All of Garrison's Comments + Replies

I've found Mac Whisper to be the most accurate (haven't tested many though), but it doesn't distinguish between speakers or do any formatting.

Late to the party, but isn't the relevant thing for AMF donors the counterfactual number of fish killed by mosquito nets distributed by AMF? It seems like AMF has higher rates of nets being used properly than other charities. 

Why did he link to a $20 book for Famine, Affluence, and Morality when the PDF is easily available online for free? 

Yeah, I think I meant pretty neutral compared to the prompts given to elicit SupremacyAGI from CoPilot, but upon reflection, I think I largely agree with your objection. 

I do still think Claude's responses here tell us something more interesting about the underlying nature of the model than the more unhinged responses from CoPilot and Bing Chat. In its responses, Claude is still mostly trying to portray itself as harmless, helpful, and pro-humanity, indicating that some amount of its core priorities persist, even while it's play-acting. Sydney and Sup... (read more)

Thanks for your thoughtful engagement! Chalmers made a similar point during our interview (that socialist societies would also experience strong pressures to build AGI). 

I tried to describe the landscape as it exists right now, without making many claims about what would likely be true under a totally different economic/political system. That being said, I do think it's interesting that the leading labs are all corporations.

If you look at firms in a market economy as profit-maximizing agents and governments as agents trying to balance many interests, ... (read more)

Idk of any online communities explicitly focused on this intersection, but would be interested in participating in one! Facebook groups historically have been good for this sort of thing (especially bc of the mod approval questions you could include), but I've basically stopped using FB entirely, as have lots of others I know. A Slack channel within the larger EA Slack may work (eagreconnect.slack.com), but I just experimented with this and there doesn't seem to be a native feature like the FB mod approval questions. You could have channel admins that add ... (read more)

1. I think there definitely would have been pushback against this at the time! And if there wasn't, I would have not felt like this was a community for me. Titotal's comment explains this better than I could. Additionally, GiveDirectly could have deployed billions and animal welfare charities were nowhere close to fully funded even at the height of the FTX bubble.
2. The idea of refuges broadly isn't obviously terrible, but all the specifics of this one seem terrible, again for reasons outlined by others.
3. See above
4. This seems like a pretty essential piece of the pr

Fin Moorhouse asked something along these lines on Twitter. Pasting his question and my response below:

Fin: "Great article. I'm curious: are there estimates for how many extra fish deaths are caused by fishing wild-caught fish, especially high on the food chain (like tuna and salmon)? Seems complicated if fishing diminishes fish stocks and ∴ reduces predation in the long run?"

Me: "I didn't come across any. I think this is an interesting line of reasoning, and it makes me a bit more uncertain about the ethics of wild-fishing, but ultimately, it doesn't move... (read more)

Wow, thanks so much – very cool to hear!

Totally agreed RE the central nervous system!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find good data on something that specific. Obviously, someone going from an omnivorous diet where they replace all land animals with plants and eat the same number of fish is going to consume fewer animals. But at least in my case, and in others of people I know, they increased their fish consumption as a result of going pescetarian. 

There are also lots of recommendations to swap out land animals for fish for climate and health reasons, so I wanted to focus more on the animal welfare implications of doing that. 

Interesting, will check these out. 

Given that many fish we eat come from farms (and that number is increasing), do you think these arguments still hold?

Congratulations Clara! I think this is a really valuable project and am excited to see it come to fruition.

Another thing to consider is the enormous amount of info value we got out of this campaign. It looks like large amounts of money are not a sufficient condition for victory, but if Carrick hadn't been able to raise the amount of hard money needed to make the campaign happen, we would've learned a lot less. 

Epistemic status: very tired.

As others mentioned, this feels like too much of an update based on one data point. 

One of the largest advantages EAs running for office will have is their ability to fundraise from other EAs. I worry that skepticism of EAs in politics and/or slowness to act on time sensitive donation oppos will kneecap the success of future candidates. 

Big picture, I think the impact case was pretty solid. The US govt is enormously influential. It moves a lot of money, regulates important industries, has the largest military, and can... (read more)

I've definitely noticed this as a part of the EA NYC community (and I wouldn't be surprised if this were true elsewhere). I think it might come from a place of trying to pre-empt common criticisms/characterizations of EA, but comes off as weird, especially when the person has no preconceptions about EA. EA has a strong culture that's pretty different from every other community I've ever been a part of, but it doesn't exert control over my life. Obviously, ideas and people from EA influence me in big ways, but because I believe those ideas and respect those people.

A few thoughts on how we could mitigate some of these risks:

1. Have generous reimbursement policies at EA orgs but don't pay exorbitant salaries. 
   1. I think most EAs should value their time higher and be willing to trade money for time, and in these cases, I think you can justify a business expense. I think this will help clarify which spending choices are meant to actually boost productivity and which are just for fun. To be clear, I think spending some fraction of your income on just "fun" things like vacations, concerts, and eating out is fine in moderat

This is a great post, and I'm glad these points are being raised. I share a lot of the same concerns (basically, what happens to EA long term when it's just a good deal to join it?).

A big and small personal win from these changes in funding:

1. I decided to launch a magazine reporting on what matters in the long-term in large part because of the change in funding situation and related calls for more ambition. I had the idea for doing this more than 3 years ago, but didn't pursue it. (We're aiming to launch in Mar 2023).
2. In August, I quit my job at GiveDirectly

Unilateral disarmament by the US seems bad, but if the US and USSR eliminated all nukes, as they almost did in 1986, that seems good to me. No other countries had anywhere close the number, and we could have been much more convincing in getting other countries to follow suit. 

Great, thank you! This is definitely out of date, at least for GiveDirectly, where I used to work. GD has moved over $500M to people in poverty, though some substantial fraction of that (>$200M if my memory serves) was to people in the US. The Impact site says $100M. 

Pre-ordered a hardcover copy! 

Curious for more specifics on the hardcover vs. Kindle thing. Are Kindle pre-orders counted as some fraction of a hardcover order? If so, what is that fraction?

I'm excited for this series! I'm a big believer in EAs doing more things out in the world, both for the direct impacts but probably even more for the information value.

For example, I'm thrilled that Longview is getting into nuclear security grantmaking. I think this is:

1. good in its own terms
2. will teach us more about how international relations, coordination, and treaties work, which seems essential to ensure AI and synthetic bio advances go well
3. gives us something concrete to point to that almost everyone can agree is valuable

(disclosure that I contract for L... (read more)

Thanks for this writeup!

Josh Clark also did a podcast series on x-risk called the End of the World. It's very good! Almost everyone he quotes is from FHI and it's very aligned with EA thinking on x-risk. 

Thanks for this writeup James! 

I'm a freelance journalist and work as a media consultant for Longview and have been thinking about questions like this a lot. I agree that science and technology journalism seems particularly valuable for EAs to have a presence in. 

A few notes on this idea:

• The main constraint to doing something like this is finding EA/Longtermist writers/journalists who could plausibly write columns. One thing I'd love to see is more EAs pitching pieces to various organizations (80K is updating their career guide for journalism ver

SBF gave $5M to ProPublica to start a biosecurity section. 

Disclosure: my partner is working on Carrick's campaign. But I also chose to donate $2900 before she was involved with the campaign.  I was persuaded by the fact that small dollar donations are particularly useful in elections, which have individual donation caps. Also, if you're primarily interested in funding longtermist projects, I don't think there's much need for small dollar donors in other domains given how much big donors are focusing on LT. 

I think Carrick has at least a 20% chance based on conversations with relevant domain experts. He'... (read more)

This is great, thank you for talking with him and translating this for us. 

Bregman is a great example of someone who I think embodies a lot of EA ideas in his work and can reach more left-wing people. I remember him getting a lot of kudos from left twitter when he called out hypocrisy at Davos and criticized Tucker Carlson on his show (so effectively that Carlson's blowup prevented the segment from airing). 

Obviously, there are some tensions between Bregman's shtick and EA's dependence on billionaire philanthropy, but I think it would be smart to... (read more)

FYI, the link in this sentence is incorrect: This might be starting with the recent increase in funding for GiveWell.

I decided against writing a piece, but I think I actually engage honestly with Koch's claims. I think there's a strong case that Charles Koch has done more harm than almost anyone alive in the last 40 years, which I make in the piece. If you'd like more evidence for this, I recommend the book Dark Money. 

If you can point to specific things you think I got wrong, I'd be happy to hear them. If we can't be honest about the impact and motivations of people as odious as Charles Koch, I think we should reevaluate some things.

I wouldn't have approached writi... (read more)

Candidly, I'm not super informed on global food insecurity and would try to avoid getting too bogged down in engaging deeply with Beasley's claim (which seems pretty unlikely to be true, as OP spelled out nicely). But if there is a good EA write up on the topic, I might be able to bone up while writing the piece (assuming it gets assigned). 

Yeah, the whole interview is filled with fun stuff like that. 

EDIT: I wrote a pitch and sent it to the Guardian's op-ed page. Given how quickly news cycles change, I think time is of the essence, but I'm also wary of reputational risks to EA, so I'd be happy to work with comms professionals about the best way to approach this, should they decide to run the piece. 

I'm a freelance journalist and previously worked in fundraising at GiveDirectly. I may be able to write a draft tomorrow, or at least an op-ed pitch. If people have concerns/ideas, feel free to comment or DM me. 

I've written for lefty outlets befor... (read more)

Again, Beckstead could have made the exact same point while offering my parenthetical. It would have communicated the same idea while also acknowledging the real world context. I'm not opposed to decoupling or thought experiments to help clarify our positions on things. 

Yes I think that Summers was wrong. Extending his logic, companies should take even fewer steps to mitigate pollution in industrial practices in poor countries than they do in rich countries, because the economic costs of doing so are lower in poor countries and because it's probably cheaper and therefore more economically efficient to not mitigate pollution. He even says in the memo that moral reasons and social concerns could be invoked to oppose his line of reasoning, which seems relevant to people who claim to want to do good in the world, not just max... (read more)

I believe that governments can be competent in highly technical endeavors (e.g. Manhattan Project and Apollo Programs), operate large distribution networks (USPS), and run businesses (many states have a legal monopoly on alcohol sales). It's a matter of investment. This article goes into a lot more detail on how a public pharma sector could work. 

but I do suspect that it's not like the vaccine information is going to be withheld from the world while at the same time pharma companies just price gouge their way through the Global South; I think it's mor

I think open-sourcing any IP (either by govt's buying it and putting it out for free, or by developing it with that intention from the beginning like Oxford had planned) would largely solve this problem. You wouldn't need to have contracts or govts mandate that companies don't profit during the pandemic. There would just be an actually competitive market for generic vaccines.

Vaccine availability in poor countries is abysmal. Which is the main issue I see with the IP-protecting approach to vaccine development. If you just let companies set monopoly prices, ... (read more)

Then we should massively invest in alternative models for developing and producing vaccines. The reality is that monopoly prices and IP protections are making vaccines inaccessible to the majority of the world. If you just remove IP protections but don't put something else in place, I could see that leading to bad outcomes, but that's not what advocates are calling for. Decades of market fundamentalism has thoroughly limited our ideas of what is possible. Public sector drug development was the norm for many countries around the world, until the pharma industry captured rich country govts. 

Thinking that you can be opposed to a broad ideology on empirical grounds is simply mistaken. You can say something like " the countries that adopted self-described Marxist governments fared worse than they would have otherwise". But even that claim requires a lot of evidence to defend! Marxist revolutions didn't happen in already wealthy countries with stable institutions. I don't even consider myself a Marxist-- I'm just trying to make the point that this stuff is too complicated to make a claim that an ideology is empirically right or wrong.

Ideology is ... (read more)

Many EAs support open borders, which to me is in the same general ballpark of "abolish the police". Both are radical breaks from how the world currently is.  Both slogans are open to many different interpretations. And both have a lot of literature and research behind them. But one slogan is popular among EAs, and one isn't. 

I'm  a self-described socialist. I also work at an EA-aligned nonprofit and co-organize one of the largest EA groups in the world. I know plenty of other EAs who do great work and identify as socialists or leftists. 

But maybe EA would be better off without us because our political contributions are objectively wrong according to your analysis. 

Your analysis assumes that the goal of anyone with left of center politics is to flip seats from red to blue, but this is not the goal of the DSA. Obviously, winning majorities is essential to enacting... (read more)

Arguments like this certainly don't help win over leftists to EA.

A self described democratic socialist nearly won the democratic nomination for president. The Democratic socialists of America (dsa) helped get dozens of candidates elected to national, state, and city offices over the last 4 years. Polling shows millennials being more sympathetic to socialism than capitalism.

The Warren example would also quickly get your political analysis dismissed by almost anyone on the left. Warren's lifetime voting record is slightly more left than bernies according to ... (read more)

The thing that dem socs in the us want, a socialist economy and government, hasn't really happened in a rich country. The closest example would be Sweden in the 70s. I don't think there's much value in comparing the results of left wing revolutions in extremely poor and war ravaged countries with what might happen if dem socs like bernie sanders were to be able to enact their agendas in rich countries. The most economically left wing governments and societies in the rich world, i.e. Scandinavia, are some of the best places to live based on a whole host of metrics.

The main issue I have with this quote is that it's so divorced from the reality of how cost effective it is to save lives in rich countries vs. poor countries (something that most EAs probably know already). I understand that this objection is addressed by the caveat 'other things being equal',  but it seems important to note that it costs orders of magnitude more to save lives in rich countries, so unless Beckstead thinks the knock-on effects of saving lives in rich countries are sufficient to offset the cost differences, it would still follow that we should focus our money on saving lives in poor countries. 

Good writeup, thank you!

It strikes me that the populist claim ("...that democracy has been stolen by elites, and that the people need to claim it back") is plainly true in the US. I guess my quibble would be that there has never really been true democracy in the US; for most of our history, large groups have been excluded from democratic processes. While almost everyone can vote now, there are still large barriers to voting (e.g. it's not a national holiday, you often have to register in advance, non-citizens can't vote, etc.). Voting ... (read more)

Wonderful feedback, thanks! It's tricky because it's not just an EA podcast, so I have to assume many of my listeners aren't familiar with EA. I could cover the EA side of things at the beginning of the show when it's relevant, then tell people who are EA veterans when to skip to. Rob does this and I find it pretty helpful. I always find it interesting to hear about the personal experience of people who "stare into the abyss" for the careers (see my episode with asylum attorney Brianna Rennix). For future posts will use your title advice.

I wouldn't consider Dave Rubin's show intellectual, but he does have reach.

I participated in a civil disobedience direct action protesting an ICE-affiliated private detention center in Elizabeth, NJ. I was one of 36 people arrested for blocking traffic in and out of the facility (and nothing else). We spent hours traveling there, prepping for the action, blocking the road, being arrested and detained. All in, it was a full day of work for everyone involved, plus over 100 others who showed up. We raised money for a lawyer and travel expenses for people traveling for court. From an EA standpoint, this is really hard to justify. We ... (read more)

The endorsement episode was released before the election and the mini-analysis was released the day after the election, when it appeared that Caban had won. I was personally involved with the campaign and thought it would be helpful to direct anyone who was inspired by the conversation with Chloe to take a concrete action. I could redact, but agree it might be odd.

Thanks! I was doing one per week at first, but have found that to be unsustainable.

Thanks! That's a really good idea. I definitely think there is an appetite for more EA-aligned podcasts and the barrier to entry is pretty low. I'll work on this in the next few weeks.