many people in the past
predicted doom from some new tech. There is seemingly no dataset which lists and
evaluates such past instances of “tech doomers.” It seems somewhat ridiculous*
to me that nobody has grant-funded a researcher to put together a dataset with
variables such as “multiple people working on the technology thought it could be
very bad for society.”
*Low confidence: could totally change my mind
———
I have asked multiple people in the AI safety space if they were aware of any
kind of "dataset for past predictions of doom (from new technology)"? There have
been some articles and arguments floating around recently such as "Tech Panics,
Generative AI, and the Need for Regulatory Caution
[https://datainnovation.org/2023/05/tech-panics-generative-ai-and-regulatory-caution/]",
in which skeptics say we shouldn't worry about AI x-risk because there are many
past cases where people in society made overblown claims that some new
technology (e.g., bicycles, electricity) would be disastrous for society.
While I think it's right to consider the "outside view" on these kinds of
things, I think that most of these claims 1) ignore examples of where there were
legitimate reasons to fear the technology (e.g., nuclear weapons, maybe
synthetic biology?), and 2) imply the current worries about AI are about as
baseless as claims like "electricity will destroy society," whereas I would
argue that the claim "AI x-risk is >1%" stands up quite well against most
current scrutiny.
(These claims also ignore the anthropic argument/survivor bias—that if they ever
were right about doom we wouldn't
Confusion
I get why I and other give to Givewell rather than catastrophic risk - sometimes
it's good to know your "Impact account" is positive even if all the catastrophic
risk work was useless.
But why do people not give to animal welfare in this case? Seems higher impact?
And if it's just that we prefer humans to animals that seems like something we
should be clear to ourselves about.
Also I don't know if I like my mental model of an "impact account". Seems like
my giving has maybe once again become about me rather than impact.
ht @Aaron Bergman
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/aaronb50?mention=user] for surfacing
this
Why doesn't EA focus on equity, human rights, and opposing discrimination (as
cause areas)?
KJonEA asks:
'How focused do you think EA is on topics of race and gender equity/justice,
human rights, and anti-discrimination? What do you think are factors that shape
the community's focus?
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zgBB56GcnJyjdSNQb/how-focused-do-you-think-ea-is-on-topics-of-race-and-gender]'
In response, I ended up writing a lot of words, so I thought it was worth
editing them a bit and putting them in a shortform. I've also added some
'counterpoints' that weren't in the original comment.
To lay my cards on the table: I'm a social progressive and leftist, and I think
it would be cool if more EAs thought about equity, justice, human rights and
discrimination - as cause areas to work in, rather than just within the EA
community. (I'll call this cluster just 'equity' going forward). I also think it
would be cool if left/progressive organisations had a more EA mindset sometimes.
At the same time, as I hope my answers below show, I do think there are some
good reasons that EAs don't prioritize equity, as well as some bad reasons.
So, why don't EAs priority gender and racial equity, as cause areas?
1. Other groups are already doing good work on equity (i.e. equity is less
neglected)
The social justice/progressive movement has got feminism and anti-racism pretty
well covered. On the other hand, the central EA causes - global health, AI
safety, existential risk, animal welfare -are comparatively neglected by other
groups. So it kinda makes sense for EAs to say 'we'll let these other movements
keep doing their good work on these issues, and we'll focus on these other
issues that not many people care about'.
Counter-point: are other groups using the most (cost)-effective methods to
achieve their goals? EAs should, of course, be epistemically modest; but it
seems that (e.g.) someone who was steeped in both EA and feminism, might have
some great suggesti
One of my current favorite substacks [https://weibo.substack.com/]: this author
just takes a random selection of Weibo posts every day and translates them to
English, including providing copies of all the videos. Weibo is sort of like
"Chinese Twitter".
One of my most consistently read newsletters! H/T to @JS Denain
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/js-denain-1?mention=user] for
recommending this newsletter to me a while ago :)
Some quick thoughts on AI consciousness work, I may write up something more
rigorous later.
Normally when people have criticisms of the EA movement they talk about its
culture or point at community health concerns.
I think aspects of EA that make me more sad is that there seems to be a few
extremely important issues on an impartial welfarist view that don’t seem to get
much attention at all, despite having been identified at some point by some EAs.
I do think that ea has done a decent job of pointing at the most important
issues relative to basically every other social movement that I’m aware of but
I’m going to complain about one of it’s shortcomings anyway.
It looks to me like we could build advanced ai systems in the next few years and
in most worlds we have little idea of what’s actually going on inside them. The
systems may tell us they are conscious, or say that they don’t like the tasks we
tell them to do but right now we can’t really trust their self reports. There’ll
be a clear economic incentive to ignore self reports that create a moral
obligation to using the systems in less useful/efficient ways. I expect the
number of deployed systems to be very large and that it’ll be plausible that we
lock in the suffering of these systems in a similar way to factory farming. I
think there are stronger arguments for the topic’s importance that I won’t dive
into right now but the simplest case is just the “big if true-ness” of this area
seems very high.
My impression is that our wider society and community is not orienting in a sane
way to this topic. I don’t remember ever coming across a junior EA seriously
considering directing their career to work in this area. 80k has a podcast with
Rob Long and a very brief problem profile (that seems kind of reasonable), ai
consciousness (iirc) doesn’t feature in ea virtual programs or any intro
fellowship that I’m aware of, there haven’t been many (or any?) talks about it
at eag in the last year. I do think that most organi
Reddit user blueshoesrcool [https://old.reddit.com/user/blueshoesrcool]
discovered
[https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/13t23ti/effective_ventures_misses_reporting_deadline/]
that Effective Ventures [https://ev.org/] (the umbrella organization for the
Centre for Effective Altruism, 80000 hours, GWWC, etc) has missed its charity
reporting deadline by 27 days
[https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/5026843/accounts-and-annual-returns].
Given that there's already a regulatory inquiry into Effective Ventures
Foundation
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C89mZ5T5MTYBu8ZFR/regulatory-inquiry-into-effective-ventures-foundation-uk],
maybe someone should look into this.
Protesting at leading AI labs may be significantly more effective than most
protests, even ignoring the object-level arguments for the importance of AI
safety as a cause area. The impact per protester is likely unusually big, since
early protests involve only a handful of people and impact probably scales
sublinearly with size. And very early protests are unprecedented and hence more
likely (for their size) to attract attention, shape future protests, and have
other effects that boost their impact.
Some personal reflections on EAG London:[1]
* Congrats to the CEA Events Team for their hard work and for organising such a
good event! 👏
* The vibe was really positive! Anecdotally I had heard that the last EAG SF
was gloom central, but this event felt much more cheery. I'm not entirely
sure why, but it might have had something to do with the open venue, the good
weather, or there being more places to touch grass in London compared to the
Bay.
* I left the conference intellectually energised (though physically exhausted).
I'm ready to start drafting some more Forum Post ideas that I will vastly
overestimate my ability to finish and publish 😌
* AI was (unsurprisingly) the talk of the town. But I found that quite a few
people,[2] myself included, were actually more optimistic on AI because of
the speed of the social response to AI progress and how pro-safety it seems
to be, along with low polarisation along partisan lines.
* Related to the above, I came away with the impression that AI Governance may
be as if not more important than Technical Alignment in the next 6-12 months.
The window for signficiant political opportunity is open now but may not stay
open forever, so the AI Governance Space is probably where the most impactful
opportunties might be at the moment.
* My main negative takeaway was that there seemed to be so little reflection on
the difficult last ~6 months for the EA movement. There was 1 session on the
FTX, but none at all on the other problems we've faced as a community such as
Sexual Abuse and Harassment, Trust in EA Leadership, Community Epistemic
Health, and whether EA Institutions ought to be reformed. In the opening
talk, the only reference was that the ship of EA feels like it's been 'going
through a storm', and the ideas presented weren't really accompanied by a
route to embed them in the movement. To me it felt like another missed
opportunity
[https://forum.effec
BUT "EVERYONE KNOWS"!
A dynamic I keep seeing is that it feels hard to whistleblow or report concerns
or make a bid for more EA attention on things that "everyone knows", because it
feels like there's no one to tell who doesn't already know. It’s easy to think
that surely this is priced in to everyone's decision making. Some reasons to do
it anyway:
* You might be wrong about what “everyone” knows - maybe everyone in your
social circle does, but not outside. I see this a lot in Bay gossip vs.
London gossip - what "everyone knows" is very different in those two places
* You might be wrong about what "everyone knows" - sometimes people use a vague
shorthand, like "the FTX stuff" and it could mean a million different things,
and either double illusion of transparency
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sBBGxdvhKcppQWZZE/double-illusion-of-transparency]
(you both think you know what the other person is talking about but don’t) or
the pressure to nod along in social situations means that it seems like
you're all talking about the same thing but you're actually not
* Just because people know doesn't mean it's the right level of salient
* Bystander effect: People might all be looking around assuming someone else
has the concern covered because surely everyone knows and is taking the right
amount of action on it.
In short, if you're acting based on the belief that there’s a thing “everyone
knows”, check that that’s true.
Relatedly: Everybody Knows
[https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/], by Zvi Mowshowitz
[Caveat: There's an important balance to strike here between the value of public
conversation about concerns and the energy that gets put into those public
community conversations. There are reasons to take action on the above
non-publicly, and not every concern will make it above people’s bar for spending
the time and effort to get more engagement with it. Just wanted to point to some
lenses that might get missed.]