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All of davidhartsough's Comments + Replies

Toward a more approachable and accessible EA Forum

100% agree. Each author gives each post its own intended audience (broad, narrow, niche, etc). And sometimes it's important to make a deliberate choice to only want a select audience to read your post.

Also I've never heard of jargon as a tool for protection. Very interesting.

The curious thing to me is that the EA Forum is entirely public online, so in theory everyone can read your post, even if you don't want them to. So it seems if you have some need to protect either yourself or the post, then you'll need some other strategies. For example, you could write anonymously so that your identity can't be traced.

But I really hope the vast majority of posts don't require any kind of "protective" measures.

ChristianKleineidam

If you want to personally protect yourself, then writing anonymously is a way to go. If you care about protecting EA's PR it helps little. Practically, that results in people not publically sharing certain information. I personally would like most of what people are willing to say privately at an event like an EA meetup they would also be willing to publically say on the EA forum.

How to Write Readable Posts

davidhartsough2y3

I should also probably clarify again that my motives are to see the EA Forum and its ideas be spread to a broader audience. I want it to grow and become more welcoming and inclusive.

In fact, I just decided to write an entire post about just that: Toward a more approachable and accessible EA Forum

I've gotta hand it to ya @AllAmericanBreakfast: your comment inspired me to write more about how this is all connected to EA communication, connection, and community building. Cheers!

How to Write Readable Posts

davidhartsough2y3

Oh, fascinating! I've never come across an idea like these "focus groups" on a forum. Have you tried this before?

(I suppose, upon reflection, I might regard the things I've created for a small audience of friends to account for maybe a third of my best work...? haha very rough estimates of course.)

DirectedEvolution

I’m actually working on a fleshed out version for EA forum, I can share the draft if you like.

How to Write Readable Posts

davidhartsough2y1

I guess "Step 2" became my next post: Toward a more approachable and accessible EA Forum

(But it reads as a preface/prelude to this post, so it's more like how the Star Wars trilogies were released out of order...... haha, far stretch of an example)

Counterarguments to the basic AI risk case

davidhartsough2y1

Fascinating! @Noah, have you seen this discussed in the EA community as well?

Dušan D. Nešić (Dushan)

I am speaking from my opinion and the conversations I had face-to-face with EA's in different situations but this seems broadly true: * Corporations are a necessary evil: generally much of the harm that is imposed on animals for example comes from monopolies, MNCs and such; tax evasion and exploitation of labor is conducted by the largest companies; Biorisk and AI risk comes from corporations as well as governments. There is however no other way to conduct business, and they bring about benefits such as technological development. I wonder if that may be what AI becomes for a while, before escaping control. I personally do see corporate control (corporate governance, as well as govt. or international control over corporations) as a viable EA cause area and am willing to explore it if someone wants to do it with me.

Noah Scales

Not really. Do you know of any such discussion?

How to Write Readable Posts

davidhartsough2y3

This post is "Step 1" towards a side mission: "to make the EA Forum more readable and approachable."

Improving written language for readers is a great way to practice making the EA Forum/community more:

friendly
welcoming
inclusive
congenial
compelling
considerate
thoughtful
caring
kind
understandable
understanding
(and also, yeah, altruistic)

From the outside looking in:

"A readable and approachable writing/forum" = "A reasonable and approachable people/community"

By making writings more readable, you demonstrate your understanding of others.
By makin

... (read more)

davidhartsough

I guess "Step 2" became my next post: Toward a more approachable and accessible EA Forum (But it reads as a preface/prelude to this post, so it's more like how the Star Wars trilogies were released out of order...... haha, far stretch of an example)

Counterarguments to the basic AI risk case

davidhartsough2y12

I love the comparison to corporations! I've never heard that before and think it's terrific.

Overall well-written and clever. Good formatting. Readable and skimmable. (This is one of those posts that has the necessity of being a "41 minute read".) Many reasons to give props to this.

My favorite quote:

"There are large and powerful systems doing things vastly beyond the ability of individual humans, and acting in a definitively goal-directed way. We have a vague understanding of their goals, and do not assume that they are coherent. Their goals are clearly n

... (read more)

Chris Leong

To be honest, I thought that the argument related to corporations was the weakest argument and that the post would be been strengthened by focusing on the other arguments. It feels to me that there's two very strong disanalogies: a) that the incentives of different employees are very often heavily at odds with each other and that this becomes more likely the more that a corporation scales and the more levels of hierarchy that it obtains b) that the corporation consists of humans who can prevent activities from veering too far into the objectionable in most cases. I'll also add an additional point: it's very difficult for large corporations to engage in massive conspiracies without it eventually leaking. AI has no such problems co-ordinating with itself.

Noah Scales

A book "The Corporation" by Joel Bakan suggests that corporations are analogous to psychopaths. The book and an accompanying documentary and set of interviews with various economists, activists, CEO's, politicians, and intellectuals shared many perspectives on corporations as psychopathic or a source of danger to humanity, the planet, etc. The book was published in 2003, but the perspective goes back further, of course.

peterhartree

Stuart Russell makes the comparison to corporations in his book Human Compatible. I have a feeling that Yudkowsky made the comparison in a blog post, but I can't quickly find it.

Effective altruism is no longer the right name for the movement

davidhartsough2y7

GREAT post! Such a fantastic and thorough explanation of a truly troubling issue! Thank you for this.

We definitely need to distinguish what I call the various "flavors" of EA. And we have many options for how to organize this.

Personally, I'm torn because, on one hand, I want to bring everyone together still under an umbrella movement, with several "branches" within it. However, I agree that, as you note, this situation feels much more like the differences between the rationality community and the EA community: "the two have a lot of overlap but they are no... (read more)

ParthThaya

Thanks for the kind words! Your observations that "people who are emphatically in one camp but not the other are very different people" matches my beliefs here as well. It seems intuitively evident to me that most of the people who want to help the less fortunate aren't going to be attracted to, and often will be repelled by, a movement that focuses heavily on longtermism. And that most of the people who want to solve big existential problems aren't going to be interested in EA ideas or concepts (I'll use Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are my examples here again).

Avoiding the demandingness of total welfarism with rights-based discounted welfarism

davidhartsough2y1

Hey Stijn, loved your post! Would you be interested in writing a second version of this without the use of philosophical terms (jargon) so that a common layperson would be able to easily read and understand these ideas? (I'd like to be able to share these ideas, but I wouldn't be able to with the current terminology. I understand it is written for an audience who has a background in moral philosophy and ethics, but I want to share these ideas with people who don't have that prior knowledge.)

Stijn

Hi David, sure, I've published an easier version, with more concrete examples and without jargon at my website: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/ I called the theory mild welfarism, hopefully that is not too much jargon? ;-)

History of the theory of well-being

davidhartsough2y1

Thanks Teo!

Thank you for these thoughtful reflections! This is exactly the kind of discussions I was hoping this might generate.

Is flourishing even possible "all else being equal", such as in an experience machine?

Hmmm, depends on how magical your machine is 😅 and not to be that guy again, but it depends on your definition of flourishing. (I'm choosing to not impose any of my own ideas in this post and even in the comments for now.)

Let's take the PERMA theory of well-being from Seligman as an example though. He'd probably say:

"If the machine complet... (read more)

History of the theory of well-being

davidhartsough2y1

Haha one reason might be that there's probably bias towards psychological needs when you get a bunch of psychologists to come up with the theories 😅🤷

(Might look very different if there were 6 prominent theories of well-being coming out of a humanistic field of biology!)

History of the theory of well-being

davidhartsough2y1

Thanks hornbill!

I think you're right, this isn't necessarily a "meta-analysis" or "systematic review" by academic standards. (I'll update the description.)

"I think if you were to frame this differently and draw out a little more why we should care about wellbeing, you'd get more punch."

What kind of framing might you have preferred?

While I was sitting on this document for over 2 years now, I went back and forth on what I wanted to accomplish with it. I've decided that I don't necessarily want it to "pack a punch" in the sense of being persuasive about a... (read more)

Welfare Estimation 201: Understanding Life-Valuation Variability

davidhartsough2y4

Haha "chutzpah", nice. Big fan of this series! Hope it continues! Can't wait to see the 300s.

Welfare Estimation 101: Money is not Fungible

davidhartsough2y4

Love this article and the series. Couldn't be happier to see you get this discussion rolling!

Questions for you regarding this piece:

The fungible thing in the analysis, i.e. the common unit of account, should be a year of healthy, happy, flourishing human life.

Just out of curiosity, why do you think this measure ought to be the unit? You could say "a month" or "a day" or "a decade" or "a six second conscious moment", but the choice is "a year".

And how do we deal with "healthy, happy, and flourishing" as a singular unit, when, in a sense, each of these t... (read more)

Richard Bruns

Questions in order: 1. I never meant to make a statement that a year is better than other time units. I said year because it is the existing standard in the field. The statement was about using a life/health measurement rather than money. As the 102 post hints at, my goal is not to create 'the best' system ex nihilo; it is to build off of the precedent set in the field. So whenever an arbitrary choice has already become the standard, and it is not obviously worse than something else, I stick with it. 2. This will inevitably be handwavey, fuzzy, and based on surveys. I imagine something like the WELBY, where we set the value of an ideal life to 1, and ask people how bad it would be for various things to happen to them, and assign 'disability weights' to everything based on their responses. 3. Because it is easy for everyone to understand intuitively. See the 102 post; anything we use will need to be very approachable, so we have society-wide buy-in for the metric.

Hank_B

As far as I can tell, Richard Bruns is talking about the quality-adjusted life year or QALY. The reason it is a year is essentially arbitrary, a year is decently long without being too long for the purposes of public health where QALYs first got used. The way we deal with "healthy, happy, and flourishing" as a single unit is much trickier. For traditional QALY calculations, researchers simply ask people how they feel when experiencing certain things (like a particular surgery or a disease) and normalize/aggregate those responses to get a scale where 0 quality is as good as death, 1 is perfect health, and negative numbers can be used for experiences worse than death. Then you multiply quality by quantity. The Wikipedia article on this is good and goes into more depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year Note: I don't know how Bruns intends to measure quality of life yet, I expect we'll have to wait.

Introducing Effective Self-Help

davidhartsough2y4

+1 to the "living reviews" idea! Love that Peter! Such a good goal to have the outputs be "consistently improved and updated over time".

Introducing Effective Self-Help

davidhartsough2y4

Great question! I don't actually know. (Although I do know that Spark Wave, the parent organization, is also the "parent" of Positly [both founded by Spencer Greenberg], so they probably have a deal worked out haha. Who knows.)

MichaelA

FWIW, I'd guess that: * It's rarely wise to do as many different types of things as Spencer Greenberg does and usually best to focus more, at least until you're ~excelling at each thing * I think Spencer's approach is going very well for him, but that it's not good as standard advice for most people or even most entreprneurial EAs * I think it's plausible it'd make sense for ESH to eventually sometimes do quite small, quick, simple, and cheap primary empirical research, like a small quick survey, as one small additional input into recommendations. But I think it's easy to underestimate how much survey work benefits from methodological expertise and effort, and I think that sort of work is very different from what's proposed in this post. So I'd guess it shouldn't be one of ESH's primary focuses or something ESH tries to get really good at (just in order to focus). But those are just some quick thoughts.

Introducing Effective Self-Help

davidhartsough2y9

Fantastic! I feel as though nearly any project founded with the basis of those 7 principles is bound to be pretty amazing.

I can't wait to see how you'll tackle these challenges and uncertainties. You've got great question along with a great idea.

I had a few thoughts pop up throughout the read, but I'll just stick to 2 to post in this comment:

#1.) I'm curious to hear what people in the EA forum think about the idea of ESH running its own research from time to time to help fill in any gaps or further test any ideas. If ESH is truly struggling to find good re... (read more)

Chris Leong

Wouldn't that be extremely expensive?

Native languages in the EA community (and issues with assessing promisingness)

davidhartsough2y6

+1 to being able to speak about these important topics and concepts to a broad, general audience.

+1 to striving to be inclusive.

+1 to making me laugh at the irony of how this post has some technical (jargon) words both in the title (what is "promisingness"? hehe) and in the post. (But to be fair: you know your audience here on the forum.)

+1 to your suggestions. Great suggestions :)

I'm reminded of the successes of scientific educators that this EA community could learn from. For example educators like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kurzgesagt demonstrate how taking... (read more)

Supporting Video, Audio, and other non-text media on the Forum

davidhartsough2y3

Well written! Great points! 10/10 am convinced.

I would love to have more audio and video content. I consume in that medium almost exclusively. I always prefer audiobooks over ebooks, podcasts over blogs, and videos over articles.

But the medium I love most of all is the combination of all of it together in a beautiful, complementary harmony. Give me the audio paired with the text transcript paired with the visual imagery and video elements 🤌

Mmmm what a pairing! (If only I could taste the altruism and smell the effectiveness.)

We've evolved to listen to othe... (read more)

Supporting Video, Audio, and other non-text media on the Forum

davidhartsough2y5

It would be amazing if every post had a direct link to its respective audio version (on each major podcast platform). Ex: I would love to go to a post on the front page, read the first paragraph, decide I'd like to give it a go, click a link on the post's page that could take me straight to the track on Spotify, hit play, return to the post, and then read along with the audio.

The Importance-Avoidance Effect

davidhartsough3y5

Haha, I love how you captured the vibe in such a great image! Thank you for the compliment as well :)

(Hopefully some of these strategies will help us navigate the things that truly are "most important" in our lives.)

The Importance-Avoidance Effect

davidhartsough3y5

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response! I really appreciate your ideas. I'll reply inline here:

"Bigger and more-complex projects tend to be more important (or else we probably wouldn't do the project), and the complexity and size tend to make it harder to get started or get into a rhythm."

Totally agree with this, and these things are compounding.

Most of my claim is that some people struggle with a cognitive bias effect that pushes them to avoid all of this, all together.

So you're right, it's not necessarily always the "importance" of the projec... (read more)

The Importance-Avoidance Effect

davidhartsough3y4

Thank you for sharing (and reading)!

Were you able to "share the load" (so to say) in some capacity with your PhD and research?

In what ways do you effectively utilize this insight you've gained into your own social motivation? Do you tend to build teams and recruit people to help you with your projects in specific ways? How do you keep it fun and enjoyable for yourself and your friends?

MaxRa

I was, I started working with a colleague and I got a research assistant which really did a lot of a difference. It was very motivating to have another mind looking at the same problems and finding them interesting/challenging, plus I could focus more on the things that were most interesting to me by outsourcing some tasks. And I think I don't have to do much else than just scheduling a meeting every two weeks or so to make it enjoyable and fun, at least for me that is all that is needed.

The Importance-Avoidance Effect

davidhartsough3y4

So glad to hear it was helpful! Thanks for reading it :)

Lemme know which strategies end up being the most effective for you! I'm keen to know what works best for people. (If you couldn't tell, I'm also a person who struggles with this a great deal, so this is mostly me trying to find answers and solutions for myself as well haha.)

The Importance-Avoidance Effect

davidhartsough3y3

Oooo love these thoughts from Aaron Swartz! I actually hadn't read this bit from him before, yet reading it felt so familiar in that "oh snap, duh, he just put to words that kind of unspoken wisdom we've always been dancing around for probably generations" kind of way.

Thank you for sharing this! I've added some of those tips to the list here.

Open Thread: September 2021

davidhartsough3y10

Hey oh! Long time lurker, first time poster.

Finally got those nervous jitters out of the way today and actually published my first post (awaiting "first-post approval"), along with my bio/this. (It is indeed daunting to try to insert one's self into the EA community and make a good first impression.)

I first discovered EA through 80000 Hours back when I graduated uni and felt existential bewilderment (5 years ago and still feelin' it of course). Then I came across ClearerThinking.org and eventually landed a gig with Spark Wave last year. I didn't get invo... (read more)

Ben_West

Hey David! Congratulations on publishing your first post :)