All of Aaron Bergman's Comments + Replies

Automated interface between Twitter and the Forum (eg a bot that, when tagged on twitter, posts the text and image of a tweet on Quick Takes and vice versa)

I’d be very surprised if you can’t get a job that pays much more than the sub teacher role- the gap between that and ~any EA org job is massive and inability to get the latter is only very weak evidence of inability to earn more.

Sorry if I missed this but this does depend a lot on location/willingness to move. The above assumes If you’re in the US and willing to move cities.

Also, living frugally to donate more is of course very virtuous if you take your salary to be a given, but from an altruistic perspective, insofar as they trade off, it’s probably much ... (read more)

Hell yeah this is awesome

Omg 😊😊😊😊

Random sorta gimmicky AI safety community building idea: tabling at universities but with a couple laptop signed into Claude Pro with different accounts. Encourage students (and profs) to try giving it some hard question from eg a problem set and see how it performs. Ideally have a big monitor for onlookers to easily see.

Most college students are probably still using ChatGPT-3.5, if they use LLMs at all. There’s a big delta now between that and the frontier.

I made a custom GPT that is just normal, fully functional ChatGPT-4, but I will donate any revenue this generates^[1] to effective charities. 

Presenting: Donation Printer 

1. ^{^}

   OpenAI is rolling out monetization for custom GPTs:

   Builders can earn based on GPT usage

   In Q1 we will launch a GPT builder revenue program. As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs. We'll provide details on the criteria for payments as we get closer.

Yeah you're right, not sure what I missed on the first read

Yeah but my (implicit, should have made explicit lol) question is “why this is the case?”

Like at a high level it’s not obvious that animal welfare as a cause/field should make less use of smaller projects than the others. I can imagine structural explanations (eg older field -> organizations are better developed) but they’d all be post hoc.

Interesting that the Animal Welfare Fund gives out so few small grants relative to the Infrastructure and Long Term Future funds (Global Health and Development has only given out 20 grants, all very large, so seems to be a more fundamentally different type of thing(?)). Data here.

A few stats:

• The 25th percentile AWF grant was $24,250, compared to $5,802 for Infrastructure and $7,700 for LTFF (and median looks basically the same).
• AWF has only made just nine grants of less than $10k, compared to 163 (Infrastructure) and 132 (LTFF).

Proportions under $threshold... (read more)

In their most straightforward form (“foundation models”), language models are a technology which naturally scales to something in the vicinity of human-level (because it’s about emulating human outputs), not one that naturally shoots way past human-level performance

• i.e. it is a mistake-in-principle to imagine projecting out the GPT-2—GPT-3—GPT-4 capability trend into the far-superhuman range

Surprised to see no pushback on this yet. I do not think this is true; I've come around to thinking that Eliezer is basically right that the limit of next token predict... (read more)

For others considering whether/where to donate: RP is my current best guess of "single best charity to donate to all things considered (on the margin - say up to $1M)."

FWIW I have a manifold market for this (which is just one source of evidence - not something I purely defer to. Also I bet in the market so grain of salt etc). 

Strongly, strongly, strongly agree. I was in the process of writing essentially this exact post, but am very glad someone else got to it first. The more I thought about it and researched, the more it seemed like convincingly making this case would probably be the most important thing I would ever have done. Kudos to you.

A few points to add

1. Under standard EA "on the margin" reasoning, this shouldn't really matter, but I analyzed OP's grants data and found that human GCR has been consistently funded 6-7x more than animal welfare (here's my tweet thread this i

[On mobile; sorry for the formatting]

Given my quick read and especially the bit below, it seems like the title is at least a bit misleading.

Quote: “To be clear: this document is not a detailed vindication of any particular class of philanthropic interventions. For example, although we think that contractualism supports a sunnier view of helping the global poor than funding x-risk projects, contractualism does not, for all our argument implies, entail that many EA-funded global poverty interventions are morally preferable to all other options (some of which... (read more)

LessWrong has a new feature/type of post called "Dialogues". I'm pretty excited to use it, and hope that if it seems usable, reader friendly, and generally good the EA Forum will eventually adopt it as well.

I'm interested in supporting this financially (that sounds like something a rich person would say so I should clarify this would not be a ton of money lol) and possibly in other ways as well (e.g., helping set up a website)

At least some chance of a less terrible death later, no? I'm really not sure what the distribution of causes of death looks like for different types of wild animal hosts

New fish data with estimated individuals killed per country/year/species  (super unreliable, read below if you're gonna use!) 

That^ is too big for Google Sheets, so here's the same thing just without a breakdown by country that you should be able to open easily if you want to take a look.

Basically the UN data generally used for tracking/analyzing the amount of fish and other marine life captured/farmed and killed only tracks the total weight captured for a given country-year-species (or group of species). 

I had chatGPT-4 provide estimated lo... (read more)

Good point, and I'll throw out The Humane League as one specific recipient of money. 

Farmed animal welfare is politically controversial in a way that GiveWell is not. This is potentially bad:

Is OpenPhil's current support of farmed animal welfare politically controversial? I don't get that sense but, if so, among who?

Maybe people who don't care about farmed animals are correct

Sure but same goes for literally everything, including eg AMF being net positive. Happy to discuss object level though.

Farmed animal advocacy is so cost-effective because, if succ

I’ve argued this largely on Twitter, but it seems pretty clear to me that no marginal dollars at all, at least up to say $1B, should in fact be going to the GiveWell portfolio (or similar charities for that matter). I don’t think it’s obvious what the alternative should be, but do think that (virtually) no well informed person trying to allocate a marginal dollar most ethically would conclude that GiveWell is the best option.

I feel like this/adjacent debates often gets framed as “normal poverty stuff vs weird longtermist stuff” but a lot of my confidence i... (read more)

According to Kevin Esvelt on the recent 80,000k podcast (excellent btw, mostly on biosecurity), eliminating the New World New World screwworm could be an important farmed animal welfare (infects livestock), global health (infects humans), development (hurts economies), science/innovation intervention, and most notably quasi-longtermist wild animal suffering intervention. 

More, if you think there’s a non-trivial chance of human disempowerment, societal collapse, or human extinction in the next 10 years, this would be important to do ASAP because we may... (read more)

EAG(x)s should have a lower acceptance bar. I find it very hard to believe that accepting the marginal rejectee would be bad on net.

Fixed, thank you! 

How right now is "right now"? Like would giving $100 literally this moment be worth $105 given in a week? A month? 

Just looking for something super approximate, especially a rough time horizon where $1 now ≈ $1 then

Somewhere in languagespace, there should be a combination of ~50-200 words that 1) successfully convinces >30% people that Wild Animal Welfare is really important, and then 2) they realize that the society they grew up in is confused, ill, and deranged. A superintelligence could generate this.

I don't think this is true, at least taking "convinces" to mean something more substantial than, say, marking the box for "yeah WAS is important" on a survey given immediately after reading. 

It's not at all obvious to me that marginal carbon actually cashes out as bad even in expectation.

Eh I'm not actually sure how bad this would be. Of course it could be overdone, but a post's author is its obvious best advocate, and a simple "I think this deserves more attention" vote doesn't seem necessarily illegitimate to me

I think the proxy question is “after what period of time is it reasonable to assume that any work building or expanding on the post would have been published?” and my intuition here is about 1 year but would be interested in hearing others thoughts

I went ahead and made an "Evergreen" tag as proposed in my quick take from a while back: 

Meant to highlight that a relatively old post (perhaps 1 year or older?) still provides object level value to read i.e., above and beyond:

1. It's value as a cultural or historical artifact above
2. The value of more recent work it influenced or inspired

What’s are some questions you hope someone’s gonna ask that seem relatively unlikely to get asked organically?

Bonus: what are the answers to those questions?

Aside from RP, what is your best guess for the org that is morally best to give money to?

Idea/suggestion: an "Evergreen" tag, for old (6 months month? 1 year? 3 years?) posts (comments?), to indicate that they're still worth reading (to me, ideally for their intended value/arguments rather than as instructive historical/cultural artifacts)

As an example, I'd highlight Log Scales of Pleasure and Pain, which is just about 4 years old now.

I know I could just create a tag, and maybe I will, but want to hear reactions and maybe generate common knowledge.

Thanks! Let me write them as a loss function in python (ha)

For real though:

• Some flavor of hedonic utilitarianism
  • I guess I should say I have moral uncertainty (which I endorse as a thing) but eh I'm pretty convinced
• Longtermism as explicitly defined is true
  • Don't necessarily endorse the cluster of beliefs that tend to come along for the ride though
• "Suffering focused total utilitarian" is the annoying phrase I made up for myself
  • I think many (most?) self-described total utilitarians give too little consideration/weight to suffering, and I don't think it really

Some shrinsight (shrimpsight?) from the comments:

I'm pretty happy with how this "Where should I donate, under my values?" Manifold market has been turning out. Of course all the usual caveats pertaining to basically-fake "prediction" markets apply, but given the selection effects of who spends manna on an esoteric market like this I put a non-trivial weight into the (live) outcomes.

I guess I'd encourage people with a bit more money to donate to do something similar (or I guess defer, if you think I'm right about ethics!), if just as one addition to your portfolio of donation-informing considerations.

Done, thanks!

Even given no electricity, copies stored physically in e.g. a flash drive or hard drive would persist until electricity could be supplied, I'm almost certain

Just chiming in to say I have a similar situation, although less extreme. Was vegan for 4 years and eventually concluded it wasn’t sustainable or realistic for me. Main animal products I buy are grass fed beef, grass fed whey protein, eggs from brands that at least go to decent lengths to make themselves seem non-horrible (3rd party humane certified, outdoor access) and a bit of conventional dairy (cheese, butter). I’d be lying if I said I’ve never bought anything “worse” than those, though.

I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.

A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)

In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn't get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence tha... (read more)

I have only a vague idea what this means but yeah, whatever facilitates access/storage. Is there anything I should do?

It’s actually been a little while since I made it, but places most likely to both (1) not be direct targets of a nuclear attack and (2) be uncorrelated with the fates of major datacenters plausibly holding the information currently

I tried making a shortform -> Twitter bot (ie tweet each new top level ~quick take~) and long story short it stopped working and wasn't great to begin with.

I feel like this is the kind of thing someone else might be able to do relatively easily. If so, I and I think much of EA Twitter would appreciate it very much! In case it's helpful for this, a quick takes RSS feed is at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/shortform?format=rss

Pardon my french but

Seems like the forces that turn people crazy are the same ones that lead people to do anything good and interesting at all. At least for EA, a core function of orgs/elites/high status community members is to make the kind of signaling you describe highly correlated with actually doing good. Of course it seems impossible to make them correlate perfectly, and that’s why setting with super high social optimization pressure (like FTX) are gonna be bad regardless.

But (again for EA specifically) I suspect the forces you describe would actually be good to increas... (read more)

Hypothesis: from the perspective of currently living humans and those who will be born in the currrent <4% growth regime only (i.e. pre-AGI takeoff or I guess stagnation) donations currently earmarked for large scale GHW, Givewell-type interventions should be invested (maybe in tech/AI correlated securities) instead with the intent of being deployed for the same general category of beneficiaries in <25 (maybe even <1) years.

The arguments are similar to those for old school "patient philanthropy" except now in particular seems exceptionally uncerta... (read more)

Made a podcast feed with EAG talks. Now has both the recent Bay Area and London ones:

• Spotify 
• RSS (can plug into any other platform)

Full vids on the CEA Youtube page

Not OP but here are some "user problems" either I have or am pretty sure a bunch of people have:

• Lots of latent, locked up insight/value in drafts
  • Implicitly high standards discourage posting these as normal posts, which is good for avg post quality and bad for total quality
• Would want to collaborate on either an explicit idea or something tbd, but making this happen as is takes a bunch of effort
• Reduces costs to getting and giving feedback
  • Currently afaik there's no market where feedback buyers and sellers can meet - just ad hoc Google doc links 
  • In princi

Definitely part of the explanation, but my strong impression from interaction irl and on Twitter is that many (most?) AI-safety-pilled EAs donate to GiveWell and much fewer to anything animal related.

I think ~literally except for Eliezer (who doesn’t think other animals are sentient), this isn’t what you’d expect from the weirdness model implied.

Assuming I’m not badly mistaken about others’ beliefs and the gestalt (sorry) of their donations, I just don’t think they’re trying to do the most good with their money. Tbc this isn’t some damning indictment - it’s how almost all self-identified EAs’ money is spent and I’m not at all talking about ‘normal person in rich country consumption.’

Note: this sounds like it was written by chatGPT because it basically was (from a recorded ramble)🤷‍
 

I believe the Forum could benefit from a Shorterform page, as the current Shortform forum, intended to be a more casual and relaxed alternative to main posts, still seems to maintain high standards. This is likely due to the impressive competence of contributors who often submit detailed and well-thought-out content. While some entries are just a few well-written sentences, others resemble blog posts in length and depth.

As such, I find myself hesitant... (read more)

Thanks for brining our convo here! As context for others, Nathan and I had a great discussion about this which was supposed to be recorded...but I managed to mess up and didn't capture the incoming audio (i.e. everything Nathan said) 😢

Guess I'll share a note I made about this (sounds AI written because it mostly was, generated from a separate rambly recording). A few lines are a little spicier than I'd ideally like but 🤷

Donations and Consistency in Effective Altruism

I believe that effective altruists should genuinely strive to practice effective altruism