All of Gordon Seidoh Worley's Comments + Replies

Still short on details. Note that this says "in principal" and "initial board". Finalization of this deal could still require finding 3 more board members to replace Helen and Tasha and Ilya who they'd still be happy with to have EA/safety voices. We'll have to wait to see what shakes out.

Yes. It's hard to find people who are poorer because of automation once we smooth over short-term losses.

What's easier to find is people who felt poorer because they lost status, even though they actually had more purchasing power and could afford more and better goods. But they weren't actually economically poorer, just felt poorer because other people got richer faster than them.

I guess it depends on what kind of regulation you're thinking of.

While it's true that the US and EU value individual liberty highly, these countries are also quite motivated to regulate arms to maintain their technological lead over other countries, for example by regulating the export of cyber, nuclear, and conventional weapons and putting restrictions on who can be part of their supply chain. Smaller countries have been more willing to treat other countries as equals when it comes to arms and not worry about the possibility of attach since they feel litt... (read more)

Mostly seems like a good thing to me. The more chips needed to build AI are dependent on supply chains that run through countries that are amenable to regulating AI, the safer we are. To that end, routing as much of the needed chip supply chain through the US and EU seems most likely to create conditions where, if we impose regulations on AI, it will take years to build up supply chains that could circumvent those regulations.

Personally I downvoted this post for a few reasons:

• insufficient details to evaluate the claims
• claims are not stated clearly
• I found it hard to follow because it contained various abbreviations with no explanation of them
• assumes reader has context that is not presented in the post

To me this reads more like publicly posting content that was written only with an audience of folks working at CEA or similar orgs in mind. So I downvoted because it doesn't seem worth a lot of people reading it since it's unclear what value there is there for them. This isn't to sa... (read more)

This is a short note to advise you against something called CouponBirds.

I don't know much about them other than they're creating lots of spam in a bid to soak up folks who are bummed about the loss of Amazon Smile. They've sent me emails and posted spammy comments on posts both here and on Less Wrong (I report them each time; they keep creating new accounts to post).

If you were thinking of using them, I encourage you to not because we should not support those who spam if we want to live in a world with less spam.

And EA is the social life, not professional for a lot of us.

I want to say something specifically in response to this.

It's great that EAs can be friends with each other. But EA has a mission. It's not a social club. We're here to do good better. Things that get in the way of doing good better should be dropped if we actually care about the mission.

The trouble is I know lots of people have impoverished social lives. They have maybe one or maybe two communities to build social bonds within. So when you're in that stance the natural thing is to try to extract ... (read more)

I've not tried to quantify this, but I've lived in a bunch of rationalist/EA houses. I've seen the dynamics up close. The downsides are very large and massively outweigh the upsides based on what I've seen. The only thing that makes people think the upsides outweigh the downsides is, I suspect, that they are desperate.

This isn't really weird, though. This is just what seems to happen in lots of communities. Dating within a community is usually dangerous to the community, and this holds for lots of communities. This is a fully general phenomenon among human... (read more)

Conflicts of interests is a way to put it, but I think it massively undersells it.

To me the thing not dating in EA (or at your company) is it upholds an extremely valuable professional norm of preventing your personal and work life from colliding in messy ways. The trouble is that breakups happen, they are messy, people do and say things they will regret, and you want as much separation between the personal and professional parts of your life in such a situation. That way only a part of your life is on fire. If you're like many people and only really have ... (read more)

To be clear, I am mostly saying don't date other EAs most of the time, especially if you are doing more than small scale earning to give. If you plan to work in EA, then EA is your office. EA is too small to think of it as an ecosystem where people can find other opportunities. There's one EA game in town. That's the place I think it's fraught to date.

There's a lot I disagree with in this post, but there's one part I super agree with:

Be much, much less accepting of any intersection between romance and office/network

Traditionally dating happens with your 2nd and 3rd order connections, not your first. Also, dating in a professional (or related) setting is very likely to lead to bad outcomes. We know this.

I realize people want to date like-minded people. There are lots of them out there who aren't in EA! You just have to look for them.

I'm curious why this has gotten so many downvotes but no comments indicating disagreement.

It's on net positive karma but vote count makes it clear there are downvotes.

I think Scott's argument for for openness to eccentrics on the ground that a couple of great ideas have far more positive value than a whole bunch of negative ones have negative value in generalises to an argument for being open to 'eccentrics' who comprise large numbers of new or intermittent posters.

You've got to consider the base rates. Most eccentrics are actually just people with ungrounded ideas that are wrong since it's easy to have wild ideas and hard to have correct ideas and thus even harder to have wild and correct ideas.

In the old days of Less ... (read more)

Sure, not everyone likes curated gardens. If that's not the kind of site you want, there's other places. Reddit, for example, has active communities that operate under different norms.

The folks who started the Forum prefer the sort of structure it has. If you want something else and you don't have a convincing argument that convinces us, you're free to participate in discussions elsewhere.

As to deeper reasons why the Forum is the way it is, see, for example, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism

My personal commentary: probably not much of a loss, but directionally sucks. No charity was receiving much money this way as far as I know, but was a nice way to feel a bit better about shopping on Amazon since you got to pick where their charitable giving went, and I'm sure it had some marginal impact for some charities. I'm also sure there's a backstory, like wanting to not be neutral on where the funds go because they leave it up to customers to choose from any registered charity, but that's not present in the announcement.

I voted against this one because it's not specific to EA. This is a general phenomenon of people who have a "disfunction" of not having 99th percentile executive function seeking ADHD diagnoses to get access to amphetamines. It might be happening in EA, but it's not clear there is an EA problem rather than a society-wide problem.

Addressing it as a general problem might be worthwhile, but we'd need to analyze it (maybe someone already has!).

Almost no organization in the world that gets stuff done on reasonable timelines operates this way. I think there's a very high prior against this.

Democracy makes sense for things you are forced into, like the government you're born under and forced to be ruled by. EA organizations are voluntary orgs that are already democratic in that funders can take their money and go elsewhere if they don't like how they are run. This would add a level of complication to decision making that would basically guarantee that large EA orgs would fail to achieve their missions.

This is a mechanism for maintaining cultural continuity.

Karma represents how much the community trusts you, and in return, because you are trusted, you're granted greater ability to influence what others see because your judgement has been vetted over a long series of posts. The increase in voting power is roughly logarithmic with karma, so the increased influence in practice hits diminishing returns pretty quickly.

If we take this away it allows the culture of the site to drift more quickly, say because there's a large influx of new folks. Right now existi... (read more)

The statement is almost certainly intentionally ambiguous. That's kind of how a lot of PR works: say things directionally and let people read in their preferred details.

There's a somewhat standard argument I've heard before that we shouldn't separate these out because they're already covered by existential risks. For example, this is already a complaint lobbied against s-risks since they're a subtype of x-risk. Trying to focus on a subtype seems like mostly a bid to allow something to rise to higher importance than it would otherwise be under standard x-risk framings.

For example, many people try to claim climate change is an extinction risk because fast, significant climate change could cause an extinction event, but that... (read more)

I don't know if we really disagree, but I'm not interested in talking about it. Seems extremely unlikely to be a discussion worth the effort to have since I don't think either of us thinks making up deceptive quotes is okay. I think I'm just sloppier than you and that's not interesting.

I was just paraphrasing. You literally wrote "rationally resolve disagreements" which feels like the same thing to me as "rational dispute resolution".

I edited my comment to quote you more literally since I think it maintains exactly the same semantic content.

No offense, but I'm surprised, because your phrasing doesn't parse for me, since it's not clear to me what it would mean for EA as a movement to be "rational", and most use of "rational" in the way you're using it here reflects a pattern shared among folks with only passing familiarity with Less Wrong.

For example, you ask about "rational debate" and "rationally resolv[ing] disagreements", but the point of the post I linked is sort of that this doesn't make sense to ask for. People might debate using rational arguments, but it would be weird to call that ra... (read more)

I fail to be convinced. Many of your arguments seem like fully general arguments about why to worry about anything as a longtermists and thus wash out. For example, you argue

Climate change would interfere with our ability to address extinction risks. States burdened by climate change could not expend efforts on preventing other catastrophic risks

But there's a great many things that fall under the category of impacting the ability of modern civilization to address arbitrary risks. For example, someone could just as easily argue that our failure to prod... (read more)

This is a problem where I think we can get some returns with minimal investment. For example, maybe just ask volunteers to bring in their air purifiers from home and hook them up during the day. That won't be a perfect solution, but it will provide cleaner air than having no purifiers. This seems like a space where we can get something like logarithmic returns on effort, which means even doing a little can be quite impactful.

I think any issues with abuse of strong upvotes is tempered by the fact that someone has to spend a lot of time writing posts and getting upvotes from other forum members before they can have much influence with their votes, strong or otherwise. So in practice this is probably not a problem, because the trust is earned through months and years of writing the posts and comments and getting the votes that earn one a lot of karma.

EAF uses the same software was Less Wrong. Less Wrong is intentionally something like a walled garden but the walls are low enough that people can climb over if they want. The purpose is the maintain high quality discussions. I'm actually kind of avoiding EAF at the moment because there's so many new people it's negatively affecting the culture that was here before, which was always different from but somewhat similar to Less Wrong. The weighted voting is a mechanism to help maintain the desired culture and prevent it from regressing to the internet mean. ... (read more)

I didn't find this compelling. As best I can tell your criticism grounds out in "EA disagrees with my and lots of people's moral intuitions, so it's probably wrong".

To pick on just one quote to explain my point:

The EA position that one’s duty is to the entire global (or future) population tends to be very upsetting to most other people, because they have other ideas about your duty! EA is a movement of some of the most powerful people in our society, and a certain “natural’ reaction occurs when those with power seem to not take up a responsibility that oug

In an important sense, yes!

To take an example of opposing armies, consider the European powers between say 1000 CE and 1950 CE. They were often at war with each other. Yet they were clearly allies in a sense that they were in agreement that the European way was best and that some European should clearly win in various conflicts and not others. This was clear during, for example, various wars between powers to preserve monarchy and Catholic rule. If I'm Austria I still want to fight the neighboring Catholic powers ruled by a king to gain land, but I'd rathe... (read more)

Wonderful! A great way to be proven wrong!

In isolation I agree. But I found nothing new or interesting in this post. Since votes control how visible a post is, I view votes as purely a signal about how much I want to see and how much I want others to see content like this. Since I didn't find it new or interested it was a poor use of my time to read it, hence the down vote.

When I down vote I like to tell people why so they have useful feedback on what makes people down vote.

I know many people vote to say "yay" or "boo". I disagree with this voting style, and my votes generally should not be interpreted that way. I down vote to say "I don't think you should bother reading this" and I up vote to say "I think you should read this".

I agree, but is this a post that will make that change? I don't see any really compelling arguments or stories here that are likely to change minds.

There's no reason a person can't be both earnest and still be hitting the applause light button. Intent matters, but so does outcomes.

I don't recall recent EA discussion of this topic, but this is an extremely well-worn topic in general. This is sort of a professionalism 101 topic that most people debate in high school as something of a toy topic because the arguments are already well explored.

Downvoted because I don't feel like there's any substance here and it's not worth spending the time to read. I think most people already agree with this sentiment and know the arguments presented in one way or another, so it feels like this post is just flashing the applause lights.

I'd probably have at least not downvoted and maybe would have upvoted this post if it contained some new content, like a proposal for how to get people not to glorify looks.

Hmm, I think these arguments comparing to other causes are missing two key things:

• they aren't sensitive to scope
• they aren't considering opportunity cost

Here's an example of how that plays out. From my perspective, the value of the very large number of potential future lives dwarfs basically everything else. Like the value of worrying about most other things is close to 0 when I run the numbers. So in the face of those numbers, working on anything other than mitigating x-risk is basically equally bad from my perspective because that's all missed oppor... (read more)

To your footnote, I'm not sure how many people are directly uncomfortable, but I do find arguments that roughly boil down to "but what about Nazis?" lazy as they try to run around the discussion by pointing to a thing that will make most readers go "Nazis bad, I agree with whatever says 'Nazis bad' most strongly!". This doesn't mean thinking Nazis are bad is an unreasonable position or something, only that it looms so large it swamps many people's ability to think clearly.

Rationalists the to taboo comparing things to Nazis or using Nazis as an example for ... (read more)

I've edited my post to make it clear I think this is an off topic discussion within the context of this question. I think it's fine for this comment to stay because it was there before I made this clarification, but I have asked the moderators to convert this from an answer to a proper comment.

I don't think it actually has (1).

Engaged Buddhism is, as I see it, best understood as a movement among Western Liberals who are also Buddhists, and as such as primarily infused with Western liberal values. These are sometimes incidentally the best way to do good, but unlike EA they don't explicitly target doing the most good, they instead uphold an ideology that values things like racial equality, human dignity, and freedom on religion (including freedom to reject religion).

As for (2), I'm not sure how much there is to learn. There's likely some things, b... (read more)

I think there's some case for specialization. That is, some people should dedicate their lives to meditation because it is necessary to carry forward the dharma. Most people probably have other comparative advantages. This is not a typical way of thinking about practice, but I think there's a case to be made that we could look at becoming a monk, for example, as a case of exercises comparative advantage as part of an ecosystem of practitioners who engage in various ways based on their comparative abilities (mostly focused on what they could be doing in the... (read more)

A couple comments.

First, I think there's something akin to creating a pyramid scheme for EA by leaning too heavy on this idea, e.g. "earn to give, or better yet get 3 friends to earn to give and you don't need to donate yourself because you had so much indirect impact!". I think david_reinstein's comment is in the same vein and good.

Second, this is a general complaint about the active/passive distinction that is not specific to your proposal but since your proposal relies on it I have to complain about it. :-)

I don't think the active/passive distinction is... (read more)

Maybe I can help Chris explain his point here, because I came to the comments to say something similar.

The way I see it, neartermists and longtermists are doing different calculations and so value money and optics differently.

Neartermists are right to be worried about spending money on things that aren't clearly impacting measures of global health, animal welfare, etc. because they could in theory take that money and funnel it directly into work on that stuff, even if it had low marginal returns. They should probably feel bad if they wasted money on a big ... (read more)

Two thoughts:

1. We should be careful about claiming the GOP is the "worse party". Worse for whom? Maybe they are doing things you don't like, but half the country thinks the Democrats are the worse party. We should be wise to the state of normative uncertainty we are in. Neither party is really worse except by some measure, and because of how they are structured against each other one party being worse means the other is better by that measure. If you wanted to make a case that one party or the other is better for EA and then frame the claim that way I think

to the fall of US democracy and a party that has much worse views on almost every subject under most moral frameworks.

This seems like a pretty partisan take and fails to adequately consider metaethical uncertainty. There's nothing about this statement that I couldn't imagine a sincere Republican with good intentions saying about Democrats and being basically right (and wrong!) for the same reasons (right assuming their normative framework, wrong when we suppose normative uncertainty).

While I don't want to suggest that you or any other person who feels the GOP has an obligation to work for them, part of the reason they are able to be hostile to various groups is because those groups are not part of how they get elected. If tomorrow the GOP was dependent on LGBTQ votes to win elections, they'd transform into a different party.

So while I'm not expert enough here to see how to change the current situation, I think there is something interesting about changing the incentive gradients for both parties to make them both more inclusive (both construct on outgroup—GOP: minorities and foreigners, Democrats: rural and working-class white people) and I expect that to have positive outcomes.

The more I practice, the more I've come to believe that that only thing that really matters is that you do it. Not that you do it well by whatever standard one might judge, but just that you do it. 30 minutes of quiet time is a foundation on which more can be explored and discovered. You don't have to sit a special way, do a special thing with your mind, or do anything else in particular for it to be worth the effort, although all those things can help and are worth doing if you're called to them!

You should totally learn a bunch of techniques or practice a... (read more)

What does this funding source do that existing LT sources don’t?

Natural followup: why a new fund rather than convince an existing fund to use and emphasize the >0.0.1% xrisk reduction criterion?

Even if he wants to do that, his power is not absolute. I'd expect/hope for his generals to step in if he tries something like that, perhaps using it as reason for a coup.