Comments
I appreciate the initiative! AI Safety is rich with disagreements, and it's nice to have an opportunity to easily map out the range of existing views. Thanks for sharing!
Curated and popular this week
74
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
Why the downvotes?
Maybe because P(doom) ranges from 10% to 99% excludes many people that state a lower P(doom) or refuse to state a number.
Maybe because Will MacAskill sits at 10–20%, calling himself "optimistic today" — but notes this is among the lowest estimates in serious circles implies people that state a lower number are not serious.
Those were my reasons to think of downvoting. In the end I didn't do it because at the time the post was already in the negatives.
There is a huge selection bias coming into play here, where people that appear in AI safety podcasts or use the expression P(doom) have self-selected for higher numbers than people that don't, and this is not addressed in the post.
Ok - that's fair. There's also the issue that doom means very different things to different people.
You're making good points. The selection bias one especially.Â
The corpus is AI safety-focused podcasts (AXRP, 80,000 Hours,Â
The Inside View, etc.), so it skews toward people who alreadyÂ
take alignment seriously. LeCun, Ng, and others who think theÂ
framing is wrong don't typically appear on those shows, andÂ
when they do they're pushing back on the premise rather thanÂ
giving a number.
The "10 to 99%" framing was honest about what's in this corpusÂ
but you're right that it implies a complete range. The "MacAskillÂ
among the lowest in serious circles" line was sloppy. ThatÂ
phrasing came from his own framing on 80k Hours but it carriesÂ
an implication I didn't intend.
If anyone has pointers to AI safety podcast episodes with peopleÂ
in the under-5% range or rejecting the framing entirely, I'dÂ
appreciate it. That's a real gap in coverage I should address.
Thanks for asking, honestly not sure why the early downvotes.Â
Guess the framing read too promotional first time around. Karma'sÂ
recovered since. Worth mentioning the mobile experience was brokenÂ
back then; that's fixed now if it matters.