Vaipan's Quick takes

I feel that we haven't taken seriously the lessons from SBF given what happened at OpenAI

How specifically? Seems to me you could easily argue that SBF should make us more skeptical of charismatic leaders like Sam Altman.

When will we learn? I feel that we haven't taken seriously the lessons from SBF given what happened at OpenAI and the split in the community concerning support for Altman and his crazy projects.

Huh? What's the lesson from FTX that would have improved the OpenAI situation?

Some reactions I have to this:

• In my (limited) personal experience, AI safety / longtermism isn't diverse along racial or gender lines, which probably indicates talented people aren't being picked up. Seems worth figuring out how to do a better job here. Similarly for EA as a whole, although this varies between cause area (iirc EA animal advocacy has a higher % of women than EA as a whole?)
• I'm genuinely unsure how accurate / fair the statement "EA has an issue of sexism" is. But certainly there is a nonzero amount, which is more than there should be, and the accounts of sexism and related unwelcome-attitudes-toward-women in the community make me very sad.
• The optimal amount of "cultural offputtingness" is not zero. It should be possible to "keep EA weird" without compromising on racial/gender/etc inclusion, and there are a lot of contingent weird things about EA that aren't core to its goodness. But there are also a lot of ways I can see a less-weird EA being a less-good EA overall. 
• The link between increased diversity / decreased tech-bro reputation and passing AI safety regulations seems tenuous to me.
  • I have a general, vague sense that "do this for PR reasons" is not a good way to get something done well
  • It doesn't seem like public perception updates very frequently (to take one example, here's Fast Company two days ago saying ETG is the "core premise" of EA). I don't think we should completely give up here, but unfortunately the "EA = techbro" perception is pretty baked in and I expect it to only change very gradually, if at all.
  • EA is also not very politically diverse -- there are very few Republicans, and even the ones that are around tend to be committed libertarians rather than mainstream GOP voters. If we're just considering the impact on passing AI safety regulations, having a less left-leaning public image could be more useful. (For the reasons in the two bullet points above though, I'm also skeptical of this idea; I just think it has a similar a priori plausibility.)
• On reflection, I think the somewhat combative tone (framing disagreement as "refusal to admit" and being "in denial") is fine here, but it did negatively color my initial reading, and probably contributed to some downvotes / disagree votes.

Also talk to me if you recognize this cultural offputtingness I'm talking about: I'm preparing a series of posts on diversity and AI and need to back it up as much as I can, despite the youth of the field. 

The "please send me supporting anecdotes" method of evidence gathering.

Bay Area and London are very costly and living there clearly increases your carbon footprint

I'm not going to dispute that those places have very high costs of living, but for carbon footprint, are you sure? I thought that the general trend was that cities (or any dense population area) tend to have lower carbon footprints due to more public transportation, more walking, and the general consolidation of everything. Am I mis-remembering this?

What you write strikes me as true: there does seem to be a tendency for EAs to focus on their particular cause area and to neglect/ignore other areas of ethical behavior. Here is my very rough typology, off the top of my head:

Sometimes these things look bad, but actually make sense. I've sure we've all heard stories about people who pay someone to clean their house or to wash their dishes, and that looks really weird to me. But if you are actually producing something of great value in the 10 minutes it would take you to wash your dishes, then I can see how it kind of makes sense to pay someone else a modest amount of money to wash your dishes for you. Paying money for a taxi rather than taking the city bus seems wasteful to me, but if you can actually get 30 minutes of work done in the taxi that you wouldn't be able to do on the bus, then I can understand the logic of it. Team retreats might fall into this category: a dozen people getting together at a tropical Airbnb using donor money is bad optics, but if we measure the gains comes out net positive I don't really have many complaints about it.

Sometimes there is simply ethical fading in one area because of such a large focus in another area. My best guess is that flights, consumption, and carbon footprint mostly fall into this category. Think of the people work on X-risk who eat dead animals. Or think about me when I didn't think about my carbon footprint while flying to a new city to meet EA people and talk about impact; I was thinking about networking rather than about climate.

And sometimes people just make silly or bad decisions. Person_A slept with Person_B, even though they work at the same small organization. Was that a great decision? No, they made a mistake. John_Doe_Org_Leader spoke dismissively and unkindly to a volunteer at an event. Not ideal, but a fumble rather than a travesty.

I do think that we should try harder, but at the same time I don't feel thrilled about asking someone who is dedicating so much energy to dedicate even more.

I think there are good arguments for thinking that personal consumption choices have relatively insignificant impact when compared to the impact you can have with more targeted work.

However, I also think there's likely to be some counter-countersignalling going on. If you mostly hang out with people who don't care about the world, you can't signal uniqueness by living high. But when your peers are already very considerate, choosing to refrain from refraining makes you look like you grok the arguments in the previous paragraph—you're not one of those naive altruists who don't seem to care about 2nd, 3rd, and nth-level arguments.

Fwiw, I just personally want the EA movement to (continue to) embrace a frugal aesthetic, irrespective of the arguments re effectiveness. It doesn't have to be viewed as a tragic sacrifice and hinder your productivity. And I do think it has significant positives on culture & mindset.

I think this is a useful question and I'm glad to be discussing this.

I agree with many of your concerns - and would love to see a more culturally-unified EA on the axis of how conscious we are of our own impact - but I also think you're failing to acknowledge something crucial: As much as EA is about altruism, it is also about focus on what's important, and your post doesn't acknowledge this as a potential trade-off for the folks you're discussing.

You'll find a lot of EA folks perceive climate change as a real problem but also perceive marginal carbon costs as not a thing worth focusing on given all the other problems in the world and the fact that carbon is offsetable. You are reading this as a "careless attitude" but I don't think this is a fair characterization. There are real tradeoffs to be made here about how to use marginal attention; they may be offsetting and just not talking about it, or deciding that it's not going to make enough difference in the short run, but regardless I think you have insufficient evidence to conclude that their attitude is wrong.

(I personally offset all my CO2 with Wren and think for at least 5 minutes about each plane flight I decide to take to decide if it is worth it; but have never written about this till now, and would have no reason to bother writing it down.)

It's not at all obvious to me that marginal carbon actually cashes out as bad even in expectation.

I don't have lots of context about that team/org, but from what I've seen online I do think there might be some issues with that particular team of people that are not representative of the issues within EA more broadly.