Hide table of contents

For Existential Choices Debate Week, we’re trying out a new type of event: the Existential Choices Symposium. It'll be a written discussion between invited guests and any Forum user who'd like to join in. 

How it works:

  • Any forum user can write a top-level comment that asks a question or introduces a consideration, the answer of which might affect people’s answer to the debate statement[1]. For example: “Are there any interventions aimed at increasing the value of the future that are as widely morally supported as extinction-risk reduction?” You can start writing these comments now.
  • The symposium’s signed-up participants, Will MacAskill, Tyler John, Michael St Jules, Andreas Mogensen and Greg Colbourn, will respond to questions, and discuss them with each other and other forum users, in the comments.
  • To be 100% clear - you, the reader, are very welcome to join in any conversation on this post. You don't have to be a listed participant to take part. 

This is an experiment. We’ll see how it goes and maybe run something similar next time. Feedback is welcome (message me with feedback here).

The symposium participants will be online between 3 - 5 pm GMT on Monday the 17th.

Brief bios for participants (mistakes mine):

  • Will MacAskill is an Associate Professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow at Forethought. He wrote the books Doing Good Better, Moral Uncertainty, and What We Owe The Future. He is the cofounder of Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, Centre for Effective Altruism and the Global Priorities Institute.
  • Tyler John is an AI researcher, grantmaker, and philanthropic advisor. He is an incoming Visiting Scholar at the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and an advisor to multiple philanthropists. He was previously the Programme Officer for emerging technology governance and Head of Research at Longview Philanthropy. Tyler holds a PhD in philosophy from Rutgers University—New Brunswick, where his dissertation focused on longtermist political philosophy and mechanism design, and the case for moral trajectory change.
  • Michael St Jules is an independent researcher, who has written on “philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals”.
  • Andreas Mogensen is a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Global Priorities Institute, part of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. His current research interests are primarily in normative and applied ethics. His previous publications have addressed topics in meta-ethics and moral epistemology, especially those associated with evolutionary debunking arguments.
  • Greg Colbourn is the co-founder of CEEALAR and currently an advocate for Pause AI, which promotes the idea of a global AI moratorium.

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to contribute to this discussion, write some questions below which could be discussed in the symposium. 

  1. ^

    You can find the debate statement, and all its caveats, here.

45

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments2


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

This is a cool idea! Will this be recorded for people who can't attend live? 

Edit: nevermind, I think I'm confused; I take it this is all happening in writing/in the comments.

Yep it'll all be in the comments, so if you aren't around you can read it later (and I'm sure a bunch of the conversations will continue, just potentially without the guests)
this was a good flag btw - I've changed the first sentence to be clearer!

Curated and popular this week
Sam Anschell
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer. I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can sometimes save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This is because negotiating doesn’t take very much time[1], savings can persist across multiple years, and counterparties can be surprisingly generous with discounts. Here are a few examples of expenses that may be negotiable: For organizations * Software or news subscriptions * Of 35 corporate software and news providers I’ve negotiated with, 30 have been willing to provide discounts. These discounts range from 10% to 80%, with an average of around 40%. * Leases * A friend was able to negotiate a 22% reduction in the price per square foot on a corporate lease and secured a couple months of free rent. This led to >$480,000 in savings for their nonprofit. Other negotiable parameters include: * Square footage counted towards rent costs * Lease length * A tenant improvement allowance * Certain physical goods (e.g., smart TVs) * Buying in bulk can be a great lever for negotiating smaller items like covid tests, and can reduce costs by 50% or more. * Event/retreat venues (both venue price and smaller items like food and AV) * Hotel blocks * A quick email with the rates of comparable but more affordable hotel blocks can often save ~10%. * Professional service contracts with large for-profit firms (e.g., IT contracts, office internet coverage) * Insurance premiums (though I am less confident that this is negotiable) For many products and services, a nonprofit can qualify for a discount simply by providing their IRS determination letter or getting verified on platforms like TechSoup. In my experience, most vendors and companies
jackva
 ·  · 3m read
 · 
 [Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added] Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions. Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be. Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more. But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.). While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity. When the world seems to
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar. We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overton window. More details on our website. Why we exist We think that AGI might come soon (say, modal timelines to mostly-automated AI R&D in the next 2-8 years), and might significantly accelerate technological progress, leading to many different challenges. We don’t yet have a good understanding of what this change might look like or how to navigate it. Society is not prepared. Moreover, we want the world to not just avoid catastrophe: we want to reach a really great future. We think about what this might be like (incorporating moral uncertainty), and what we can do, now, to build towards a good future. Like all projects, this started out with a plethora of Google docs. We ran a series of seminars to explore the ideas further, and that cascaded into an organization. This area of work feels to us like the early days of EA: we’re exploring unusual, neglected ideas, and finding research progress surprisingly tractable. And while we start out with (literally) galaxy-brained schemes, they often ground out into fairly specific and concrete ideas about what should happen next. Of course, we’re bringing principles like scope sensitivity, impartiality, etc to our thinking, and we think that these issues urgently need more morally dedicated and thoughtful people working on them. Research Research agendas We are currently pursuing the following perspectives: * Preparing for the intelligence explosion: If AI drives explosive growth there will be an enormous number of challenges we have to face. In addition to misalignment risk and biorisk, this potentially includes: how to govern the development of new weapons of mass destr