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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
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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....
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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.
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Thanks for sharing, interesting article.
It seems like we basically have a situation where supply is low but the marginal units are very valuable (as they are replacing small gensets). If so, is the underlying issue just that prices are too low? If electricity prices were allowed to rise to the market-clearing rate (ideally using the sort of market mechanisms used in PJM or ERCOT, but alternatively just by using PPAs) supply would increase, and there might be some degree of demand efficiency improvements. The government shouldn't need to build generation capacity - this is firmly within the expertise of the private sector.