All of catehall's Comments + Replies

As the former COO and briefly co-CEO of Alvea, I also endorse Kyle's reflections!

Don't know where you are, but there might be enough people here in the bay for it to make sense.

Thanks so much for  your post here! I spent 5ish years as a litigator and couldn't agree more with this. As an additional bit of context for non-lawyers, how discovery works in a large civil trial, from someone who used to do it:

1. You gather an ocean of potentially relevant documents from a wide range of sources
2. You spend a ton of time sifting through them looking for quotes that, at least if taken out of context, might support a point you want to make
3. You gather up all these potentially useful materials and decide what story you want to tell with them

Like a bird building a nest at a landfill, it's hard to know what throwaway comment a lawyer might make something out of.

I don't think this matters FYI -- all funds came directly or indirectly from a bankrupt entity or person

Quick thoughts -- this isn't intended to be legal advice, just pointing in a relevant direction. There are a couple types of "clawbacks" under bankruptcy law:

• Preference action (11 USC 547): Generally allows clawback of most transfers by an insolvent entity or person made within 90 days of filing for bankruptcy. The concept here is that courts don't want people to be able to transfer money away to whoever they want to have it just before filing for bankruptcy. My GUESS (this really really isn't legal advice, I'm really not a bankruptcy lawyer) is that any m

I dunno, man. I just want to be able to afford a house and a family while working, like, every waking hour on EA stuff. Sure, I’d work for less money, but I would be significantly less happy and healthy as a result — I know having recently worked for significantly less money. There’s some term for this - “cheerful price”? We want people to feel cared for and satisfied, not test their purity by seeing how much salary punishment they will take against the backdrop of “EA has no funding constraints.” I apologize for the spicy tone, but I think this attitude, ... (read more)

Hmm for some reason I feel like this will get me downvoted, but: I am worried that an AI with "improve animal welfare" built into its reward function is going to behave a lot less predictably with respect to human welfare. (This does not constitute a recommendation for how to resolve that tradeoff.)

Thank you for the labor of writing this post, which was extremely helpful to me in clarifying my own thinking and concerns. I plan to share it widely.

"I think it would be tempting to assume that the best of these people will already have intuited the importance of scope sensitivity and existential risk, and that they’ll therefore know to give EA a chance, but that’s not how it works." This made my heart sing. EA would be so much better if more people understood this.

Happy to see this being discussed :) I may come back and write more later, but a couple quick points:

• I've been having lots of convos with different people in this vein, and am feeling optimistic there's growing momentum behind recognizing the importance of recruiting mid+ career professionals -- not as a matter of equity and diversification, but as one of bringing critical and missing talent into the movement. I think EA has, on the whole, significantly overvalued "potential" and significantly undervalued "skills" and "capacities" in the past.
• One of the ad

Hi all -- Cate Hall from Alvea here. Just wanted to drop in to emphasize the "we're hiring" part at the end there. We are still rapidly expanding and well funded. If in doubt, send us a CV.

Thanks so much for your detailed comment, and sorry for not seeing it earlier!

I'm a bit unclear what's going on in the Thermo-Fischer example: The second question from the initial letter makes it sound like TF had been granted a license to export under the EAR, but I don't see a claim that the technology was covered by the Commerce Control List, and the response from Ross seems to suggest otherwise (from what I can tell, I'm behind the WSJ paywall).

In any event, I think this is just the same issue that comes up generally with regulation of dual-use technol... (read more)

Hiya -- EA lawyer here. While the US legal system is generally a mess and you can find examples of people suing for all sorts of stuff, I think the risk of giving honest feedback (especially when presented with ordinary sensitivity to people you believe to be average-or-better-intentioned) is minimal. I'd be very surprised if it contributed significantly to the bottom-line evaluation here, and would be interested to speak to any lawyer who disagreed about their reasons for doing so.

I just totally missed that the info was in the job ads -- so thank you very much for providing that information, it's really great to see.  Sorry for missing it the first time around!

Just a quick note in favor of putting more specific information about compensation ranges in recruitment posts. Pay is by necessity an important factor for many people, and it feels like a matter of respect for applicants that they not spend time on the application process without having that information. I suspect having publicly available data points on compensation also helps ensure pay equity and levels some of the inherent knowledge imbalance between employers and job-seekers, reducing variance in the job search process. This all feels particularly true for EA, which is too young to have standardized roles and compensation across a lot of organizations.

I’ve been on the EA periphery for a number of years but have been engaging with it more deeply for about 6 months. My half-in, half-out perspective, which might be the product of missing knowledge, missing arguments, all the usual caveats but stronger:

Motivated reasoning feels like a huge concern for longtermism.

First, a story: I eagerly adopted consequentialism when I first encountered it for the usual reasons; it seemed, and seems, obviously correct. At some point, however, I began to see the ways I was using consequentialism to let myself off the hook, ... (read more)