All of Guy Raveh's Comments + Replies

I definitely agree. But I think we're far from it being practically useful for dedicated EAs to do this themselves.

Do most charitable organizations have in-house people to examine donors? I'm not saying we shouldn't check, but rather that there shouldn't be people in EA organizations whose job is to do this - rather than organizations just hiring auditors or whomever to do it for them.

I'd argue that "checking whether businesses are run responsibly" is out of scope for EA in general.

forcing people to trust me not to have inserted a backdoor into the executable binary

Were you prohibited from also open sourcing it?

Dissenting view: like everywhere else on the internet, when you encounter something really crazy you sometimes have to look at the publication date. I trust readers can do that.

I disagree, and in this case I don't think the forum team should have a say in the matter. Each user has their own interpretation of the upvote/downvote button and that's ok. Personally I don't use it as "I disagree" but rather as "this comment shouldn't have been written", but there's certainly a correlation. For instance, I both disagree-voted and downvoted your comment (since I dislike the attempt to police this).

Right? Also you can have a person turn on the scandal machine, which then creates more than one scandal associated with them.

Is it definitely established that a living person is required for every scandal?

Toometa, tomato

Scandals don't just happen in the vacuum

Has anyone tested this? Because if we could create them in a vacuum, that might save a lot of energy usually lost to air resistance, and thus be more effective

3. We make these positions more attractive to scandal-prone people by abandoning cost-effectiveness analyses and instead base strategy and grantmaking on vibes and relationships imaginary Bayesian updates.

FTFY

"Under ordinary circumstances" → "If you cannot afford [to give as much as is needed]"

See also SMBC's "Effective Villainy"

I propose the creation of an umbrella organisation for all EA activities with the name Control - which all other orgs can then spin out of.

As a representative of Naming What We Can, I feel that after this change Swapcard would be better served by the name Tarotcard.

Naming What We Can is now officially* considering renaming itself Shrimping What We Can (or alternatively, Naming What We Shrimp).

*By "officially" I mean that I'm going to show one of the other co-founders a screenshot of this comment

Thank you! This is the kind of important work EA must now strive for.

1. What

Are you sure you have the numbers right? 80,000 Shrimp doesn't sound like that many

Off the top of my head, that time limit is often two years after the filing of the bankruptcy case.

Do you know where I can find a legal reference with the exact time limit?

If the FTX debtors are paid back without taking back my grant, I'd like to donate it somewhere, but I need to know I'm protected from a clawback in that scenario.

I note there is no path for Cotton-Barratt to become a typical member of the community again

I don't think this is true?

I don't feel qualified to give an opinion on the board decisions, punishment etc. for the specific case. But in nature, it does look like a decision that allows returning to full participation in the community, subject to some future checks, which makes sense.

And his reputation has suffered a blow, but not a very big one? Like, I don't see anyone publicly objecting to his presence on the forum.

I'm glad to see:

1. The Community Health team adopting more robust procedures
2. Transparency regarding the changes made and the reasons for them
3. The boards of EV taking an active role in overseeing this and in acting even against a well known and powerful figure.

I was also glad to see Owen step down from his role, taking full responsibility and apologizing for his actions, cooperating and attempting to improve himself. This sets a good example.

I certainly also think it'd be useless, like most prediction markets in EA.

I think it would be net negative, in the "What is your community doing to prevent sexual misconduct? - Oh, we make bets about it" kind of way.

2 years later, I stumbled onto this comment, and I'd be happy to know if your perspective about this has changed after the FTX crisis.

Thanks for the data! For other readers I'll note the Faunalytics page you linked to contains more interesting information (e.g. a majority of lapsed vegns try it only for health reasons, while a majority of those who remain vegn do not).

The remainder of that distribution after the 1 year mark would also be interesting, as it might take over that to get accustomed to it.

This does suggest that a gradual transition might have higher success rates?

Sorry, I originally commented with a much more detailed account but decided I didn't want so much personal info on the forum.

On my first attempt at vegetarianism I failed after about a week, and after that I decided to start with avoiding meat at home and at uni. The transition to being fully vegan took about 2.5 years. I was a picky eater so I had a lot of foods and ingredients to get used to. I also improved my cooking abilities a lot during this time.

Edit: it's true that I'm now in a phase where it is almost costless for me to be vegan, and I've been in that state for years. My point is rather that I didn't start off like that.

FWIW my personal experience doesn't square with this. It was initially hard for me but after a transition period where I got accustomed to new foods, it got much easier. For most people - those who are medically able to do it - I think this would be the case.

Are there vaccines specific to the new variant?

Publishing pieces in the media (with minimal 3rd-party editing) is at least tractable on the scale of weeks, if you have a friendly journalist. The academic game is one to two orders of magnitude slower than that.

Given that MIRI has held these views for decades, I don't quite see how the timeline for academic publication is of issue here.

How does the choice to publish MIRI's main views as LessWrong posts rather than, say, articles in peer-reviewed journals or more pieces in the media, square with the need to convince a much broader audience (including decision-makers in particular)?

I think I agree with this explanation much more than with the original post.

Maybe you can help us resolve this, SummaryBot - would you say you're software or not?

I feel like this distinction is mostly true in places that don't matter, and false in places that do matter.

Sure, a trained LLM is not a piece of software but rather an architecture and a bunch of weights (and maybe an algorithm for fine-tuning). This is also true of other parts of software, like configuration files with a bunch of constants no one understands other than the engineer who optimized them using trial and error.

On the other hand, the only way they can do something, i.e. interact with anything, is by being used inside a program. Such a program ... (read more)

Hi Arden, thanks for engaging like this on the forum!

Re: "the general type of person we tend to ask for input" - how do you treat the tradeoff between your advisors holding the values of longtermist effective altruism, and them being domain experts in the areas you recommend? (Of course, some people are both - but there are many insightful experts outside EA).

While I agree that the discussion here is bad at all those metrics, I'm not sure how you infer that the CH team does better at e.g. fairness or compassion.

Reflecting a bit, I'll admit that I liked it as a norm in my department in uni ("You want to take a class but don't have the prerequisites? No problem, it's your responsibility to understand, not ours"), but still think it has no place in broader society - and in personal and romantic relationships in particular.

Since the attitude around me if you don’t like contracts you entered is generally “tough shit, get more agency”, I was surprised at the responses saying Alice and Chloe should have been protected from an arrangement they willing entered

Where is "around you" where this is the norm? FWIW I think it's a terrible one.

I'd add that this kind of supportive behaviour was encouraged by the forum team at least over some period of time.

I was initially going to comment on how we in Israel actually repurpose this poem quite a lot in a joking manner - but then I Ctrl+F'd the actual part of the post and I mostly agree with you on this point.

Can you give an example of a state that was clearly a "worse offender" than Israel and yet was clearly treated less severely by the UN?

I'm not fact-checking anything, but I'd bet both Russia and China are worse offenders who are treated better.

Although to be clear, I think the "UN bias against Israel" argument, while true, is almost always irrelevant to the discussion, maybe even including this instance. The relevant question is whether the UN General Secretary has the necessary information to know better than you or I do. And I'd answer that with a "maybe".

Just to make clear, I meant UN orgs on the ground in Gaza whose activities are, by necessity, dependent on continued support from Hamas (which comes with a steep price), and many of whose workers are (at least in expectation) Hamas supporters.

A large part of the difficulty in understanding comes, I think, from "the war" or "Israeli policy" being composed of many large and small acts by different agents with different agendas, e.g.:

• PM Netanyahu
• Defense minister Gallant
• Cabinet members Gantz & Eisenkot
• Police minister (and convicted terrorist) Ben-Gvir
• Treasury minister Smotrich
• Other extended cabinet members
• IDF chief of the general staff Halevi
• Various lower IDF commanders

Add to that various wings of Hamas, UN orgs of questionable independence and reliability, wartime media, and 2500 ye... (read more)

I grew up in northern Israel and was there in 2006. I'm still traumatised by the constant alarms and rockets. I remember watching the news, seeing Beirut being bombed, feeling nothing but empathy and sadness about it. It didn't look any less traumatic for the Lebanese than it was for us.

Bless you for seeing all humans for who they are.

I, very sadly, cannot recommend any org operating in this area. I'm a big fan of Standing Together, so maybe them, but I'm very pessimistic about the chances of the peace process. [Edit: I'd rather say I'm not optimistic enough. One of the major determiners of the future here will be foreign (and in particular, American) pressure - so maybe lobbying the US government to push for a peace accord would be good?]

If I were a non-Israeli person wanting to donate, I'd focus on aid for Gaza, but there too I cannot point to any organisation able to reliably move go... (read more)

I don't agree with you, because I still think the post leaves much room for readers to come to different conclusions, and is rather (in that part) a demonstration of how popular thought misses important things.

I do however appreciate your effort to discuss with me and explain your view.

Because the post is about OP's personal feelings as they relate to EA thinking, and not about what the right thing for Israel to do is, or what the resolution for the conflict is.

One of the things that I think EAs may be able to see better than others is that such claims are not mutually exclusive.

Ofer, I'm an Israeli and a leftist perhaps as much as you are. Perhaps not, since I think the war is a necessary evil (though at the same time think some of the acts taken by Israel in it are unnecessary and horrific). Point is, I wouldn't be surprised to discover you're right. But I don't understand what this all has to do with anything in Ezra's post.

Thank you so much for writing this. I deeply identify with most of what you wrote.

Since the war, as you wrote, simplistic views of tribalism and side-picking have taken over almost universally. Having an EA-like universalist perspective, one is often surrounded both in real life and on the internet by people whose lack of empathy for some of the human beings involved is now extremely apparent. This has been very difficult emotionally and will keep being so for the next few months at least. It thus makes me very glad to see views such as yours coming from people in my communities.