Quick takes

A year ago, I wrote "It's OK to Have Unhappy Holidays" during a time when I wasn’t feeling great about the season myself. That post inspired someone to host an impromptu Christmas Eve dinner, inviting others on short notice. Over vegan food and wine, six people came together to share their feelings about the holidays, reflect on the past year with gratitude, and enjoy a truly magical evening. It’s a moment I’m deeply thankful for. Perhaps this could inspire you this year—to host a gathering or spontaneously reach out to those nearby for a walk, a drink, or a shared meal.

Ho-ho-ho, Merry-EV-mas everyone. It is once more the season of festive cheer and especially effective charitable donations, which also means that it's time for the long-awaited-by-nobody-return of the 🎄✨🏆 totally-not-serious-worth-no-internet-points-JWS-Forum-Awards 🏆✨🎄, updated for the 2024! Spreading Forum cheer and good vibes instead of nitpicky criticism!!
 

Best Forum Post I read this year:

Explaining the discrepancies in cost effectiveness ratings: A replication and breakdown of RP's animal welfare cost effectiveness calculations by @titotal&nb... (read more)

As a bit of a lurker, let me echo all of this, particularly the appreciation of @Vasco Grilo🔸. I don't always agree with him, but adding some numbers makes every discussion better!

4
Toby Tremlett🔹
I wish it could be EV-mas every day...  This is great JWS, thanks for writing it! After Forum Wrapped is out in Jan, we should have a list of underrated posts (unsure on exact wording), we'll see how it compares.

If transformative AI is defined by its societal impact rather than its technical capabilities (i.e. TAI as process not a technology), we already have what is needed. The real question isn't about waiting for GPT-X or capability Y - it's about imagining what happens when current AI is deployed 1000x more widely in just a few years. This presents EXTREMELY different problems to solve from a governance and advocacy perspective.

E.g. 1: compute governance might no longer be a good intervention
E.g. 2: "Pause" can't just be about pausing model development. It should also be about pausing implementation across use cases

Personal reasons why I wished I delayed donations: I started donating 10% of my income about 6 years back when I was making Software Engineer money. Then I delayed my donations when I moved into a direct work path, intending to make up the difference later in life. I don't have any regrets about 'donating right away' back then. But if I could do it all over again with the benefit of hindsight, I would have delayed most of my earlier donations too.

First, I've been surprised by 'necessary expenses'. Most of my health care needs have been in therapy and denta... (read more)

Haven't seen anyone mention RAND as a possible best charity for AI stuff and I guess I'd like to throw their hat in the ring or at least invite people to tell me why I'm wrong. My core claims are approximately:

  • Influencing the US (federal) government is probably one of the most scalable cost-effective routes for AI safety.
  • Think tanks are one of the most cost-effective ways to influence the US government.
  • The prestige of the think tank matters for getting into the room/influencing change.
  • Rand is among the most prestigious think tank doing AI safety work.
  • It's
... (read more)
2
huw
I am seeing here that they already work closely with Open Philanthropy and were involved in drafting the Executive Order on AI. So this does not seem like a neglected avenue.

Yea I have no idea if they actually need money but if they still want to hire more people to the AI team wouldn't it be better to give the money to RAND to hire those policymakers rather than like the Americans for Responsible Innovation - which open phil currently recommends but is much less prestigious and I'm not sure if they are working side by side with legislators. The fact that open phil gave grants but doesn't currently recommend for individual donors makes me think you are right that they don't need money atm but it would be nice to be sure. 

2
Nick K.
What have they done or are planning to do that seems worth supporting?

According to this article, CEO shooter Luigi Malgione:

really wanted to meet my other founding members and start a community based on ideas like rationalism, Stoicism, and effective altruism

Doesn't look he was part of the EA movement proper (which is very clear about nonviolence), but could EA principles have played a part in his motivations, similarly to SBF? 

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I personally think people overrate people's stated reasons for extreme behaviour and underrate the material circumstances of their life. In particular, loneliness

As one counterexample, EA is really rare in humans, but does seem more fueled by principles than situations.

(Otoh, if situations make one more susceptible to adopting some principles, is any really the "true cause"? Like plausibly me being abused as a child made me want to reduce suffering more, like this post describes. But it doesn't seem coherent to say that means the principles are overstated ... (read more)

4
Guive
Well, they could have. A lot of things are logically possible. Unless there is some direct evidence that he was motivated by EA principles, I don't think we should worry too much about that possibility. 
4
Jason
I don't see a viable connection here, unless you make "EA principles" vague enough to cover an extremely wide space (e.g., considering ~consequentialism an "EA principle"). 

We just wanted to transparently share that CEA’s University Groups Team is not running two of our historical programs over the next few months:

We think both programs are relatively valuable, but are less aligned with our current vision (of providing value through helping EA university group organizers run better groups) than some of our alternatives.

We have made this (difficult!) dec... (read more)

Thank you for sharing this update! I’m interested in learning more about how you arrived at this decision, as we at EA Netherlands often encounter similar choices. Your insights could be really valuable for us.

Would you mind sharing a bit about your reasoning process?

Thanks again for keeping us informed!

I'm not sure of an org that deals with ultra-high net worth individuals (longview?), but someone should reach out to Bryan Johnson. I think he could be persuaded to invest in AI Safety (skip to 1:07:15)

I'm going to repeat something that I did about a year ago:

A very small, informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I'll help. If you would like to do a mock interview, send me a message and we can schedule a video call to practice. If we have never met before, that is okay. I'm happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.

To be clear: this is not a paid service, I'm not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I'm not going to ask you to subscribe... (read more)

I often return to this bit of 80000 Hours' anonymous career advice, about how when you're great at your job, no one's advice is that useful.

I think in general if you want to accomplish something, or you want to be good at something, or you want something to happen — you want to throw yourself into it, and get really deep into it. Focus on it. Obsess over it. If you don’t, you probably won’t get the result you want. And if you do — you’re going to find that advice from other people often isn’t that useful. By “advice” here I mean talking to people who are

... (read more)

I have a thought on this. It related to the level of effort from the advice giver, and the willingness to understand the recipient's context. Often advice is given with only a few seconds of effort, or with  the giver applying a sort of cookie-cutter template to their understanding of the recipient. That is when useless advice comes from. When the giver dedicates some time minutes toward understanding and exploring the receiver's context, toward actually paying attention, then the advice is able to be of much better quality.

This is specifically fresh ... (read more)

3
trevor1
It seems like there's a scale between rubber-ducking and mentorship that a person can operate at depending on the skill differences. Furthermore, some advice-givers are better at rubberducking and others are better at mentorship, adding another dimension. Yudkowsky's old sequence post on Cached Thoughts is pretty brief and goes rather deep into the watering-down phenomenon you described.

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will host an EA Forum Team office hours / co-working session in EA Gather this Thursday, Dec 19! We'll be in this pod between 2-3 PM UK time (9-10 AM Eastern Time). Feel free to stop by to ask us questions, work on a Forum post, or just co-work alongside us. :)

We may continue hosting these, perhaps for longer slots than just one hour. Let us know in the comments or over DM if you'd like to attend one in the future.

We're in there now! I'm working on the EA Newsletter, other people are working on posts and google docs, and we are having chats in the breaks. Feel free to join.

I would REALLY appreciate if someone quite good at math (especially distributions/graphs) could hop on (what I expect would be a short call) to help me sort out an issue I'm panicking over

EDIT: I'm no longer panicking, thank you to everyone who reached out !

4
NunoSempere
Did you get this sorted?

I think so

I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and ... (read more)

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Can you maybe expand a bit more on why? I found out about EA when I was 23 and I wish I found out about it when I was perhaps 16/17 and perhaps earlier. It's obviously hard to know but I think I would have made better and different choices on career path, study, etc.; so it's advantageous to learn about EA earlier in life despite being far from making direct impact.

I also suspect though correct me if I'm wrong, behind point 1 is an assumption that EA is bad for people's personal welfare. I don't know if this is true. 

2
David_Moss
I think the possibility that outreach to younger age groups[1] might be net negative is relatively neglected. That said, the two possible reasons suggested here didn't strike me as particularly conclusive. The main reasons why I'm somewhat wary of outreach to younger ages (though there are certainly many considerations on both sides): * It seems quite plausible that people are less apt to adopt EA at younger ages because their thinking is 'less developed' in some relevant way that seems associated with interest in EA. * I think something related to but distinct from your factor (2) could also be an influence here, namely reaching out to people close to the time when they are making relevant decisions might be more effective at engaging people. * It also seems possible (though far from certain) that the counterfactual for many people engaged by outreach to younger age groups, is that they could have been reached by outreach targeted at a later date, i.e. many people we reach as high schoolers could simply have been reached once they were at university.  These questions seem very uncertain, but also empirically tractable, so it's a shame that more hasn't been done to try to address them. For example, it seems relatively straightforward to compare the success rates of outreach targeting different ages.  We previously did a little work to look at the relationship between the age when people first got involved in EA and their level of engagement. Prima facie, younger age of involvement seemed associated with higher engagement, though there's a relative dearth of people who joined EA at younger ages, making the estimates uncertain (when comparing <20s to early 20s, for example), and we'd need to spend more time on it to disentangle other possible confounds.     1. ^ Or it might be that 'life stages' are the relevant factor rather than age per se, i.e. a younger person who's already an undergrad might have similar outcomes when exposed to EA as a typi
2
Joey🔸
Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/me have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on it - specifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.

I note that in some sense I have lost trust that the EA community gives me a clear prioritisation of where to donate.

Some clearer statements:

  • I still think GiveWell does great work
  • I still generally respect the funding decisions of Open Philanthropy
  • I still think this forum has a higher standard than most place
  • It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones
  • I don't know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are
  • I don't really know what orgs do all-considered work o
... (read more)
Showing 3 of 6 replies (Click to show all)
3
Charlie_Guthmann
do you feel confident about your moral philosophy?
9
Peter Wildeford
I'm very uncertain about whether AI really is >10x neglected animals and I cannot emphasize enough that reasonable and very well-informed people can disagree on this issue and I could definitely imagine changing my mind on this over the next year. This is why I framed my comment the way I did hopefully making it clear that donating to neglected animal work is very much an answer I endorse. I also agree it's very hard to know whether AI organizations will have an overall positive or negative (or neutral) impact. I think there's higher-level strategic issues that make the picture very difficult to ascertain even with a lot of relevant information (imo Michael Dickens does a good job of overviewing this even if I have a lot of disagreements). Also the private information asymmetry looms large here. I also agree that "work that aims to get AI companies to commit towards not committing animal mistreatment" is an interesting and incredibly underexplored area. I think this is likely worth funding if you're knowledgable about the space (I'm not) and know of good opportunities (I currently don't). I do think risk aversion is underrated as a reasonable donor attitude and does make the case for focusing on neglected animals stronger.

Makes sense ! I understand the position.

Regarding AI x animals donation opportunities, all of this is pretty new but I know a few. Hive launched a Ai for Animals website, with an upcoming conference: https://www.aiforanimals.org/

I also know about Electric Sheep, which has made a fellowship on the topic : https://electricsheep.teachable.com/

Anthropic's Twitter account was hacked. It's "just" a social media account, but it raises some concerns.

Update: the post has just been deleted. They keep the updates on their status page: https://status.anthropic.com/

Mini EA Forum Update

We now have a unified @mention feature in our editor! You can use it to add links to posts, tags, and users. Thanks so much to @Vlad Sitalo — both for the GitHub PR introducing this feature, and for time and again making useful improvements to our open source codebase. 💜

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Thanks! (I slightly object to "the normal markdown syntax", since based on my quick reading neither John Gruber's original markdown spec nor the latest CommonMark spec nor GitHub Flavoured Markdown have footnotes)

4
Chris Leong
This is amazing. I expect this to noticably increase the number of links included in articles.
2
Sarah Cheng
Ah sorry, I don't think there's any additions on the markdown side. Yeah I think this is true in some sense. CKEditor does get more attention in our dev work. Partly that's because it's the default, and is used much more often (I ran a quick query to sense check this, and it looks like about 1/9 of things written on the Forum in 2024 are in markdown, 7/9 are using CKEditor, and 1/9 are other[1]). I don't think this tells the whole story though, so I'm open to pitches for us to enhance the markdown editor. :) Though note that we have significantly less engineering capacity now. 1. ^ Mostly admin-specific or legacy things

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think it's a negative sign that mirror bacteria seems to have pretty much not been discussed within the EA community until now (that said, what really matters is the percent of biosecurity folk in the community who have heard of this issue).

Reflections on Two Years at EA Germany

I'm stepping down this week after two years as co-director of EA Germany. While I deeply valued the team and helped build successful structures, I stayed too long when my core values and personal fit no longer aligned.

When I joined EAD, I approached it like the other organisations I’ve worked with, planning on staying 5-10 years to create stability during growth and change. My co-director, Sarah, and I aimed to grow EAD quickly and sustainably. But the FTX collapse hit just as I started in November 2022, and the d... (read more)

If someone isn't already doing so, someone should estimate what % of (self-identified?) EAs donate according to our own principles. This would be useful (1) as a heuristic for the extent to which the movement/community/whatever is living up to its own standards, and (1i) assuming the answer is 'decently' it would be useful evidence for PR/publicity/responding to marginal-faith tweets during bouts of criticism.

Looking at the Rethink survey from 2020, they have some info about which causes EAs are giving to but they seem to note that not many people respond ... (read more)

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