Thanks Richard!

Writing is done for an audience. Effective altruists have a very particular practice of stating their personal credences in the hypotheses that they discuss. While this is not my practice, in writing for effective altruists I try to be as precise as I can about the relative plausibility that I assign to various hypotheses and the effect that this might have on their expected value.

When writing for academic audiences, I do not discuss uncertainty unless I have something to add which my audience will find to be novel and adequately supported.  

I don’t remind academic readers that uncertainty matters, because all of them know that on many moral theories uncertainty matters and many (but not all) accept such theories. I don’t remind academic readers of how uncertainty matters on some popular approaches, such as expected value theory, because all of my readers know this and many (but fewer) accept such theories. The most likely result of invoking expected value theory would be to provoke protests that I am situating my argument within a framework which some of my readers do not accept, and that would be a distraction. 

I don’t state my personal probability assignments to claims such as the time of perils hypothesis because I don’t take myself to have given adequate grounds for a probability assignment. Readers would rightly object that my subjective probability assignments had not been adequately supported by the arguments in the paper, and I would be forced to remove them by referees, if the paper were not rejected out of hand.

For the same reason, I don’t use language forcing my personal probability assignments on readers. There are always more arguments to consider, and readers differ quite dramatically in their priors. For that reason, concluding a paper with the conclusion that a claim like the time of perils hypothesis has a probability on the order of 10^(-100) or 10^(-200) would again, rightly provoke the objection that this claim has not been adequately supported. 

When I write, for example, that arguments for the time of perils hypothesis are inconclusive, my intention is to allow readers to make up their own minds as to precisely how poorly those arguments fare and what the resulting probability assignments should be. Academic readers very much dislike being told what to think, and they don’t care a whit for what I think.

As a data point, almost all of my readers are substantially less confident in many of the claims that I criticize than I am. The most common reason why my papers criticizing effective altruism are rejected from leading journals is that referees or editors take the positions criticized to be so poor that they do not warrant comment. (For example, my paper on power-seeking theorems was rejected from BJPS by an editor who wrote, “The arguments critically evaluated in the paper are just all over the place, verging from silly napkin-math, to speculative metaphysics, to formal explorations of reinforcement learning agents. A small minority of that could be considered philosophy of computer science, but the rest of it, in my view, is computer scientists verging into bad philosophy of mind and futurism … The targets of this criticism definitely want to pretend they're doing science; I worry that publishing a critical takedown of these arguments could lend legitimacy to that appearance.”)

Against this background, there is not much pressure to remind readers that the positions in question could be highly improbable. Most think this already, and the only thing I am likely to do is to provoke quick rejections like the above, or to annoy the inevitable referee (an outlier among my readers) selected for their sympathies with the position being criticized.

To tell the truth, I often try to be even more noncommittal in the language of my papers than the published version would suggest. For example, the submitted draft of “Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk” said in the introduction that “under many assumptions, once these mistakes are corrected, the value of existential risk mitigation will be far from astronomical.” A referee complained that this was not strong enough, because (on their view) the only assumptions worth considering were those on which the value of existential risk mitigation is rendered extremely minimal. So I changed the wording to “Under many assumptions, once these mistakes are corrected, short-termist interventions will be more valuable than long-termist interventions, even within models proposed by leading effective altruists.” Why did I discuss these assumptions, instead of a broader class of assumptions under which the value of existential risk mitigation is merely non-astronomical? Because that’s what my audience wanted to talk about. 

In general, I would encourage you to focus in your writing on the substantive descriptive and normative issues that divide you from your opponents. Anyone worth talking to understands how uncertainty works. The most interesting divisions are not elementary mistakes about multiplication, but substantive questions about probabilities, utilities, decision theories, and the like. You will make more significant contributions to the state of the discussion if you focus on identifying the most important claims that in fact divide you from your opponents and on giving extended arguments for those claims.   

To invent and claim to resolve disagreements based on elementary fallacies is likely to have the effect of pushing away the few philosophers still genuinely willing to have substantive normative and descriptive conversations with effective altruists. We are not enthusiastic about trivialities. 

Harry Lloyd in the philosophy department can do this.

Sam Altman is far from the only problematic speaker invited to Lighthaven. 

Just seeing this now -- sorry for the late reply!

It's open access. Here is the copyright information from the book. Is this license good enough for the kind of audio adaptation you're thinking of? (There's a permissions department at Oxford that you can contact if you're not sure -- they direct to https://plsclear.com/Home/Index I think)

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Subject to this license, all rights are reserved.

Glad to be working with Kuhan!

There's not very much evidence for existential risk from biological causes. I've had a very hard time getting anyone to even tell me what they are concerned about, and when they do it is not very plausible.

Good question! I'm assuming just the .pdf, which is what Oxford University Press does for most academic books. But I will check and let you know if they're doing an epub.

Since the book is open access, I'm not sure if they secured the pdfs. If they didn't you could try a converter?

Ilan and Shakked Noy have a nice piece on one aspect of this, "The Short-Termism of ‘Hard’ Economics." It's forthcoming in Essays on longtermism, hopefully within a month or two. They argue that preferences for methodological hardness in economics make it difficult to publish longtermist research within economics. 

To be fair, economics as a field is widely regarded as one of the strongest and most successful in academia right now. There are definitely challenges, of which Bob and the Noy's identify some, but I don't want to give the impression that academics are too down on economics as a field. They've been killing it since the mid-20th century.

I also don't think economists are crazy to think that their top journals are sometimes more rigorous than leading interdisciplinary journals, which can be a bit more headline-chasing and often don't give authors enough words to be fully rigorous.

Honestly I agree. Titotal’s work is fabulous (and I’m happy to use that adjective) but it’s usually not a good idea to put someone’s hackles up when you want to tell them they are wrong.

I downvoted this because of the skepticism of academic rigor and the weakness of the quantum physics analogy. 

Quantum physics is a paradigmatic example of a major theoretical advance developed by academics and accepted by academics after rigorous testing. The reason why these standards were applied is that there were (and still are) any number of theories in fundamental physics which turn out to be false, and it is important to use reasons and evidence to determine whether they are true. 

I am happy to see academics within the nascent AI safety space working towards more traditional and rigorous academic standards. These standards exist for a good reason and I have every expectation that they will continue to serve us well.