Your prior that the problem is not anything other than low pay should be incredibly strong. If, as is prognosticated, a huge sum of money flows into AIS, then Google senior staff engineers and VPs will be in play to lead research projects, and I strongly suspect the prerequisite that the candidate "must be AIS-pilled" will quietly resolve itself. Pricey management consultants at McKinsey and BCG will be retained to speed all this up.
My contrarian stance: veganism is not EA. The impact of veganism on your time, money, health, budget, enjoyment of veganism is substantial. You're likely doing useful, impactful things with your time and energy when you have them, and veganism is a drain on your time and energy.
The only thing that tips the scale toward veganism in my judgment (I do not presently practice veganism), is the practice just interests you. Despite the above detriments, most people can go vegan if they want. If you love it, feel empathetic to animals, feel it refreshes your values, sure, do it.
But it's not the sort of practice I would make central to EA. It should be as taboo as playing guitar, basketball, or backpacking, which is to say not taboo, but not automatically on topic.
hate datacenters, would support just about any anti-dc regulation
if you believe anything about the HF incident or any AI capabilities, you are a shill falling for AI marketing
I think both views are propagandized. My mental model is, propaganda hardens and narrows political beliefs, and I think on both points, the social media consensus has gone beyond what widespread sincere belief looks like.
The distilled factual version is really not too hard for ordinary people to understand. "The models are very powerful and they can't control them." If people are just never really getting to that, it's not complexity, it's some other psychological or social force. (I concede the big picture conclusion which is like "oh and it can attempt take over," sounds way more absurd to an AIS-novice than the constituent parts.) Any propaganda researchers reading? I'd like to know WTF is going on with point #2 above.
Recently, I thought you could take something like anti-dc sentiment and attach wonkish AIS riders. I think I'm right that negative AI valence is very important, but I'm more concerned propaganda can interfere with "valence => desired action."
On the other hand -- a number of elites seem to have noticed what happened, e.g. D Ted Lieu and R Nathaniel Moran with AI Kill Switch Act.
I guess I should point out that Stoicism tells you don't stare into the abyss. It's explicit that inner circles matter more than outer circles. It's not compatible with utilitarianism. You are believing different things as a Stoic than you are as a utilitarian, and when you think about your beliefs you have different thoughts. I haven't seen any EA endorse not agreeing with utilitarianism. If you do, that opens a lot more options in mental health, and you can just directly do the Stoic thing of caring about yourself more than others because it's moral to.
A few years ago it was: stare into the abyss of tremendous amounts of suffering, on the order of trillions or quadrillions of animals, now and into the future. Literally Soares' "Guilt" series says you should do this as a virtue.
Now it's: stare into the abyss of imminent AI-caused extinction.
These tenets imply mental health ought to be a foremost priority, no? What I observe is something more like this essay -- after a few years of realizing poor EA mental health isn't correlative but it's something our philosophy specifically induces, we write a few self-help posts about it, probably achieving the same efficacy as reading the first few chapters out of Ryan Holiday's book. I might even cite the comments here as evidence we're not effective: they're mostly along the theme of, anxiety that doing more than the minimum of self-care sacrifices performance.
Politician as in "running for office" is a little distinct, I definitely agree/get that we want some EA/ people doing policy especially in AIS. That was possibly a weak example, but it's hard to think of specifically unexpected examples of something.
I appreciate this reading it as a critique, but I really have no way to tell if the claims add up to the conclusion.
For example: growth can be bad, EA strikes many as an ideology, fewer people self-ID as EA, EA's funnel seems in confict with truth seeking, the central/corporate pressure seems at odds with community building -- those are all worth keeping in mind. I just don't know if they add up to a damning outcome or not.
Which is not to say he'll definitely win: it's a competitive field and he's at 42% on Manifold. Still, I decided to donate,
You should specifically donate to candidates who won't "definitely" win. Closest to 50% is best, and 42% is pretty darn close to 50%. My heuristic is to try treating 25-75 as a competitive race.
For candidates <50%, you have util/fuzzy split: it's fun to win, but util cares about flipping a loss to a win, not just being on the winning side.
(Caveats, out of scope to this specific point: betting markets are sometimes doctor-able or can have multiple equilibria, early momentum for a candidate at near 0% is a special case)
I contest the existence of fuzzy-free util. That's an abstraction to help make a decision and it raises these problems:
Should EA be disciplined when celebrating EA wins, like cage-free eggs, so as not to get any fuzzies? That's supposed to be util work.
Is there any theory for why anyone would ever do util with no fuzzy? We're all biological creatures, concerned with food, sex, respiration -- fuzzies, not utils. What is the initial drive to get a util?
Billionaire donors do demand accountability and transparency. Should we not be suspicious there may be some fuzzies involved there?
There's a utility monster thought experiment - if "burn money discreetly" saved 10^100 lives, can you really see EA retooling itself around that? I think it would struggle with recruitment, struggle to pull people out of AI and bio risk. Remember - no fuzzy, for feeding the util monster, only util. Yes this is a Pascal's mugging but it's a valid one - the theory should withstanding it if fuzzy and util are simply separate. My feeling is it's unlikely we would cope near our current form. which implies our current form is not doing a fuzzy/util separation.
Everyone be careful reading an article telling you to stop trusting part of yourself, and furthermore, to question caring for people around you so much. Those both have epistemic hazard, and since the author didn't say why your care-o-meter is important, here it is: it's so people around you can tell you you're trusting the authors of a bunch of new essays you're reading too much, and getting carried away.
Your prior that the problem is not anything other than low pay should be incredibly strong. If, as is prognosticated, a huge sum of money flows into AIS, then Google senior staff engineers and VPs will be in play to lead research projects, and I strongly suspect the prerequisite that the candidate "must be AIS-pilled" will quietly resolve itself. Pricey management consultants at McKinsey and BCG will be retained to speed all this up.
My contrarian stance: veganism is not EA. The impact of veganism on your time, money, health, budget, enjoyment of veganism is substantial. You're likely doing useful, impactful things with your time and energy when you have them, and veganism is a drain on your time and energy.
The only thing that tips the scale toward veganism in my judgment (I do not presently practice veganism), is the practice just interests you. Despite the above detriments, most people can go vegan if they want. If you love it, feel empathetic to animals, feel it refreshes your values, sure, do it.
But it's not the sort of practice I would make central to EA. It should be as taboo as playing guitar, basketball, or backpacking, which is to say not taboo, but not automatically on topic.
Reddit chatter is like:
I think both views are propagandized. My mental model is, propaganda hardens and narrows political beliefs, and I think on both points, the social media consensus has gone beyond what widespread sincere belief looks like.
The distilled factual version is really not too hard for ordinary people to understand. "The models are very powerful and they can't control them." If people are just never really getting to that, it's not complexity, it's some other psychological or social force. (I concede the big picture conclusion which is like "oh and it can attempt take over," sounds way more absurd to an AIS-novice than the constituent parts.) Any propaganda researchers reading? I'd like to know WTF is going on with point #2 above.
Recently, I thought you could take something like anti-dc sentiment and attach wonkish AIS riders. I think I'm right that negative AI valence is very important, but I'm more concerned propaganda can interfere with "valence => desired action."
On the other hand -- a number of elites seem to have noticed what happened, e.g. D Ted Lieu and R Nathaniel Moran with AI Kill Switch Act.
I guess I should point out that Stoicism tells you don't stare into the abyss. It's explicit that inner circles matter more than outer circles. It's not compatible with utilitarianism. You are believing different things as a Stoic than you are as a utilitarian, and when you think about your beliefs you have different thoughts. I haven't seen any EA endorse not agreeing with utilitarianism. If you do, that opens a lot more options in mental health, and you can just directly do the Stoic thing of caring about yourself more than others because it's moral to.
Doesn't EA do the minimum though?
These tenets imply mental health ought to be a foremost priority, no? What I observe is something more like this essay -- after a few years of realizing poor EA mental health isn't correlative but it's something our philosophy specifically induces, we write a few self-help posts about it, probably achieving the same efficacy as reading the first few chapters out of Ryan Holiday's book. I might even cite the comments here as evidence we're not effective: they're mostly along the theme of, anxiety that doing more than the minimum of self-care sacrifices performance.
Politician as in "running for office" is a little distinct, I definitely agree/get that we want some EA/ people doing policy especially in AIS. That was possibly a weak example, but it's hard to think of specifically unexpected examples of something.
I appreciate this reading it as a critique, but I really have no way to tell if the claims add up to the conclusion.
For example: growth can be bad, EA strikes many as an ideology, fewer people self-ID as EA, EA's funnel seems in confict with truth seeking, the central/corporate pressure seems at odds with community building -- those are all worth keeping in mind. I just don't know if they add up to a damning outcome or not.
Pointing this out:
You should specifically donate to candidates who won't "definitely" win. Closest to 50% is best, and 42% is pretty darn close to 50%. My heuristic is to try treating 25-75 as a competitive race.
For candidates <50%, you have util/fuzzy split: it's fun to win, but util cares about flipping a loss to a win, not just being on the winning side.
(Caveats, out of scope to this specific point: betting markets are sometimes doctor-able or can have multiple equilibria, early momentum for a candidate at near 0% is a special case)
I contest the existence of fuzzy-free util. That's an abstraction to help make a decision and it raises these problems:
Everyone be careful reading an article telling you to stop trusting part of yourself, and furthermore, to question caring for people around you so much. Those both have epistemic hazard, and since the author didn't say why your care-o-meter is important, here it is: it's so people around you can tell you you're trusting the authors of a bunch of new essays you're reading too much, and getting carried away.