All of Yadav's Comments + Replies

(I am mostly articulating feelings here. I am unsure about what I think should change). 

I am somewhat disappointed with the way Manifund has turned out. This isn't to critique the manifund team or that regranting as an idea is bad, but after a few months of excitement and momentum, things have somewhat decelerated. While you get the occasional cool projects, most of the projects on the website don't seem particularly impressive to me. I also feel like some of the regrantors seem slow to move money, but it could be that the previous problem is feeding into this. 

1
wes R
7mo
I wasn't, but it provided valuable info, and I suspect that its message has seeped its way into other posts. Maybe it's just that? a "Relic of the past"?

Hmm I’d very keen to see what an answer to this might look like. I know some people I work with are interested in making a similar kind of switch.

It might be helpful to also think of China's compute access in a world where they invade Taiwan. I don't think this should be weighed highly IMO but still seems personally useful to work through. 

3
trevor1
7mo
I heard that chip fabs/factories are extremely soft targets and would be destroyed by the losing side either way. This is definitely the right kind of way to think about this though.

I assume the actions you’ve taken can’t be shared? (No pressure if it can’t).

Thanks for asking Yadav. I can confirm that:

  • Nonlinear has not been invited or permitted to run sessions or give talks relating to their work, or host a recruiting table at EAG and EAGx conferences this year. 
  • Kat ran a session on a personal topic at EAG Bay Area 2023 in February. EDIT: Kat, Emerson and Drew also had a community office hour slot at that conference
    Since then we have not invited or permitted Kat or Emerson to run any type of session.
  • We have been considering blocking them from attending future conferences since May, and were planning on making that decision if/when Kat or Emerson applied to attend a future conference.

Hmm I disagree. I’m not a fan of making it a norm for someone to reply to me, feels icky and I don’t think anyone has responsibility to message me back unless we’ve scheduled something beforehand.

I empathise with the awkwardness of trying to reach out again but something like ‘Hey I tried reaching you at EAG: London, but didn’t get a response. No pressure but if you’d have time at this EAGx to have a chat I’d love to. Some things I’d like to get out of our conversation: X, Y, Z….’ could be reasonable way of dealing with this.

Small note - it seems to occasionally mess up the usernames for posts like  'EU farmed fish policy reform roadmap' and 'New probabilistic simulation tool'.

2
Tobias Dänzer
7mo
Another username issue: If there are multiple authors, they're ignored here, e.g. for "Impact obsession", the attribution for Ewelina_Tur is missing. Same with "CE alert", "Dimensions of pain", etc.
2
Tobias Dänzer
7mo
I've noticed one more username issue: The listed name is the one in the URL (e.g. jessica-liu-taylor) instead of the username (e.g. jessicata). Or e.g. Bill Benzon becomes bill-benzon. It's not clear to me why e.g. Raemon doesn't become raemon, though.
3
Hamish McDoodles
7mo
I've identified source of problem and fixed, thanks!
4
Siao Si
7mo
Thanks for pointing this out! I've fixed it in this post and we'll look into checking it automatically

I'm doing some thinking on the prospects for international cooperation on AI safety, particularly potential agreements to slow down risky AI progress like CHARTS. Does anyone know of a good website or resource that summarizes different countries' current views and policies regarding deliberately slowing AI progress? For example, something laying out which governments seem open to restrictive policies or agreements to constrain the development of advanced AI (like the EU?) versus which ones want to charge full steam ahead, no matter the risks. Or which coun... (read more)

2
Will Aldred
8mo
Not exactly what you're looking for (because it focuses on the US and China rather than giving an overview of lots of countries), but you might find "Prospects for AI safety agreements between countries" useful if you haven't already read it, particularly the section on CHARTS.

I wonder if anyone has examined the pros and cons of protesting against AI labs? I have seen a lot of people uncertain about this. It may be useful to have someone have a post up, having done maybe <10 hours of thinking on this.

Suggestion: Enlarge the font size for pronouns on EA Global/EA retreat name cards

There was a period when I used they/them pronouns and was frequently misgendered at EA events. This likely occurred because I present as male, but regardless, it was a frustrating experience. I often find it difficult to correct people and explicitly mention my preferred pronouns, especially in socially taxing environments like EAGs or retreats. Increasing the size of the pronouns on name cards could be helpful.

Although I think this is incredible, there is a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it may be difficult to sustain the kind of success rate that CE is currently achieving. Do you anticipate that, as you run more incubation programs, you will see more incubated charities failing or shutting down?

Do you have a sense of whether you will eventually exhaust cost-effective charity ideas as you continue to run more incubation programs?

Thank you for your comment, Yadav.
Regarding success rates, we expect the net impact per charity to generally improve because both our program and outreach have gotten stronger. This improvement could still happen even with the overall success rate of our charities decreasing, with more charities shutting down but more charities having large wins, especially in policy. Over time, we expect some of our charities to shut down, with our general estimate being that one in five will.

Regarding cost-effective ideas, we recognize this as a legitimate concern and so... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! This is cool to see.

I may have missed this but do you have a sense of whether this marketing push is leading to more people working on pressing problems that 80k endorses? I am curious if there is a direct correlation between money spent on marketing and people working on these problems. 

5
Bella
1y
Glad you liked the post! I talk a bit about this in this section – basically, we don't know for sure how much this is causing people to work on pressing problems yet  (because people changing their careers like this takes something like 2 years on average, some much longer — and we just haven't been at it that long yet!) That said, we do have some preliminary evidence (at the very least, some "proofs of concept") that it's working. We also did a small-scale experiment in 2017, where we ran some social media ads and found 70 people who told us they changed their career plans 18 months later.

Shame you couldn't get involved with stuff here in Bristol; I think we could have made more of an effort last year to be more open to folks outside of the University of Bristol - glad you're liking it in Oxford!

3
Bill
1y
Hi, While I think it would have been nice, it seems to be more a supererogatory act. Community building is hard and focusing on the key tenants of your community seem to be of way higher EV than spreading yourself too thinly with the few resources that are perhaps available. At the same time, I would agree ideally that this would be done but I fully sympathise with the past structure.

Yeah, I concur. I feel like this could have been under a separate tag that we could have hidden instead. 

3
JP Addison
1y
I thought of that. The reason I didn't suggest that approach was rather mundane. This post needs to have the "Nick Bostrom" tag. Currently, someone who wants to hide all Bostrom-email content from the frontpage can hide the Bostrom tag, and it will hide this post as well. In the approach where we default-hide the Nick Bostrom tag, we would need to do some ugly kludge to make it so that, by default, this post shows up on the frontpage. The approach taken was simpler. Maybe in the future it'd be worth it to do that ugly kludge? I'm unconvinced, but that's a pretty lightly held view.

I think you intended to link to this instead of the 80K article at the top?

2
Thomas Kwa
1y
Fixed

Thanks for engaging with this post, Adrià!

Yup, it's the growth in staff. 

I suspect it isn't the number of staff but rather how highly elite and educated the EU body is. Other countries seem to trust their decisions on this ground.

Off-topic but I thought the 'Company', 'Valuation' and 'Severity' columns were too narrow. They're hard to read on mobile. 

2
Ben_West
1y
Thanks! How does it look now?

The Bristol student group can be found here now instead - eabristol.org

1
Nick Lowry
1y
Nice one

FWIW,

Richard Pettigrew has written a condensed version of their paper on the EA Forum.

Is this closed off to people in the UK, or can anyone apply?

2
Nathan_Barnard
1y
Anyone can apply - we can definitely accept people in the US, Canada, Ireland and EU countries - we're currently unsure about others.

Hi Ben,

I realised that this probably has something to do with me having the 'Personal' tag turned on. I unticked the section that asks whether you want to have your post on the frontpage before I posted this, so I was confused as to why this appeared on the frontpage anyways.

I was mostly trying to avoid spamming the frontpage, given this isn't very relevant to the forum. 

I tried to prevent this from going up on the front page. Unsure why it's showing up anyways; many apologies. 

2
Ben_West
1y
Hey Yadav, Forum support here. Sorry about the confusion. Could you clarify what happened? In particular: was this showing up in the "front page posts" section or a different part of the front page (e.g. "recent discussion")?
Answer by YadavNov 23, 202211
❤️10

Really excited about the work the Wild Animal Initiative is doing, so I will be donating to them. I'll also be giving to AMF. 

3
Vasco Grilo
1y
Thanks for sharing, Yadav! I also like the work of Wild Animal Initiative, as I think the scale of the welfare of wild animals is plausibly much larger than that of farmed ones. You may be interested in this comment I made about donating to GiveWell's top charities.

I am going to link post a talk by Rowan Lund (from Family Empowerment Media) here in case people want to learn more. 

Yadav
1y29
13
0

This is great. I’m glad stuff like the community health team exists.

Curious about what this implies -

  • Does leadership at FTX change?
  • What does this mean for the FTX Foundation?
  • What does this mean for the FTX Future Fund?
7
Nathan Young
1y
We attempted to answer the third question here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yjGye7Q2jRG3jNfi2/ftx-will-probably-be-sold-at-a-steep-discount-this-is-bad 

Ah, thanks for sharing! I assume the Carlsmith report is this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353?

1
Joel Becker
1y
Yes! :)

If companies like OpenAI and Deepmind have safety teams, it seems to me that they anticipate that speeding up AI capabilities can be very bad, so why don't they press the brakes on their capabilities research until we come up with more solutions to alignment?

4
Greg_Colbourn
1y
Possible reasons: * Their leaderships (erroneously) believe the benefits outweigh the risk (i.e. they don't appreciate the scale of the risk, or just don't care enough even if they do?). * They worry about losing the race to AGI to competitors who aren't as aligned (with safety), and they aren't taking heed of the warnings of Szilárd and Ellsberg re race dynamics. Perhaps if they actually took the lead in publicly (and verifiably) slowing down, that would be enough to slow down the whole field globally, given that they are the leaders. There isn't really precedence for this for something so globally important, but perhaps the "killing" of the electric car (that  delayed development by ~a decade?) is instructive.

I'd be curious to know if anyone got hired through this. 

I don't think using "optics" as a reason to shift away from the Bay is great. Many of the critiques you seem to be gesturing at would still ham away at EA regardless (potentially because it's an easy narrative to pick on or because it's easy to associate the movement's funding with Silicon Valley). 


I also think using the association between EA and Oxford Uni seems counterintuitive to me; people seem to often associate Oxford with "elitism".

I also think using the association between EA and Oxford Uni seems counterintuitive to me; people seem to often associate Oxford with "elitism".

Agree with this, and this could be further hurt by focusing too much on the areas with more elite universities on the East Coast (of course I am in favor of recruiting from them to a large extent, but shifting the community is a different question). Right now I think the Silicon Valley and Oxford hubs balance each other out well on this dimension.

One aspect of Silicon Valley culture I really like relative to Eas... (read more)

I think it's more that there's a lot of criticism that's really about Silicone Valley culture, and if EA is less centered there, less of that culture will seep in.

0
alene
2y
Thank you so much for all your support, Yadav!

Thanks for creating this! I thought it was really useful and easy to read.

Minor point here, but I think phrases like "soldier mindset" and "high-fidelity" could have been hyperlinked to relevant definitions or articles for clarity.

Good post!

I really liked the idea of a rejection doc when I first came across it. I have one with my brother, and it's been super helpful in keeping us motivated. 

“ Since 1980, the country’s animal product consumption has been on a downward trend”

Is there a source for this? (I might have missed out on it from the post. )

1
ea nyuad
2y
Thank you for bringing this up. This statement is based on an analysis of data found on Our World In Data, which compiled the UN FAO's information on the country's meat, egg, and dairy consumption. Within this dataset, we found that there has been an overall decrease in animal-derived product consumption since 1981 with fluctuations.

I think EA Grants is different from EA Funds. EA Grants was discontinued a while back - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants

Oh, I get it now. That seems like a misleading summary, given that that program was primarily aimed at EA community infrastructure (which received 66% of the funding), the statistic cited here is only for a single grants round, and one of the five concrete examples listed seems to be a relatively big global poverty grant. 

I still expect there to be some skew here, but I would take bets that the actual numbers for EA Grants look substantially less skewed than 1:16.

I note down certain lines my therapist tells after a session. I look over them from time to time. One that's stuck with me is  "You don't need everything to fall in place for you to be okay. You don't need everything to fall in place for you to love yourself." These act as good reminders for me when things aren't going so well in my life. 

But other than that, I've found reading things like what Luisa has put out to be very useful. For example, someone sent me this essay by a law professor that was super valuable to read.  

I've also found sel... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! Especially this part:

I strongly recommend you aim to decouple your self-worth from your productivity and impact — to internalise that you have intrinsic worth no matter how productive you are or how much impact you have.

I was lucky to have a therapist who was able to help me internalise this, and I think it has been incredibly valuable in helping me break some of my negative thought patterns and self-deprecating tendencies.

4
Miranda_Zhang
2y
Would love to hear about what worked for you! I think I feel that particular point much more strongly than the rest of imposter syndrome (e.g., I don't notice myself avoiding jobs that seem too important) but I don't feel like I've made that much progress in ~2 years of therapy. edit: updated towards 'maybe I do actually have imposter syndrome alongside general low-self-esteem' after I took the screening tool & realized that I do have a bottleneck around " putting your work out there"
4
howdoyousay?
2y
Agreed, and I was going to single out that quote for the same reason.  I think that sentence is really the crux of imposter syndrome. I think it's also, unfortunately, somewhat uniquely triggered by how EA philosophy is a maximising philosophy, which necessitates comparisons between people or 'talent' as well as cause areas.  As well as individual actions, I think it's good for us to think more about community actions around this as any intervention targeting the individual but not changing environment rarely makes the dent needed.

Thanks for linking this Matthew!

Ah. So you don't want to clog up the forum with something people aren't interested in? 

2
DavidNash
2y
Yep.

Why might you stop cross posting to the forum?

2
DavidNash
2y
When I started I told myself that if each post gets roughly 10 votes than it's providing enough value to keep on doing, and the last month and this month have been just below that, so there seems to be declining interest, and the people that are interested can just sign up to get the updates.

Well done on getting a post out on the forum about your experience Olivia!

3
Olivia Addy
2y
Thank you!

Thanks for writing this! 
 

I broadly agree that starting an EA Chapter isn't very hard. Though your point on the amount of time one may sink into being an organiser might be missing some nuance. In speaking to other uni groups and from personally helping run the Bristol group, if you really want your group to do well it's going to come at some cost to your time. For example, you are going to have to put in effort to get the most out of really promising folks in your university groups with 1-1s; it can often take you some time to figure out how to ... (read more)

3
gvst
2y
Yeah it definitely takes time to do it right. But even if you personally do not have the time, starting the group first and focusing on finding people who do have the time could accelerate growth.
3
michel
2y
Agreed. In my experience, running a group successfully takes a lot of time. You can get funding, improve productivity tools, and meet with many helpful folks, but at the end of the day, a group really scales in proportion to how much time you put into it.  I agree with the overall thesis though. Starting a group is not as daunting as it may seem at first glance, and I personally find it quite rewarding! 

Has anyone signed up to your intro fellowship after seeing it on Reddit? I am skeptical about marketing an intro fellowship via Reddit but would love to get your thoughts on it. 

6
mic
2y
I think like two people. Wouldn’t count on it as the core of your marketing strategy.
Answer by YadavDec 23, 20217
0
0

Touching on the latter - you might find this useful: https://handbook.globalchallengesproject.org/

Hey Kerry!

Good question. I included this disclaimer because to me it seems very hard to define what we exactly mean by an "AI weapon", which makes a complete ban, like the one the BWC has, implausible. 

8
Kerry_Vaughan
3y
I think I still don't quite get why this seems implausible. (For what it's worth, I think your view is pretty mainstream, so I'm asking about it more to understand how people are thinking about AI and not as any kind of criticism of the post or the parenthetical.) It seems clear to me that an AI weapon could exist. AI systems designed to autonomously identify and destroy targets seem like a particularly clear example. A ban which distinguishes that technology from nearby civilian technology doesn't seem much more difficult than distinguishing biological weapons from civilian uses of biological technology. Of course we're mostly interested in AGI, not narrower AI technology. I agree that society doesn't think of AGI development as a weapons technology and so banning "AGI weapons" seems strange to contemplate, but it's not too difficult to imagine that changing! After all, many of the proponents of the technology are clear that they think it will be the most powerful technology ever invented, granting its creators unprecedented strength. Various components of the US military and intelligence services certainly seems to think AGI development has military implications, so the shift to seeing it as a dual-use weapons technology doesn't seem to be too big of a leap to imagine.
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