Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
I wish Clara had pushed Jason more in this interview about what EA is and what Jason's issues with it are in more specific detail. I think he's kind-of attacking an enemy of his own making (linking @jasoncrawford so he can correct me). For example:
My impression is that Jason is rhetorically trying to set EA up as a poor alternative to Progress Studies/Progress movement/whatever so that he can knock it down. (e.g. see this twitter thread of his for an example - of note here he uses Helen Toner as an example of an EA driven to a terrible decision by EA ideology, whereas now it seems to be a case of a playing a high-stakes power-struggle and losing. I wonder if he has made a correction.) This article is Jason presenting his take on what the differences are, and I don't think that it's an unbiased one or one that's devoid of strategic intent.
tl;dr - I don't really recognise the EA Jason is presenting here that much,[1] and I think he's using it deliberately as a foil to increase the stature of the 'Progress Community'
Maybe it's a Bay vs UK thing, I don't know