All of David Mathers's Comments + Replies

I should probably stop posting on this or reading the comments, for the sake of my mental health (I mean that literally, this is a major anxiety disorder trigger for me.) But I guess I sort of have to respond to a direct request for sources. 

Scott's official position on this is agnosticism, rather than public endorsement*. (See here for official agnosticism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart)

However, for years at SSC he put the dreaded neo-reactionaries on his blogroll. And they are definitely race/IQ guys. Meanwhile... (read more)

I think this is too pessimistic:  why did one of Biden's cabinet ask for Christiano in one of the top positions at the US gov's AI safety org if the government will reliably prioritize the sort of factors you cite here to the exclusion of safety?: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/04/us-commerce-secretary-gina-raimondo-announces-expansion-us-ai-safety

I also think that whether or not the government regulates private AI has little to do with whether it militarizes AI. It's not like there is one dial with "amount of government" and it just gets ... (read more)

I trust EV more than the charity commission about many things, but whether EV behaved badly over SBF is definitely not one of them. One judgment here is incredibly liable to distortion through self-interest and ego preservation, and it's not the charity commission's. (That's not a prediction that the charity commission will in fact harshly criticize EV. I wouldn't be surprised either way on that.) 

'also on not "some moral view we've never thought of".'

Oh, actually, that's right. That does change things a bit. 

People don't reject this stuff, I suspect, because there is frankly, a decently large minority of the community who thinks "black people have lower IQs for genetic reasons" is suppressed forbidden knowledge. Scott Alexander has done a lot, entirely deliberately in my view, to spread that view over the years (although this is probably not the only reason), and Scott is generally highly respected within EA. 

Now, unlike the people who spend all their time doing race/IQ stuff, I don't think more than a tiny, insignificant fraction of the people in the com... (read more)

I find it easy to believe there was a heated argument but no threats, because it is easy for things to get exaggerated, and the line between telling someone you no longer trust them because of a disagreement and threatening them is unclear when you are a powerful person who might employ them. But I find Will's claim that the conversation wasn't even about whether Sam was trustworthy or anything related to that, to be really quite hard to believe. It would be weird for someone to be mistaken or exaggerate about that, and I feel like a lie is unlikely, simply because I don't see what anyone would gain from lying to TIME about this.

Nathan's comment here is one case where I really want to know what the people giving agree/disagree votes intended to express. Agreement/disagreement that the behaviour "doesn't sound like Will'? Agreement/disagreement that Naia would be unlikely to be lying? General approval/disapproval of the comment? 

Yes, but not at great length. 

From my memory, which definitely could be faulty since I only listened once: 

He admits people did tell him Sam was untrustworthy. He says that his impression was something like "there was a big fight and I can't really tell what happened or who is right" (not a direct quote!). Stresses that many of the people who warned him about Sam continued to have large amounts of money on FTX later, so they didn't expect the scale of fraud we actually saw either. (They all seem to have told TIME that originally also.) Says Sam w... (read more)

 Will's expressed public view on that sort of double or nothing gamble is hard to actually figure out, but it is clearly not as robustly anti as commonsense would require, though it is also clearly a lot LESS positive than SBF's view that you should obviously take it: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill/

(I haven't quoted from the interview, because there is no one clear quote expressing Will's position, text search for "double" and you'll find the relevant stuff.) 

Actually, I have a lot of sympathy with what you are saying here. I am ultimately somewhat inclined to endorse "in principle, the ends justify the means, just not in practice" over at least a fairly wide range of cases. I (probably) think in theory you should usually kill one innocent person to save five, even though in practice anything that looks like doing that is almost certainly a bad idea, outside artificial philosophical thought experiments and maybe some weird but not too implausible scenarios involving war or natural disaster. But at the same time... (read more)

I don't necessarily disagree with most of that, but I think it is ultimately still plausible that people who endorse a theory that obviously says in principle bad ends can justify the means are somewhat (plausibly not very much though) more likely to actually do bad things with an ends-justifies-the-means vibe. Note that this is an empirical claim about what sort of behaviour is actually more likely to co-occur with endorsing utilitarianism or consequentialism in actual human beings. So it's not refuted by "the correct understanding of consequentialism mos... (read more)

The 3% figure for utilitarianism strikes me as a bit misleading on it's own, given what else Will said. (I'm not accusing Will of intent to mislead here, he said something very precise that I, as a philosopher, entirely followed, it was just a bit complicated for lay people.) Firstly, he said a lot of the probability space was taken up by error theory, the view that there is no true morality. So to get what Will himself endorses, whether or not there is a true morality, you have to basically subtract an unknown but large amount for his credence in error th... (read more)

Actually, Wikipedia is characterizing the US bills a bit misleadingly: at least the one I looked at is not a full legal ban on trans women using women's bathrooms, but seemed to only cover schools specifically. 

But I do take your point that Will was not the only person involved, or necessarily the most important internally. 

I think part of the issue is that the Time article sort of contains a very serious allegation about Will specifically, which he hasn't (yet*) publicly given evidence against (or clearly denied), namely Naia Bouscal's allegation that he threatened Tara Mac Aulay. I say "sort of", because saying someone "basically" X-ed, where X-ing is bad arguably carries the implication that it maybe wasn't really X exactly, but something a bit like it. Which makes it a bit hard to tell exactly what Naia was actually accusing Will of. Alas, as far as I know, she's not said... (read more)

I must say that, given that I know from prior discussion on here that you are not Will's biggest fan, your attempt to be fair here is quite admirable. There should maybe be an "integrity" react button? 

I think that even if you buy that, Will's behavior is still alarming, just in a different way. Why exactly should we, as a community, think of ourselves as being  fitted to steer public opinion? Weren't we just meant to be experts on charity, rather than everything under the sun? (Not to mention that Musk is not the person I would choose to collaborate with on that, but that's for another day.) Will complains about Sam's hubris, but what could be more hubristic than that? 

I remember feeling nervous when I first started working in EA that (otherwi... (read more)

Unendorsed as I trust Jason on this far more than my own judgment, since he's an actual lawyer.

OK, I misremembered the exact nature of the suit. Sorry.

I meant something in between "is" and "has a non-zero chance of being", like assigning significant probability to it (obviously I didn't have an exact number in mind), and not just for base rate reasons about believing all rich people to be dodgy. 

I feel like "people who worked with Sam told people about specific instances of quite serious dishonesty they had personally observed" is being classed as "rumour" here, which whilst not strictly inaccurate, is misleading, because it is a very atypical case relative to the image the word "rumour" conjures. Also, even if people only did receive stuff that was more centrally rumour, I feel like we still want to know if any one in leadership argued "oh, yeah, Sam might well be dodgy, but the expected value of publicly backing him is high because of the upside... (read more)

(Well not quite, Wiki edit out "or our culture" as an alternative to "form of government").

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1657541010745081857?lang=en. There you go for the quote in the form Wikipedia gives it.

Yeah sorry!

Please people, do not treat Richard Hannania as some sort of worthy figure who is a friend of EA. He was a Nazi, and whilst he claims he moderated his views, he is still very racist as far as I can tell.

Hannania called for trying to get rid of all non-white immigrants in the US, and the sterilization of everyone with an IQ under 90 indulged in antisemitic attacks on the allegedly Jewish elite, and even post his reform was writing about the need for the state to harass and imprison Black people specifically ('a revolution in our culture or form of governmen... (read more)

https://twitter.com/letsgomathias/status/1687543615692636160   (Just so people can get a sense of how very bad his views at least were, and could still be.) 

I think she provided excellent evidence that at least some of your sources are in fact accurately characterized as "Nazi". Did you actually read the article she linked? 

This is a meta-level point, but I'd be very, very wary of giving any help to Hanania if he attempts (even sincerely) to position himself publicly as a friend of EA. He was outed as having moved in genuinely and unambiguously white supremacist political circles for years a while ago. And while I accept that repentance is possible, and he claims to have changed (and probably has become less bad), I do not trust someone at all who had to have this be exposed rather than publicly owning up and denouncing his (allegedly) past views of his own accord, especially... (read more)

'Naive consequentialist plans also seem to have increased since FTX, mostly as a result of shorter AI timelines and much more involvement of EA in the policy space.'

This gives me the same feeling as Rebecca's original post: that you have specific information about very bad stuff that you are (for good or bad reasons) not sharing. 

Yes, Harris should have asked Will about this: https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ 

Wasn't the OpenAI thing basically the opposite of the mistake with FTX though? With FTX people ignored what appears to have been a fair amount of evidence that a powerful, allegedly ethical businessperson was in fact shady. At OpenAI, people seem to have got (what they perceived as, but we've no strong evidence they were wrong) evidence, that a powerful, allegedly ethically motivated businessperson was in fact shady, so they learnt the lessons of FTX and tried to do something about it (and failed.) 

'Am I correct in interpreting your comment as something like "Rebecca says it's costly to say more which might imply she is sitting on not yet disclosed information that might put powerful EAs in a bad light"?'

Yes, that's what I meant. Maybe not "not all ready disclosed" though. It might just be confirmation that the portraited painted here is indeed fair and accurate: https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/  EDIT: I don't doubt that the article is broadly literally accurate, but there's always a big gap between what... (read more)

As am aside, this isn't really action relevant, but insofar as being involved with the legal system is a massive punishment even when the legal system itself is very likely going to eventually come to the conclusion you've done nothing legally wrong, that seems bad? Here it also seems to be having a knock on effect of making it harder to find out what actually happened, rather than being painful but producing useful information.

The suit against Brady also sounds like a complete waste of society's time and money to me.

Agreed

Who would be able to sue? Would it really be possible for FTX customers/investors to sue someone for not making public "I heard Sam lies a lot and once misplaced money at Alameda early on it and didn't seem too concerned, and reneged on a verbal agreement to share ownership". Just because someone worked at the Future Fund? Or even someone who worked at EV? 

I'm pretty sure if you're aware of it Will is. (Not sure about Harris.) 

The complaints here seem to be partly about HOW EtG is promoted, rather than how MUCH. Though I am mildly skeptical that people in fact did not warn against doing harm to make money while promoting EtG, and much more skeptical that SBF would have listened if they had done this more. 

True. We should make sure any particular safeguard wasn't in place around how people advocated for it before assuming it would have helped though. For what it's worth my sense is that a much more culpable thing was not blowing the whistle on Sam's bad behaviour at early Alameda even after Will and other leaders-I forget exactly who, if it's even known-were informed about it. That mistake was almost certainly far less consequential for the people harmed by FTX (I don't think it would have stopped the fraud; it might have protected EA itself), but I strongly suspect it was more knowably wrong at the time than anything anyone did or said about EtG as a general idea. 

Also, I don't know if Spencer Greenberg's podcast with Will is recorded yet, but if it hasn't been I think he absolutely should ask Will what he thinks the phrase about "extensive and significant mistakes" here actually refers to. EDIT: Having listened (vaguely, while working) to most of the Sam Harris interview with Will, as far as I can tell Harris entirely failed to ask anything about this, which is a huge omission. Another question Spencer could ask Will is: did you specify this topic was off-limits to Harris? 

I mostly agree with this, and upvoted strongly, but I don't think the scare quotes around "criticism" is warranted. Improving ideas and projects through constructive criticism is not the same thing as speaking truth to power, but it is still good and useful, it's just a different good and useful thing. 

Also, I feel mean for pressing the point against someone who is clearly finding this stressful and is no more responsible for it than anyone else in the know, but I really want someone to properly explain what the warning signs the leadership saw were, who saw them, and what was said internally in response to them. I don't even know how much that will help with anything, to be honest, so much as I just want to know. But at least in theory, anyone who behaved really badly should be removed from positions of power. (And I do mean just that: positions where t... (read more)

'and think confusion on this issue has indirectly resulted in a lot of harm.'

Can you say a bit more about this?

I don't actually find either all THAT reassuring. The GW blogpost just says most nets are used for their intended purpose, but 30% being used otherwise is still a lot, not to mention they can be used for their intended purpose and the later to fish. The Cold Takes blog post just cites the same data about most nets being used for their intended purpose. 

I don't think it's necessary, no. But I do think some early critics of EtG were motivated at least partly by a general anticapitalist case that business or at least finance careers were generically morally problematic in themselves. 

Wait, why do you think 2 is false for FTX? (Good comment though!) 

I had seen the second of these at some point I think, but not the first. 

Any claim that advising people to earn to give is inherently really bad needs to either defend the view that "start a business or take another high paying job" is inherently immoral advice, or explain why it becomes immoral when you add "and give the money to charity" or when it's aimed at EAs specifically. It's possible that can be done, but I think it's quite a high bar. (Which is not to say EtG advice couldn't be improved in ways that make future scandals less likely.)