All of Guy Raveh's Comments + Replies

I've also been trying this to people claiming financial interests. On the other hand, the tweet Haydn relied to actually makes another good point though, that does apply to professors - diverting attention to from societal risks that they're contributing to but can solve, to x-risk where they can mostly sign such statements and then go "🤷🏼‍♂️", shields them from having to change anything in practice.

I found this post very interesting and useful for my own thinking about the subject.

Note that while the conclusions here are ones intended for OP specifically, there's actually another striking conclusion that goes against the ideas of many from this community: we need more evidence! We need to build stronger AI (perhaps in more strictly regulated contexts) in order to have enough data to reason about the dangers from it. The "arms race" of DeepMind and OpenAI is not existentially dangerous to the world, but is rather contributing to its chance of survival... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! I've been waiting to hear how that residency played out.

That might be true in theory, but not in practice. People become biased towards the causes they like or understand better.

I'm really sad to hear that! Is the court's decision available somewhere?

Thank you for the work you're doing!

How's the first lawsuit going?

Hi Xueyin!

While I'm not currently working on a career plan, I am also suffering from a disability which limits my ability to work, so I wanted to offer my sympathy. Sadly, disabilities are not very visible in EA, but rest assured you're not alone in dealing with one.

A small word of advice, perhaps, is that in my experience most (though not all) career paths and programs are aimed at able-bodied people who can devote a full work week each to their career. Finding ways to accommodate disabilities will often require thinking outside the box, and being assertive and direct, and asking organizers and contacts about what can be done differently for it.

Good luck!

I wonder why he didn't do anything about it as prime minister though. It's certainly not in the Israeli consensus, but only for the reason that it's out of mind entirely for Israelis. So there would've been no real opposition, except by tech companies maybe.

I think this is spot on. There have been many discussions on the forum proposing rules like "Never hit on women during daytime in EAG, but it's ok at afterparties". And they're all basically doing something blunt on the one hand, and not preventing people from being a**holes on the other hand.

How many examples do you have of elites making the right decisions for a larger group? And out of how many elites trying to do that in general?

I've been vocal about thinking the community should have a voice here (maybe specifically in CEA, and other stakeholders should be involved for other parts of EVF). But widening the boards is a minimal step in the right direction.

Hi Miranda, thanks for the very clear answer!

I don't necessarily agree with the method of allocation, but from a broad perspective I'm happy to see that a small change in estimates translates to a small, but still meaningful, adjustment in allocation.

And furthermore, will it change how funds from the 'all grants' fund are spent?

I think donors motivated by EA principles would be making a mistake, and leaving a lot of value on the table by donating to GiveDirectly or StrongMinds over GiveWell's recommendations

Not going into the wider discussion, I specifically disagree with this idea: there's a trade-off here between estimated impact and things like risk, paternalism, scalability. If I'm risk-averse enough, or give some partial weight to bring less paternalistic, I might prefer donating to GiveDirectly - which I indeed am, despite choosing to donate to AMF in the past.

(In practi... (read more)

What I mean is "these forecasts give no more information than flipping a coin to decide whether AGI would come in time period A vs. time period B".

I have my own, rough, inside views about if and when AGI will come and what it would be able to do, and I don't find it helpful to quantify them into a specific probability distribution. And there's no "default distribution" here that I can think of either.

This isn't personal, but I downvoted because I think Metaculus forecasts about this aren't more reliable than chance, and people shouldn't defer to them.

I'm aware that by prioritising how to use limited resources, we're making decisions about people's lives. But there's a difference between saying "we want to save everyone, but can't" and saying "This group should actually not be saved, because their lives are so bad".

Curiously, I note that people are quite ready to accept that, when it comes to factory farming, those animals would lead bad lives, so it is better that they never exist.

I actually agree! But I don't think it's the same thing. I don't want to kill existing animals; I want to not intention... (read more)

I have a difficulty with this idea of a neutral point, below which it is preferable to not exist. At the very least, this is another baked in assumption - that the worst wellbeing imaginable is worse than non-existence.

There are two reasons for me being troubled with this assumption:

1. I've been living with a chronic illness for many years, which causes constant suffering. I'm expected to keep living like that for decades to come. I can't accept the idea that there's a point of suffering beyond which I should not live.
2. Giving such a point will allow one to make decisions about whether people should live or die. As a rule that I personally believe in, we should never make such decisions.

I don't think we actually want to incentivise positive-EV bets as such? Some amount of risk aversion ought to be baked in. Going solely by EV only makes sense if you make many repeated uncorrelated bets, which isn't really what Longtermists are doing.

This sounds cool but... It only works with Twitter?!

I propose, on the contrary, that we celebrate having more diverse writing styles on the forum, as one small way to facilitate more diversity in people who come into the movement and stay in it :)

I strongly agree with you: that kind of discourse takes responsibility away from the people who do the actual harm; and it seems to me like the suggested norms would do more harm than good.

Still, it seems that the community and/or leadership have a responsibility to take some collective actions to ensure the safety of women in EA spaces, given that the problem seems widespread. Do you agree? If yes, do you have any suggestions?

I wonder if I can get into this without any knowledge in statistical modelling 😅

Alternatively, what's a good way to gain become proficient in that? I do have a master's in applied mathematics.

I agree with your worries, and I doubt either of these options is true.

But I worry that instead of viewing it as a tradeoff, where discussion of rules is warranted, and and instead of seeing relationships as a place where we need caution and norms, it's instead viewed from a lens of meddling versus personal freedom, and so it feels unreasonable to have any rules about what consenting adults should do.

To me, at least, the current suggestions (in top level posts) do feel more like 'meddling' than like reasonable norms. This is because they are on the one hand very broad, ignoring many details and differences - and on the o... (read more)

Is it as easy (or easy enough) to enroll participants in RCTs if you need their whole household, rather than just them, to consent to participate? Does it create any bias in the results?

+1 to "how is this anti-Semitic?" (I'm also Jewish)

charity is a necessarily private act

Why so?

And where votes aren't weighed by karma.

This strikes me as a very good idea.

Forwarding the link to the EA Israel staff :)

MIRI folk believe they have an unusually clear understanding of risks

"Believe" being the operative word here. I really don't think they do.

I upvoted the post because I like that it tries to tackle power dynamics and sources of problems related to sex, which the community clearly has.

That said, I don't actually agree. I don't think policing people's relationship choices (including casual ones) is necessary - or productive - for preventing harassment etc.

Perhaps the most important point is that out of the sample of comments I've read so far, most were written by men - and I'm much more interested to hear what women in EA think here.

One could question what it even means to either 'not wish you'd never been born' or to 'not want to die when' when your wellbeing is negative.

One could also claim on a hedonic view that, whatever it means to want not to die, having net-negative wellbeing is the salient point and in an ideal world you would painlessly stop existing.

Given that the lived experience of some (most?) of the people who live lives full of suffering is different from tha model, this suggests that the model is just wrong.

The idea of modeling people as having a single utility... (read more)

This post is now again out of the front page.

I don't know if you meant it like that, but this comment reads to me as very sarcastic towards someone who obviously just misunderstood you :/

Edit: especially as your original comment was clear and I don't think anyone would read this thread and come out with the implied false beliefs about you.

Sorry, I'm on your side here, but read Linch's comment again. He wrote the opposite of what you're saying he did.

e.g. in an earlier draft of this post, before fact-checking it with her, I said that we talked about “feelings of mutual attraction”

(Followed by)

This was not her experience

Doesn't seem like a big difference to me.

I think on the first report, how far this needs to go depends on the person who was harassed. It's ok not to require a public apology and it's ok not to want the accused to lose their job (although it's also ok to want the opposite!).

But after Wise became aware of more cases, he should have been removed from the board. Personally I think he should have also apologized publicly (like he now did), but I find this less important.

Note that the future reports did come and therefore he should've been removed before this point in time.

I agreevoted but I don't think this is a community norm. It's just a life skill.

If you have technical understanding of current AIs, do you truly believe there are any major obstacles left? The kind of problems that AGI companies could reliably not tear down with their resources? If you do, state so in the comments

I've just completed a master's degree in ML, though not in deep learning. I'm very sure there are still major obstacles to AGI, that will not be overcome in the next 5 years nor in the next 20. Primary among them is robust handling of OOD situations.

Look at self-driving cars as an example. It was a test case for AI compani... (read more)

Traditionally, thought leaders in EA have been careful not to define any "core principles" besides the basic idea of "we want to find out using evidence and reason how to do as much good as possible, and to apply that knowledge in practice". While it's true that various perceptions and beliefs have creeped in over the years, none of them is sacred.

In any case, as far as I understand the "scout mindset" (which I admit isn't much), it doesn't rule out recognising areas which would be better left alone (for real, practical reasons - not because the church said so).

Thanks for the quick answer! I suspected as much but wanted to make sure.

I didn't understand (1).

2. I don't know if his characterization is right or not, I'm not a Rationalist. But of course subjects being taboo because of the harm discussing them does is fine. Why wouldn't it be?

Was the list of rapists redacted by OP or by moderators?

1. Ideas that you talk about don't stand on their own. They exist within a historical and social context. You can't look at the idea without also considering how it affects people. I imagine Matthew personally finds the idea toxic too, as do I - but that's not really the point.

2. Perhaps Rationalism really argues that fewer ideas should be taboo, or perhaps that's just Hanania's version of it. But EA isn't synonymous with Rationalism, and you don't need to adopt one (certainly not completely) to accept the other.

I'll only answer with a small point: I'm from a different country, and we don't have a "Democratic coalition", neither do we have racism against Chinese people because there are barely any Chinese people here (hence, we didn't have this pressure against making a big deal of COVID). I don't see EA through an American perspective, and mostly ignore phrases like that.

Still, generally speaking, I would side with US democrats on many things, and am sure the mild disagreements needed wouldn't be an actual problem. Progressivism is perceived by conservatives as something that creates extreme homogeneity of thought, but that doesn't really seem the case to me.

I'm really sorry for the experience you've been having, and I appreciate you stepping down to take care of yourself, and by sharing it all here, sending a message to all EAs that they should take care of themselves too.

If the Executive Director of CEA can decide to prioritise his own health, so can anyone else. EA is known to be very demanding - particularly in such high responsibility positions, but also for most other EAs - and in doing this you're leading by example and hopefully preventing other EAs from harming their health.

Almost every "bad" thing said here about "Woke EA" sounds good to me, while the "good" things EA would otherwise be able to achieve sound absolutely horrible.