In my latest post I talked about whether unaligned AIs would produce more or less utilitarian value than aligned AIs. To be honest, I'm still quite confused about why many people seem to disagree with the view I expressed, and I'm interested in engaging more to get a better understanding of their perspective. At the least, I thought I'd write a bit more about my thoughts here, and clarify my own views on the matter, in case anyone is interested in trying to understand my perspective. The core thesis that was trying to defend is the following view: My view: It is likely that by default, unaligned AIs—AIs that humans are likely to actually build if we do not completely solve key technical alignment problems—will produce comparable utilitarian value compared to humans, both directly (by being conscious themselves) and indirectly (via their impacts on the world). This is because unaligned AIs will likely both be conscious in a morally relevant sense, and they will likely share human moral concepts, since they will be trained on human data. Some people seem to merely disagree with my view that unaligned AIs are likely to be conscious in a morally relevant sense. And a few others have a semantic disagreement with me in which they define AI alignment in moral terms, rather than the ability to make an AI share the preferences of the AI's operator.  But beyond these two objections, which I feel I understand fairly well, there's also significant disagreement about other questions. Based on my discussions, I've attempted to distill the following counterargument to my thesis, which I fully acknowledge does not capture everyone's views on this subject: Perceived counter-argument: The vast majority of utilitarian value in the future will come from agents with explicitly utilitarian preferences, rather than those who incidentally achieve utilitarian objectives. At present, only a small proportion of humanity holds slightly utilitarian views. However, as unaligned AIs will differ from humans across numerous dimensions, it is plausible that they will possess negligible utilitarian impulses, in stark contrast to humanity's modest (but non-negligible) utilitarian tendencies. As a result, it is plausible that almost all value would be lost, from a utilitarian perspective, if AIs were unaligned with human preferences. Again, I'm not sure if this summary accurately represents what people believe. However, it's what some seem to be saying. I personally think this argument is weak. But I feel I've had trouble making my views very clear on this subject, so I thought I'd try one more time to explain where I'm coming from here. Let me respond to the two main parts of the argument in some amount of detail: (i) "The vast majority of utilitarian value in the future will come from agents with explicitly utilitarian preferences, rather than those who incidentally achieve utilitarian objectives." My response: I am skeptical of the notion that the bulk of future utilitarian value will originate from agents with explicitly utilitarian preferences. This clearly does not reflect our current world, where the primary sources of happiness and suffering are not the result of deliberate utilitarian planning. Moreover, I do not see compelling theoretical grounds to anticipate a major shift in this regard. I think the intuition behind the argument here is something like this: In the future, it will become possible to create "hedonium"—matter that is optimized to generate the maximum amount of utility or well-being. If hedonium can be created, it would likely be vastly more important than anything else in the universe in terms of its capacity to generate positive utilitarian value. The key assumption is that hedonium would primarily be created by agents who have at least some explicit utilitarian goals, even if those goals are fairly weak. Given the astronomical value that hedonium could potentially generate, even a tiny fraction of the universe's resources being dedicated to hedonium production could outweigh all other sources of happiness and suffering. Therefore, if unaligned AIs would be less likely to produce hedonium than aligned AIs (due to not having explicitly utilitarian goals), this would be a major reason to prefer aligned AI, even if unaligned AIs would otherwise generate comparable levels of value to aligned AIs in all other respects. If this is indeed the intuition driving the argument, I think it falls short for a straightforward reason. The creation of matter-optimized-for-happiness is more likely to be driven by the far more common motives of self-interest and concern for one's inner circle (friends, family, tribe, etc.) than by explicit utilitarian goals. If unaligned AIs are conscious, they would presumably have ample motives to optimize for positive states of consciousness, even if not for explicitly utilitarian reasons. In other words, agents optimizing for their own happiness, or the happiness of those they care about, seem likely to be the primary force behind the creation of hedonium-like structures. They may not frame it in utilitarian terms, but they will still be striving to maximize happiness and well-being for themselves and others they care about regardless. And it seems natural to assume that, with advanced technology, they would optimize pretty hard for their own happiness and well-being, just as a utilitarian might optimize hard for happiness when creating hedonium. In contrast to the number of agents optimizing for their own happiness, the number of agents explicitly motivated by utilitarian concerns is likely to be much smaller. Yet both forms of happiness will presumably be heavily optimized. So even if explicit utilitarians are more likely to pursue hedonium per se, their impact would likely be dwarfed by the efforts of the much larger group of agents driven by more personal motives for happiness-optimization. Since both groups would be optimizing for happiness, the fact that hedonium is similarly optimized for happiness doesn't seem to provide much reason to think that it would outweigh the utilitarian value of more mundane, and far more common, forms of utility-optimization. To be clear, I think it's totally possible that there's something about this argument that I'm missing here. And there are a lot of potential objections I'm skipping over here. But on a basic level, I mostly just lack the intuition that the thing we should care about, from a utilitarian perspective, is the existence of explicit utilitarians in the future, for the aforementioned reasons. The fact that our current world isn't well described by the idea that what matters most is the number of explicit utilitarians, strengthens my point here. (ii) "At present, only a small proportion of humanity holds slightly utilitarian views. However, as unaligned AIs will differ from humans across numerous dimensions, it is plausible that they will possess negligible utilitarian impulses, in stark contrast to humanity's modest (but non-negligible) utilitarian tendencies." My response: Since only a small portion of humanity is explicitly utilitarian, the argument's own logic suggests that there is significant potential for AIs to be even more utilitarian than humans, given the relatively low bar set by humanity's limited utilitarian impulses. While I agree we shouldn't assume AIs will be more utilitarian than humans without specific reasons to believe so, it seems entirely plausible that factors like selection pressures for altruism could lead to this outcome. Indeed, commercial AIs seem to be selected to be nice and helpful to users, which (at least superficially) seems "more utilitarian" than the default (primarily selfish-oriented) impulses of most humans. The fact that humans are only slightly utilitarian should mean that even small forces could cause AIs to exceed human levels of utilitarianism. Moreover, as I've said previously, it's probable that unaligned AIs will possess morally relevant consciousness, at least in part due to the sophistication of their cognitive processes. They are also likely to absorb and reflect human moral concepts as a result of being trained on human-generated data. Crucially, I expect these traits to emerge even if the AIs do not share human preferences.  To see where I'm coming from, consider how humans routinely are "misaligned" with each other, in the sense of not sharing each other's preferences, and yet still share moral concepts and a common culture. For example, an employee can share moral concepts with their employer while having very different consumption preferences from them. This picture is pretty much how I think we should primarily think about unaligned AIs that are trained on human data, and shaped heavily by techniques like RLHF or DPO. Given these considerations, I find it unlikely that unaligned AIs would completely lack any utilitarian impulses whatsoever. However, I do agree that even a small risk of this outcome is worth taking seriously. I'm simply skeptical that such low-probability scenarios should be the primary factor in assessing the value of AI alignment research. Intuitively, I would expect the arguments for prioritizing alignment to be more clear-cut and compelling than "if we fail to align AIs, then there's a small chance that these unaligned AIs might have zero utilitarian value, so we should make sure AIs are aligned instead". If low probability scenarios are the strongest considerations in favor of alignment, that seems to undermine the robustness of the case for prioritizing this work. While it's appropriate to consider even low-probability risks when the stakes are high, I'm doubtful that small probabilities should be the dominant consideration in this context. I think the core reasons for focusing on alignment should probably be more straightforward and less reliant on complicated chains of logic than this type of argument suggests. In particular, as I've said before, I think it's quite reasonable to think that we should align AIs to humans for the sake of humans. In other words, I think it's perfectly reasonable to admit that solving AI alignment might be a great thing to ensure human flourishing in particular. But if you're a utilitarian, and not particularly attached to human preferences per se (i.e., you're non-speciesist), I don't think you should be highly confident that an unaligned AI-driven future would be much worse than an aligned one, from that perspective.

With another EAG nearby, I thought now would be a good time to push out this draft-y note. I'm sure I'm missing a mountain of nuance, but I stand by the main messages:   "Keep Talking" I think there are two things EAs could be doing more of, on the margin. They are cheap, easy, and have the potential to unlock value in unsuspecting ways. Talk to more people I say this 15 times a week. It's the most no-brainer thing I can think of, with a ridiculously low barrier to entry; it's usually net-positive for one while often only drawing on unproductive hours of the other. Almost nobody would be where they were without the conversations they had. Some anecdotes: - A conversation led both parties discovering a good mentor-mentee fit, leading to one dropping out of a PhD, being mentored on a project, and becoming an alignment researcher. - A first conversation led to more conversations which led to more conversations, one of which illuminated a new route to impact which this person was a tremendously good fit for. They're now working as a congressional staffer. - A chat with a former employee gave an applicant insight about a company they were interviewing with and helped them land the job (many, many such cases). - A group that is running a valuable fellowship programme germinated from a conversation between three folks who previously were unacquainted (the founders) (again, many such cases).   Make more introductions to others (or at least suggest who they should reach out to) By hoarding our social capital we might leave ungodly amounts of value on the table. Develop your instincts and learn to trust them! Put people you speak with in touch with other people who they should speak with -- especially if they're earlier in their discovery of using evidence and reason to do more good in the world. (By all means, be protective of those whose time is 2 OOMs more precious; but within +/- 1, let's get more people connected: exchanging ideas, improving our thinking, illuminating truth, building trust.  At EAG, at the very least, point people to others they should be talking to. The effort in doing so is so, so low, and the benefits could be massive.

Edgy and data-driven TED talk on how the older generations in America are undermining the youth. Worth a watch.  

I am concerned about the H5N1 situation in dairy cows and have written and overview document to which I occasionally add new learnings (new to me or new to world). I also set up a WhatsApp community that anyone is welcome to join for discussion & sharing news. In brief: * I believe there are quite a few (~50-250) humans infected recently, but no sustained human-to-human transmission * I estimate the Infection Fatality Rate substantially lower than the ALERT team (theirs is 63% that CFR >= 10%), something like 80%CI = 0.1 - 5.0 * The government's response is astoundingly bad - I find it insane that raw milk is still being sold, with a high likelihood that some of it contains infectious H5N1 * There are still quite a few genetic barriers to sustained human-to-human transmission * This might be a good time to push specific pandemic preparedness policies

Going to quickly share that I'm going to take a step back from commenting on the Forum for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of ideas in my head that I want to work into top-level posts to hopefully spur insightful and useful conversation amongst the community, and while I'll still be reading and engaging I do have a limited amount of time I want to spend on the Forum and I think it'd be better for me to move that focus to posts rather than comments for a bit.[1] If you do want to get in touch about anything, please reach out and I'll try my very best to respond. Also, if you're going to be in London for EA Global, then I'll be around and very happy to catch up :) 1. ^ Though if it's a highly engaged/important discussion and there's an important viewpoint that I think is missing I may weigh in

I worked at OpenAI for three years, from 2021-2024 on the Alignment team, which eventually became the Superalignment team. I worked on scalable oversight, part of the team developing critiques as a technique for using language models to spot mistakes in other language models. I then worked to refine an idea from Nick Cammarata into a method for using language model to generate explanations for features in language models. I was then promoted to managing a team of 4 people which worked on trying to understand language model features in context, leading to the release of an open source "transformer debugger" tool. I resigned from OpenAI on February 15, 2024.

I think some of the AI safety policy community has over-indexed on the visual model of the "Overton Window" and under-indexed on alternatives like the "ratchet effect," "poisoning the well," "clown attacks," and other models where proposing radical changes can make you, your allies, and your ideas look unreasonable. I'm not familiar with a lot of systematic empirical evidence on either side, but it seems to me like the more effective actors in the DC establishment overall are much more in the habit of looking for small wins that are both good in themselves and shrink the size of the ask for their ideal policy than of pushing for their ideal vision and then making concessions. Possibly an ideal ecosystem has both strategies, but it seems possible that at least some versions of "Overton Window-moving" strategies executed in practice have larger negative effects via associating their "side" with unreasonable-sounding ideas in the minds of very bandwidth-constrained policymakers, who strongly lean on signals of credibility and consensus when quickly evaluating policy options, than the positive effects of increasing the odds of ideal policy and improving the framing for non-ideal but pretty good policies. In theory, the Overton Window model is just a description of what ideas are taken seriously, so it can indeed accommodate backfire effects where you argue for an idea "outside the window" and this actually makes the window narrower. But I think the visual imagery of "windows" actually struggles to accommodate this -- when was the last time you tried to open a window and accidentally closed it instead? -- and as a result, people who rely on this model are more likely to underrate these kinds of consequences. Would be interested in empirical evidence on this question (ideally actual studies from psych, political science, sociology, econ, etc literatures, rather than specific case studies due to reference class tennis type issues).

Trump recently said in an interview (https://time.com/6972973/biden-trump-bird-flu-covid/) that he would seek to disband the White House office for pandemic preparedness. Given that he usually doesn't give specifics on his policy positions, this seems like something he is particularly interested in. I know politics is discouraged on the EA forum, but I thought I would post this to say: EA should really be preparing for a Trump presidency. He's up in the polls and IMO has a >50% chance of winning the election. Right now politicians seem relatively receptive to EA ideas, this may change under a Trump administration.

Excerpt from the most recent update from the ALERT team:   Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1: What a week! The news, data, and analyses are coming in fast and furious. Overall, ALERT team members feel that the risk of an H5N1 pandemic emerging over the coming decade is increasing. Team members estimate that the chance that the WHO will declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) within 1 year from now because of an H5N1 virus, in whole or in part, is 0.9% (range 0.5%-1.3%). The team sees the chance going up substantially over the next decade, with the 5-year chance at 13% (range 10%-15%) and the 10-year chance increasing to 25% (range 20%-30%).   their estimated 10 year risk is a lot higher than I would have anticipated.

Not sure how to post these two thoughts so I might as well combine them. In an ideal world, SBF should have been sentenced to thousands of years in prison. This is partially due to the enormous harm done to both FTX depositors and EA, but mainly for basic deterrence reasons; a risk-neutral person will not mind 25 years in prison if the ex ante upside was becoming a trillionaire. However, I also think many lessons from SBF's personal statements e.g. his interview on 80k are still as valid as ever. Just off the top of my head: * Startup-to-give as a high EV career path. Entrepreneurship is why we have OP and SFF! Perhaps also the importance of keeping as much equity as possible, although in the process one should not lie to investors or employees more than is standard. * Ambition and working really hard as success multipliers in entrepreneurship. * A career decision algorithm that includes doing a BOTEC and rejecting options that are 10x worse than others. * It is probably okay to work in an industry that is slightly bad for the world if you do lots of good by donating. [1] (But fraud is still bad, of course.) Just because SBF stole billions of dollars does not mean he has fewer virtuous personality traits than the average person. He hits at least as many multipliers than the average reader of this forum. But importantly, maximization is perilous; some particular qualities like integrity and good decision-making are absolutely essential, and if you lack them your impact could be multiplied by minus 20.     [1] The unregulated nature of crypto may have allowed the FTX fraud, but things like the zero-sum zero-NPV nature of many cryptoassets, or its negative climate impacts, seem unrelated. Many industries are about this bad for the world, like HFT or some kinds of social media. I do not think people who criticized FTX on these grounds score many points. However, perhaps it was (weak) evidence towards FTX being willing to do harm in general for a perceived greater good, which is maybe plausible especially if Ben Delo also did market manipulation or otherwise acted immorally. Also note that in the interview, SBF didn't claim his donations offset a negative direct impact; he said the impact was likely positive, which seems dubious.

In this "quick take", I want to summarize some my idiosyncratic views on AI risk.  My goal here is to list just a few ideas that cause me to approach the subject differently from how I perceive most other EAs view the topic. These ideas largely push me in the direction of making me more optimistic about AI, and less likely to support heavy regulations on AI. (Note that I won't spend a lot of time justifying each of these views here. I'm mostly stating these points without lengthy justifications, in case anyone is curious. These ideas can perhaps inform why I spend significant amounts of my time pushing back against AI risk arguments. Not all of these ideas are rare, and some of them may indeed be popular among EAs.) 1. Skepticism of the treacherous turn: The treacherous turn is the idea that (1) at some point there will be a very smart unaligned AI, (2) when weak, this AI will pretend to be nice, but (3) when sufficiently strong, this AI will turn on humanity by taking over the world by surprise, and then (4) optimize the universe without constraint, which would be very bad for humans. By comparison, I find it more likely that no individual AI will ever be strong enough to take over the world, in the sense of overthrowing the world's existing institutions and governments by surprise. Instead, I broadly expect unaligned AIs will integrate into society and try to accomplish their goals by advocating for their legal rights, rather than trying to overthrow our institutions by force. Upon attaining legal personhood, unaligned AIs can utilize their legal rights to achieve their objectives, for example by getting a job and trading their labor for property, within the already-existing institutions. Because the world is not zero sum, and there are economic benefits to scale and specialization, this argument implies that unaligned AIs may well have a net-positive effect on humans, as they could trade with us, producing value in exchange for our own property and services. Note that my claim here is not that AIs will never become smarter than humans. One way of seeing how these two claims are distinguished is to compare my scenario to the case of genetically engineered humans. By assumption, if we genetically engineered humans, they would presumably eventually surpass ordinary humans in intelligence (along with social persuasion ability, and ability to deceive etc.). However, by itself, the fact that genetically engineered humans will become smarter than non-engineered humans does not imply that genetically engineered humans would try to overthrow the government. Instead, as in the case of AIs, I expect genetically engineered humans would largely try to work within existing institutions, rather than violently overthrow them. 2. AI alignment will probably be somewhat easy: The most direct and strongest current empirical evidence we have about the difficulty of AI alignment, in my view, comes from existing frontier LLMs, such as GPT-4. Having spent dozens of hours testing GPT-4's abilities and moral reasoning, I think the system is already substantially more law-abiding, thoughtful and ethical than a large fraction of humans. Most importantly, this ethical reasoning extends (in my experience) to highly unusual thought experiments that almost certainly did not appear in its training data, demonstrating a fair degree of ethical generalization, beyond mere memorization. It is conceivable that GPT-4's apparently ethical nature is fake. Perhaps GPT-4 is lying about its motives to me and in fact desires something completely different than what it professes to care about. Maybe GPT-4 merely "understands" or "predicts" human morality without actually "caring" about human morality. But while these scenarios are logically possible, they seem less plausible to me than the simple alternative explanation that alignment—like many other properties of ML models—generalizes well, in the natural way that you might similarly expect from a human. Of course, the fact that GPT-4 is easily alignable does not immediately imply that smarter-than-human AIs will be easy to align. However, I think this current evidence is still significant, and aligns well with prior theoretical arguments that alignment would be easy. In particular, I am persuaded by the argument that, because evaluation is usually easier than generation, it should be feasible to accurately evaluate whether a slightly-smarter-than-human AI is taking bad actions, allowing us to shape its rewards during training accordingly. After we've aligned a model that's merely slightly smarter than humans, we can use it to help us align even smarter AIs, and so on, plausibly implying that alignment will scale to indefinitely higher levels of intelligence, without necessarily breaking down at any physically realistic point. 3. The default social response to AI will likely be strong: One reason to support heavy regulations on AI right now is if you think the natural "default" social response to AI will lean too heavily on the side of laissez faire than optimal, i.e., by default, we will have too little regulation rather than too much. In this case, you could believe that, by advocating for regulations now, you're making it more likely that we regulate AI a bit more than we otherwise would have, pushing us closer to the optimal level of regulation. I'm quite skeptical of this argument because I think that the default response to AI (in the absence of intervention from the EA community) will already be quite strong. My view here is informed by the base rate of technologies being overregulated, which I think is quite high. In fact, it is difficult for me to name even a single technology that I think is currently clearly underregulated by society. By pushing for more regulation on AI, I think it's likely that we will overshoot and over-constrain AI relative to the optimal level. In other words, my personal bias is towards thinking that society will regulate technologies too heavily, rather than too loosely. And I don't see a strong reason to think that AI will be any different from this general historical pattern. This makes me hesitant to push for more regulation on AI, since on my view, the marginal impact of my advocacy would likely be to push us even further in the direction of "too much regulation", overshooting the optimal level by even more than what I'd expect in the absence of my advocacy. 4. I view unaligned AIs as having comparable moral value to humans: This idea was explored in one of my most recent posts. The basic idea is that, under various physicalist views of consciousness, you should expect AIs to be conscious, even if they do not share human preferences. Moreover, it seems likely that AIs — even ones that don't share human preferences — will be pretrained on human data, and therefore largely share our social and moral concepts. Since unaligned AIs will likely be both conscious and share human social and moral concepts, I don't see much reason to think of them as less "deserving" of life and liberty, from a cosmopolitan moral perspective. They will likely think similarly to the way we do across a variety of relevant axes, even if their neural structures are quite different from our own. As a consequence, I am pretty happy to incorporate unaligned AIs into the legal system and grant them some control of the future, just as I'd be happy to grant some control of the future to human children, even if they don't share my exact values. Put another way, I view (what I perceive as) the EA attempt to privilege "human values" over "AI values" as being largely arbitrary and baseless, from an impartial moral perspective. There are many humans whose values I vehemently disagree with, but I nonetheless respect their autonomy, and do not wish to deny these humans their legal rights. Likewise, even if I strongly disagreed with the values of an advanced AI, I would still see value in their preferences being satisfied for their own sake, and I would try to respect the AI's autonomy and legal rights. I don't have a lot of faith in the inherent kindness of human nature relative to a "default unaligned" AI alternative. 5. I'm not fully committed to longtermism: I think AI has an enormous potential to benefit the lives of people who currently exist. I predict that AIs can eventually substitute for human researchers, and thereby accelerate technological progress, including in medicine. In combination with my other beliefs (such as my belief that AI alignment will probably be somewhat easy), this view leads me to think that AI development will likely be net-positive for people who exist at the time of alignment. In other words, if we allow AI development, it is likely that we can use AI to reduce human mortality, and dramatically raise human well-being for the people who already exist. I think these benefits are large and important, and commensurate with the downside potential of existential risks. While a fully committed strong longtermist might scoff at the idea that curing aging might be important — as it would largely only have short-term effects, rather than long-term effects that reverberate for billions of years — by contrast, I think it's really important to try to improve the lives of people who currently exist. Many people view this perspective as a form of moral partiality that we should discard for being arbitrary. However, I think morality is itself arbitrary: it can be anything we want it to be. And I choose to value currently existing humans, to a substantial (though not overwhelming) degree. This doesn't mean I'm a fully committed near-termist. I sympathize with many of the intuitions behind longtermism. For example, if curing aging required raising the probability of human extinction by 40 percentage points, or something like that, I don't think I'd do it. But in more realistic scenarios that we are likely to actually encounter, I think it's plausibly a lot better to accelerate AI, rather than delay AI, on current margins. This view simply makes sense to me given the enormously positive effects I expect AI will likely have on the people I currently know and love, if we allow development to continue.

First in-ovo sexing in the US Egg Innovations announced that they are "on track to adopt the technology in early 2025." Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this.  UEP originally promised to eliminate male chick culling by 2020; needless to say, they didn't keep that commitment. But better late than never!  Congrats to everyone working on this, including @Robert - Innovate Animal Ag, who founded an organization devoted to pushing this technology.[1] 1. ^ Egg Innovations says they can't disclose details about who they are working with for NDA reasons; if anyone has more information about who deserves credit for this, please comment!

Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1. Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 Mana to 1 USD:1000 Mana on May 1. Thankfully, the 10k USD/month charity cap will not be in place until then. Also this part might be relevant for people with large positions they want to sell now: > One week may not be enough time for users with larger portfolios to liquidate and donate. We want to work individually with anyone who feels like they are stuck in this situation and honor their expected returns and agree on an amount they can donate at the original 100:1 rate past the one week deadline once the relevant markets have resolved.

GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo! Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views

CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA's three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions. This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape.  See more details and apply here!

Animal Justice Appreciation Note Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it. Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!

Marcus Daniell appreciation note @Marcus Daniell, cofounder of High Impact Athletes, came back from knee surgery and is donating half of his prize money this year. He projects raising $100,000. Through a partnership with Momentum, people can pledge to donate for each point he gets; he has raised $28,000 through this so far. It's cool to see this, and I'm wishing him luck for his final year of professional play!

FHI has shut down yesterday: https://www.futureofhumanityinstitute.org/

An alternate stance on moderation (from @Habryka.) This is from this comment responding to this post about there being too many bans on LessWrong. Note how the LessWrong is less moderated than here in that it (I guess) responds to individual posts less often, but more moderated in that I guess it rate limits people more without reason.  I found it thought provoking. I'd recommend reading it. > Thanks for making this post!  > > One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like "1 comment per 3 days" is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as "please comment primarily on your own posts", though of course it shares many important properties of a ban). This is a pretty opposite approach to the EA forum which favours bans. > Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy:  > > Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort > > "Another thing I've noticed is that almost all the users are trying.  They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what's been written here, trying to apply Baye's rule or understand AI.  Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty." > > Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don't fit well within that culture and those standards.  > > In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying " to contribute to LW,  I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing.  > > Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren't even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future. I sense this is quite different to the EA forum too. I can't imagine a mod saying I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying". I find this honesty pretty stark. Feels like a thing moderators aren't allowed to say. "We don't like the quality of your comments and we don't think you can improve". > Signal to Noise ratio is important > > Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone's comments don't seem actively bad, doesn't mean I don't want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.  > > We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose. > Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not > > I think if you've been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven't invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little.  > > I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we've been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don't think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don't think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden.  > > You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don't want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don't want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we've been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don't invest in something that will end up being taken away from you. > > Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn't > > Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things.  > > I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn't positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don't really think "give people specific and detailed feedback" is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it. > > I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people's english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues. Again this is very blunt but I'm not sure it's wrong.  > We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions > > It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible.  > > As such, we don't have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes. > > I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is. > > I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber > > When making moderation decisions, it's always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above. > > I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to...  > > * argue from authority,  > * don't like speaking in probabilistic terms,  > * aren't comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time,  > * or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms,  > > then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn't exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site). It feels cringe to read that basically if I don't get the sequences lessWrong might rate limit me. But it is good to be open about it. I don't think the EA forum's core philosophy is as easily expressed. > If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site. > > Now some more comments on the object-level:  > > I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site.  > > Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics). > > Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it's worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them. 

I am not confident that another FTX level crisis is less likely to happen, other than that we might all say "oh this feels a bit like FTX". Changes: * Board swaps. Yeah maybe good, though many of the people who left were very experienced. And it's not clear whether there are due diligence people (which seems to be what was missing). * Orgs being spun out of EV and EV being shuttered. I mean, maybe good though feels like it's swung too far. Many mature orgs should run on their own, but small orgs do have many replicable features. * More talking about honesty. Not really sure this was the problem. The issue wasn't the median EA it was in the tails. Are the tails of EA more honest? Hard to say * We have now had a big crisis so it's less costly to say "this might be like that big crisis". Though notably this might also be too cheap - we could flinch away from doing ambitious things * Large orgs seem slightly more beholden to comms/legal to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing. * OpenPhil is hiring more internally Non-changes: * Still very centralised. I'm pretty pro-elite, so I'm not sure this is a problem in and of itself, though I have come to think that elites in general are less competent than I thought before (see FTX and OpenAI crisis) * Little discussion of why or how the affiliation with SBF happened despite many well connected EAs having a low opinion of him * Little discussion of what led us to ignore the base rate of scamminess in crypto and how we'll avoid that in future