TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
I wrote two posts exploring suffering, both with plenty of links to more resources thinking about what we mean by "suffering": "Is Feedback Suffering?" and "Suffering and Intractable Pain".
My views have evolved since I wrote those posts so I don't necessarily endorse everything in them anymore, but hopefully they are useful starting points. For what it's worth, my view now is more akin to the traditional Buddhist view on suffering as described by the teaching on dependent origination.
Are you familiar with tranquilism, which is in part inspired by Buddhist views of wellbeing?
Yes, Lukas's post was what got me thinking about suffering in more detail and helped lead to the creation of those two posts. I think it's linked from one or both of them.