All of AbigailT's Comments + Replies

Over the past couple of weeks I've been surprised and distressed by the extent of these reports, a point which your concrete observations have underscored for me.

Having more details about the abusers you've identified and the abuses they committed would help me (and probably others) understand the nature of the problem, and what actions would make sense in response. On the other hand, there are good reasons not to make the list public, not least of which is that the survivors may not have consented to this.

I'm wondering if there is some way we can make mor... (read more)

Fwiw I would still be interested in a response from Will, but I dont think he should feel obliged to give one.

Hi, thank you for bringing this up, I didn't want to generalise that everything with FTX is shady, however, It appears that media and people outside of EA might get that impression anyway based on media featuring Will's name rather prominently next to SBF's etc. General public will not know the minute details and there's a risk of association rising, that EA's are a part of (crypto) billionaires club, which has a lot of bad publicity already. Leaving this uncommented exposes EA to further allegiations of being a Silicon Valley cult etc. etc.

Also, I agree w... (read more)

I'm not sure I understand why you think this requires a response. I don't think the texts here were shady or wrong at all. Musk was clearly looking for people to buy Twitter with him, and Will happened to be a mutual contact. Trying to put them in touch seems pretty reasonable to me.

This may not be what you're intending (and is pretty understandable), but I want to be pretty careful about generalising from what's going on now, to assuming that anything involved with SBF or FTX is shady until proven otherwise.

Attempting to frame this as MacAskill simply putting them in touch is fairly astonishing. From the texts alone:

MacAskill laid out monetary amounts for the offers of Bankman-Fried's investment in Twitter.

He’s worth $24B, and his early employees (with shared values) bump that to $30B. I asked about how much he could in principle contribute and he said: “~$1-3b would be easy ~3-8b I could do ~$8-15b is maybe possible but would require financing.

Then, when Musk explicitly asked if he would vouch for Sam Bankman-Fried. MacAskill vouched for him enthusiastically... (read more)

I think seeing it as "just putting two people in touch" is narrow. It's about judgement on whether to get involved in highly controversial commercial deal which was expected to significantly influence discourse norms, and therefore polarisation, in years to come. As far as I can tell, EA overall and Will specifically do not have skills / knowhow in this domain.

Introducing Elon to Sam is not just like making a casual introduction; if everything SBF was doing was based on EA, then this feels like EA wading in on the future of Twitter via the influence of SBF... (read more)

Fwiw I would still be interested in a response from Will, but I dont think he should feel obliged to give one.

Finding good data seems like an interesting problem here- this method seems like a good first pass that will underestimate/completely miss some companies (mine included). It's hard to think of another good data source that wouldn't have this problem though. Next time an EA survey rolls around, asking people for their companies there might add something?

This post takes a well-known story about impact (smallpox eradication), and makes it feel more visceral. The style is maybe a little heavy-handed, but it brought me along emotionally in a way that can be useful in thinking about past successes. I'd like to see somewhat more work like this, possibly on lesser-known successes in a more informative (but still evocative) style.

Thanks for the post - I can see what you're getting at, but this doesn't feel like two clearly distinct categories to me. The first person I thought to try and apply this to had strong traits from both columns, for example. As a similar but more available example, where would you fit Bryan Caplan here? He's disagreeable without being angry, and is trying hard not to be wrong while happily telling others why they are. 

I'm not sure whether my intuition here is that these can both be strong/weak in the same person, that there's more of a spectrum, or tha... (read more)

3
Ozzie Gooen
2y
I'd note that I expect these clusters (and I suspect they're clusters) to be a minority of intellectuals. They stand out a fair bit to me, but they're unusual.  I agree Bryan Caplan leans disagreeable, but is less intense than others. I found The Case Against Education and some of his other work purposefully edgy, which is disagreeable-type-stuff, but at the same time, I found his interviews to often be more reasonable.  I would definitely see the "disagreeable" and "assessor" archetypes as a spectrum, and also think one person can have the perks of both.

I should clarify 3.3. For me, longtermism is partly the acknowledgement of much vaster moral stakes - so long as there are things we can do to help, they're no less important to do as short-termist interventions. (The usual arguments about it not being helpful to demand too much of people still apply though).

Hi - my intuitions fall in the other direction here, so I'm keen to explain why.  Implicit IMOs in front of everything here.

1:
    1.1:  I have a younger brother. My parents could have stopped at one, and my family would broadly still be happy, but my brother is generally happy and leads a good life. Similarly, if they'd had a third child they probably would have been happy and great too, and I would have loved them. All else being equal I wish that youngest sibling could have existed. IMO these two sentiments aren't meaningfully distinc... (read more)

1
AbigailT
3y
I should clarify 3.3. For me, longtermism is partly the acknowledgement of much vaster moral stakes - so long as there are things we can do to help, they're no less important to do as short-termist interventions. (The usual arguments about it not being helpful to demand too much of people still apply though).