Quick takes

[crossposted from my blog; some reflections on developing different problem-solving tools]

When all you have is a hammer, everything sure does start to look like a nail. This is not a good thing.

I've spent a lot of my life variously
1) Falling in love with physics and physics fundamentalism (the idea that physics is the "building block" of our reality)
2) Training to "think like a physicist"
3) Getting sidetracked by how "thinking like a physicist" interacts with how real people actually do physics in practice
4) Learning a bunch of different skills to tackle i... (read more)

Moderation updates

Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact

Next month (September 2024) is my 10th anniversary of formally engaging with EA. This date marks 10 years since I first reached out to the Foundational Research Institute about volunteering, at least as far as I can tell from my emails.

Prior to that, I probably had read a fair amount of Peter Singer, Brian Tomasik, and David Pearce, who might all have been considered connected to EA, but I hadn’t actually actively tried engaging with the community. I’d been engaged with the effective animal advocacy commun... (read more)

Ilya's Safe Superintelligence Inc. has raised $1B.

I think more EAs should consider operations/management/doer careers over research careers, and that operations/management/doer careers should be higher status within the community.

I get a general vibe that in EA (and probably the world at large), that being a "deep thinking researcher"-type is way higher status than being an "operations/management/doer"-type. Yet the latter is also very high impact work, often higher impact than research (especially on the margin).

I see many EAs erroneously try to go into research and stick to research despite having very ... (read more)

Nonprofit organizations should make their sources of funding really obvious and clear: How much money you got from which grantmakers, and approximately when. Any time I go on some org's website and can't find information about their major funders, it's a big red flag. At a bare minimum you should have a list of funders, and I'm confused why more orgs don't do this.

I used to frequently come across a certain acronym in EA, used in a context like "I'm working on ___" or "looking for other people who also use ___". I flagged it mentally as a curiosity to explore later, but ended up forgetting what the acronym was. I'm thinking it might be CFAR, which seems to have meant CFAR workshops? If so, 1) what happened to them, and 2) was it common for people to work through the material themselves, self-paced?

Please people, do not treat Richard Hannania as some sort of worthy figure who is a friend of EA. He was a Nazi, and whilst he claims he moderated his views, he is still very racist as far as I can tell.

Hannania called for trying to get rid of all non-white immigrants in the US, and the sterilization of everyone with an IQ under 90 indulged in antisemitic attacks on the allegedly Jewish elite, and even post his reform was writing about the need for the state to harass and imprison Black people specifically ('a revolution in our culture or form of governmen... (read more)

I’m looking for podcasts, papers, or reviews on fish sentience.

Specifically:

• Long form interview about the moral weight of fish.
• Papers which estimate their moral weight
• Information on the long term damage of fish hooks, being out of water, or the moral harm of fishing.

I would also like to know if there are practical methods to reduce the amount of harm done if you are fishing.

Rethink priorities had their moral weights report which placed salmon at 0.056, I’m not sure I understood completely what that figure meant. I think this means they have 5% of the... (read more)

The Economist has an article about China's top politicians on catastrophic risks from AI, titled "Is Xi Jinping an AI Doomer?"

Western accelerationists often argue that competition with Chinese developers, who are uninhibited by strong safeguards, is so fierce that the West cannot afford to slow down. The implication is that the debate in China is one-sided, with accelerationists having the most say over the regulatory environment. In fact, China has its own AI doomers—and they are increasingly influential.

[...]

China’s accelerationists want to keep th

I like the idea of carbon offsets for flights etc, but I think most carbon offset schemes are probably garbage. A year ago I made a personal pledge that whenever I was prompted to pay extra to carbon offset something, I would decline, but then immediately donate the same amount or more to effective environmental funds (in my case, Effective Altruism Australia Environment.) It's easy to remember and easy to do. Perhaps this simple pledge will be similarly sticky for other people :)