All of Davis_Kingsley's Comments + Replies

Congratulations Niel! Best of luck with the future of 80k!

Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?

In general I think "TESCREAL" is a bad term that conflates a bunch of different things in order to attack them all as a group and I'd prefer not to see it used.

I consider this sort of "oh, I have a take but you guys aren't good enough for it" type perspective deeply inappropriate for the Forum -- and I say that as someone who is considerably less "anti-Anthropic" than some of the comments here.

I interpret it as broadly the latter based on the further statements in the Twitter thread, though I could well be wrong.

Congrats Ben, and count me in as another voice in favor of this type of humor on the Forum!

Yes, to be clear I don't think Oli was necessarily claiming that -- I was replying to Jonas here, who listed Tara as one of "the Leverage people" in his own comment.

Wait, was Tara a Leverage person? Kerry and Larissa work for Leverage now and Tyler was affiliated in the past, but I wasn't under the impression Tara was particularly involved with Leverage -- though I could of course be wrong!

A while ago I remember seeing some  discussion of EA analysis of Ukraine relief following the Russian invasion -- perhaps some EAs from Poland were involved? Did this ever get comprehensively written up anywhere?

I quite suspect people at Anthropic are already thinking of considerations like this when deciding what to do and am not sure that an anonymous post is needed here.

Thanks for posting this! I appreciate the legibility and insight into the process here, especially during a stressful time in EA/on the Forum. 

Thanks for posting this. I think giving detailed reflections and "lessons learned" like this can be really helpful in these sorts of situations, but I also recognize it can be tough to do in public. Positive reinforcement for this openness and frank discussion!

Historical note: If EA had emerged in the 1970s era of the gay rights movement rather than the 2010s, I can imagine an alternative history in which some EAs were utterly outraged and offended that gay or lesbian EAs had dared to invite them to a gay or lesbian event. The EA community could have leveraged the latent homophobia of the time to portray such an invitation as bizarrely unprofessional, and a big problem that needs addressing. Why are we treating polyamory and kink in 2023 with the same reactive outrage that people would have treated gay/lesbian s

Side-note: the OP says "Wildly unusual social practices like polyamory", but I think poly is fairly common in the Bay Area outside of EA/rat circles.

I suspect it's fairly common in other young, blue-tribe, urban contexts in the US too? (Especially if we treat "polyamorous", "non-monogamous", and many "monogamish" relationship styles as more-or-less the same phenomenon.)

I've heard this argument before but I think it's quite overstated. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and still am in touch with many friends from childhood. They are generally young, blue-tribe, ... (read more)

It's also worth noting that I am an adult convert to Catholicism and was involved with the Bay Area rationalist and EA community (and uncomfortable with the "polyamory pressure" in that community) for years before joining the Church, including some time when I didn't take religion seriously much at all. Claiming or implying that I hold my views (or faced backlash against them) just because I'm Catholic does me a disservice.

I note also that others in the community who are not (as far as I know) Catholic have faced backlash for their views against polyamory ... (read more)

No, but if you say "polyamory has been a problem in the EA (and rationalist) communities for a long time" and people know that you do in fact believe polyamory to be immoral, it's completely reasonable for them to respond as Kelsey did?
 

Most people don't know that and I wasn't asserting it here -- that would be much more controversial and much more of a debate than I wanted to have, and further one that I don't think is very appropriate for the EA Forum! My hope is (was?) that even people who quite disagree with me -- including many polyamorous people -- would have common cause in opposing the pressure to be polyamorous that has been prevalent.

I am a Catholic -- though I would not call myself a traditionalist -- and I believe what the Church teaches, including on matters of sexuality. Bringing my religion up in this way feels like a character attack that ought to be below the standards of the EA Forum though, and I'm grieved to see it.

My posts here are not saying "Polyamory is a sin, convert to Catholicism." They are not saying "you should be pressured into monogamy." Those things seem much more contentious than what I'm going for here. Instead, I am saying that there has long been in fact the e... (read more)

Yes, I'm not sure this needs to be said but just to be clear -- I also don't think CEA or whatever should have a "talking people out of polyamorous relationships" department, and this would seem like a bizarre overreach to me.

I'm thinking of things much more along the lines of "discourage the idea of polyamory as 'more rational' and especially polyamory pressure in particular", not "make EA institutions formally try to deconvert people from polyamory" or whatever.

To be clear, the thing I was wishing we had resolved internally was much more the widespread pressure to be polyamorous in (at least some parts of?) EA rather than individual people's relationships; as you say, it would not be appropriate for the EA community to have a discussion about how to "resolve" your personal relationships.  What would that even mean?

However, I think that this is far from the first time that major cultural issues with polyamory and unwelcome pressure to be polyamorous have been brought up, and it does seem to me that that's the... (read more)

I think polyamory has been a problem in the EA (and rationalist) communities for a long time and led to both some really uncomfortable and concerning community dynamics and also just a lot of drama and problems. Multiple high-profile women have told me that they felt pressured to be polyamorous by men in the community and/or felt that polyamory was bad but they didn't feel comfortable speaking up against it, and I've faced some degree of community social backlash myself for speaking out (even informally!) against polyamory. 

In general I think this has been kind of an ongoing issue for quite some time, and I wish we had resolved it "internally" rather than it being something exposed by outside investigators.

You say :

Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks "how can I become smart like you?", you no longer need to answer "Have you ever read Harry Potter?" because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it.

On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn't recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It's highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than... (read more)

I recognize this comment may not be received well here, but I think things like this are quite bad for EA to support -- there are very substantial political skew issues in the movement already, and running political candidates as a EA intervention seems like another step down a road I think the movement needs to quickly depart.

The "Organizations vs. Getting Stuff Done" post is about anarchist political activism. This is a rather unusual area -- under normal circumstances organizations are a relevant tool to aid in getting things done, not an obstacle to it.

To me this seems like essentially a "cheap shot" -- you could write basically this story in support of very many positions. Imagine a story that's like "wow, this guy was a utilitarian, even back then people knew utilitarianism could lead to unacceptable conclusions, we're getting rid of his statue" or whatever. In fact, you could probably write a story like this against certain ideas in EA animal thought.

One relevant concept might be that of the feedback loop, where the output of a process affects the input. For instance, if you survey only people who are already attending your events as to how to improve them, you might wind up missing ways to improve it for those who didn't attend. After several cycles of this you might wind up with an event that is very appealing for the "in crowd" but which doesn't much appeal to newcomers.

Note that Torres was banned from the forum for a year following a previous discussion here where he repeatedly called another member a liar and implied that member should be fired from his job.

Good point re: Charity Entrepreneurship.

I'm somewhat more skeptical of the grantmaking thing though because there are few enough positions that it is not very legible who is good at it, whether others currently outside the field could do better, etc.

I could be wrong -- I can point to specific things from some grantmakers that I thought were particularly good, for instance -- but it doesn't feel to me that it's the most amenable field for such a program. 

(Note that this is low-confidence and I could be wrong -- if there are more objective grantmaking skill metrics somewhere I'd be very interested to see more!)

My impression is that the people who end up working in EA organizations are not on the same tier of discipline, work ethic, commitment, etc. as elite military forces and are not really even very close?

I don't say that to disparage EA direct workers, I'm involved in direct work myself  -- but my sense is that much more is possible. That said, as you mention the amount of discipline needed may simply not be as high.

For some reason I can't see the draft, when I click on the notification I received for it it says "Error: app.operation_not_allowed" and kind of glitches out the interface until I refresh. Apologies!
 

(edit: fixed now, thanks!)

Thanks, I'm impressed by this reply and your willingness to go out there and do a survey. I will have more substantive feedback later as I want to consult with someone else before making a further statement -- ping me if I haven't replied by Friday.

I (very anecdotally) think there are lots of people who are interested in donating to quite specific cause areas, e.g. "my father died of cancer so I donate to cancer charities" or "I want to donate to help homelessness in my area" -- haven't studied that in depth though.

Thanks! Good to know.

Hmm, I remember seeing a criticism somewhere in the EA-sphere that went something like:

"The term "longtermism" is misleading because in practice "longtermism" means "concern over short AI timelines", and in fact many "longtermists" are concerned with events on a much shorter time scale than the rest of EA."

I thought that was a surprising and interesting argument, though I don't recall who initially made it. Does anyone remember?

The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero. I will never be rich, so I have chosen to crank down my desires. The bureaucracy cannot take anything from me, because there is nothing to take.

Colonel John Boyd

I think this comment, while quite rude, does get at something valuable. There's an argument that goes "hmm, the outside view says this is absurd, we should be really sure of our inside view before proceeding" and I think that's sometimes a bit of a neglected perspective in rationalist/EA spaces.

I happen to know that the inside view on HPMoR bringing people into the community is very strong, and that the inside view on Eli Tyre doing good and important work is also very strong. I'm less familiar with the details behind the other gra... (read more)

I don't agree with all of the decisions being made here, but I really admire the level of detail and transparency going into these descriptions, especially those written by Oliver Habryka. Seeing this type of documentation has caused me to think significantly more favorably of the fund as a whole.

Will there be an update to this post with respect to what projects actually fund following these recommendations? One aspect that I'm not clear on is to what extent CEA will "automatically" follow these recommendations and to what extent there will be significant further review.

Just posting to acknowledge that I've seen this - my full reply will be long enough that I'm probably going to make it a separate post.

Neither is poverty alleviation or veganism or anything else in practice.

Again, strong disagree - many things are not politicized and can be answered more directly. One of the main strengths of EA, in my view, is that it isn't just another culture war position (yet?) - consider Robin Hanson's points on "pulling the rope sideways".

You said the problem was stating it authoritatively rather than the actual conclusions, I made it sound less authoritative but now you're saying that the actual conclusions matter.

Sorry, I perhaps wasn't specific enough in my original reply. The "less authoritative" thing was meant to apply to the entire document, not just this one section - that's why I also said I wasn't sure documents like this are good for EA as a movement.

I think there's something unhealthy and self-reinforcing about tiptoeing around like that. The

Like I said, that's not really the point - it also doesn't meaningfully resolve that particular issue, because of course the whole dispute is whose well-being counts, with anti-abortion advocates claiming that human fetuses count and pro-abortion people claiming that human fetuses don't.

I dunno, maybe I'm overly cautious, but I'm not fond of someone publishing a well-made and official-looking "based on EA principles, here's who to vote for" document, since "EA principles" quite vary - I think if EA becomes seen as politically aligned (with either major US party) that constitutes a huge constraint on our movement's potential.

I don't think there's much practical difference between "intrinsic moral interests" and "intrinsic moral rights", but that's not really the point - it's more that I think given such differences in perspective between EAs, I'm not sure that documents like this are great for EA as a movement. I would at least prefer to see them presented less... authoritatively?

I like that you've put the effort into creating this, but I'm not fond of the background assumptions here - there seem to be some elements that not all EAs might necessarily share. For instance, one section begins "Intrinsic moral rights do not exist" - that's certainly not what I believe and it seems inconsistent with other sections that talk about the "intrinsic moral weight" of animal populations, etc.

While the fact that you've "shown your work" with the Excel spreadsheet helps people evaluate the same i... (read more)

I actually quite disagree - I believe history indicates national militaries very frequently miss effective ways to conduct war. There's a famous phrase, "fighting the last war", that describes how military planners almost always miss innovations and changes in conditions during peacetime and only adapt when forced to by direct conflict.

For example, between World War One and World War Two, the world's militaries converged on several dangerously false theories with respect to what the next war would look like, and many weapons and strateg... (read more)

Good points!

One note I'll add is that similar attacks with vehicles or bladed weapons were used against Israel prior to their adoption by ISIS, though these attacks are not as widely reported by Western media since they don't happen in Europe or the US; that said, it's quite possible that ISIS themselves got the idea from Palestinian attackers, especially if the "copycat hypothesis" is true.

One thing I've noticed is that direct work tends to put you much more in contact with reality (for lack of a better term) than community-building; it's much easier to see what you're accomplishing and what is and isn't working. This can be especially important for people trying to build and/or demonstrate skills.

It seems clear to me that in some cases positive systemic change is possible, even with relatively limited teams working on them.

However, systemic changes can also lead to substantial problems. Even some of the examples you gave here are far from objectively good - I note with some worry that historical attempts to place the means of production into the hands of the people have led to some of the greatest disasters of human history.

The "downside risks" of these sorts of approaches seem very high. That isn't to say that nobody should do them, but ... (read more)