This is a special post for quick takes by Milan Weibel🔹. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Comment Permalink
Thanks for the suggestion! This should be relatively quick to add so I'll see if we can do it soon. :) I was also thinking of setting up a bluesky bot account similar to our twitter account. Do you know how active the EA-ish bluesky community is?
High-variance. Most people seem to have created an account and then gone back to being mostly on (eX)twitter. However, there are some quite active accounts. I'm not the best to ask this question to, since I'm not that active either. Still, having the bluesky account post as a mirror of the twitter acccount maybe isn't hard to set up?
Contra hard moral anti-realism: a rough sequence of claims
Epistemic and provenance note: This post should not be taken as an attempt at a complete refutation of moral anti-realism, but rather as a set of observations and intuitions that may or may not give one pause as to the wisdom of taking a hard moral anti-realist stance. I may clean it up to construct a more formal argument in the future. I wrote it on a whim as a Telegram message, in direct response to the claim
> “you can't find "values" in reality”.
Yet, you can find valence in your own experiences (that is, you just know from direct experience whether you like the sensations you are experiencing or not), and you can assume other people are likely to have a similar enough stimulus-valence mapping. (Example: I'm willing to bet 2k USD on my part against a single dollar yours that that if I waterboard you, you'll want to stop before 3 minutes have passed.)[1]
However, since we humans are bounded imperfect rationalists, trying to explicitly optimize valence is often a dumb strategy. Evolution has made us not into fitness-maximizers, nor valence-maximizers, but adaptation-executers.
"values" originate as (thus are) reifications of heuristics that reliably increase long term valence in the real world (subject to memetic selection pressures, among them social desirability of utterances, adaptativeness of behavioral effects, etc.)
If you find yourself terminally valuing something that is not someone's experienced valence, then either one of these propositions is likely true:
- A nonsentient process has at some point had write access to your values.
What you value is a means to improving somebody's experienced valence, and so are you now.
crossposted from lesswrong
- ^
In retrospect, making this proposition was a bit crass on my part.
In a certain sense, an LLM's token embedding matrix is a machine ontology. Semantically similar tokens have similar embeddings in the latent space. However, different models may have learned different associations when their embedding matrix was trained. Every forward pass starts colored by ontological assumptions, an these may have alignment implications.
For instance, we would presumably not want a model to operate within an ontology that associates the concept of AI with the concept of evil, particularly if it is then prompted to instantiate a simulacrum that believes it is an AI.
Has someone looked into this? That is, the alignment implications of different token embedding matrices? I feel like it would involve calculating a lot of cosine similarities and doing some evals.
Curated and popular this week
·
[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
·
I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
·
Need help planning your career? Probably Good’s 1-1 advising service is back! After refining our approach and expanding our capacity, we’re excited to once again offer personal advising sessions to help people figure out how to build careers that are good for them and for the world.
Our advising is open to people at all career stages who want to have a positive impact across a range of cause areas—whether you're early in your career, looking to make a transition, or facing uncertainty about your next steps. Some applicants come in with specific plans they want feedback on, while others are just beginning to explore what impactful careers could look like for them. Either way, we aim to provide useful guidance tailored to your situation.
Learn more about our advising program and apply here.
Also, if you know someone who might benefit from an advising call, we’d really appreciate you passing this along. Looking forward to hearing from those interested. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
Finally, we wanted to say a big thank you to 80,000 Hours for their help! The input that they gave us, both now and earlier in the process, was instrumental in shaping what our advising program will look like, and we really appreciate their support.
High-variance. Most people seem to have created an account and then gone back to being mostly on (eX)twitter. However, there are some quite active accounts. I'm not the best to ask this question to, since I'm not that active either. Still, having the bluesky account post as a mirror of the twitter acccount maybe isn't hard to set up?