All of Jason Schukraft's Comments + Replies

Hi Vaipan,

Thanks for your questions. I’ll address the last one, on behalf of the cause prio team.

One of the exciting things about this team is that, because it launched so recently, there’s a lot of room to try new things as we explore different ways to be useful. To name a few examples:

• We’re working on a constellation of projects that will help us compare our grantmaking focused on risks from advanced AI systems to our grantmaking focused on improving biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
• We’re producing a slew of new BOTECs across different focus areas.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your question. Two quick points:

(1) I wouldn't model Open Phil as having a single view on these sorts of questions. There's a healthy diversity of opinions, and as stated in the "caveats" section, I think different Open Phil employees might have chosen different winners.

(2) Even for the subset of Open Phil employees who served as judges, I wouldn't interpret these entries as collectively moving our views a ton. We were looking for the best challenges to our AI worldview in this contest, and as such I don't think it should be too surprising that the winning entries are more skeptical of AI risks than we are.

Hi Paul, thanks for your question. I don't have an intrinsic preference. We encourage public posting of the entries because we believe that this type of investigation is potentially valuable beyond the narrow halls of Open Philanthropy. If your target audience (aside from the contest panelists) is primarily researchers, then it makes sense to format your entry according to the norms of the research community. If you are aiming for a broader target audience, then it may make sense to structure your entry more informally.

When we grade the entries, we will be focused on the content. The style and reference won't (I hope) make much of a difference.

Hi Nicholas,

The details and execution probably matter a lot, but in general I'm fine with bullet-point writing. I would, however, find it hard to engage with an essay that was mostly tables with little prose explaining the relevance of the tables.

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for your question. It's a bit difficult to answer in the abstract. If your ideas hang together in a nice way, it makes sense to house them in a single entry. If the ideas are quite distinct and unrelated, it makes more sense to house them in separate entries. Another consideration is length. Per the contest guidelines, we're advising entrants to shoot for a submission length around 5000 words (though there are no formal word limits). All else equal, I'd prefer three 5000 word entries to one 15,000 word entry, and I'd prefer one 5000 word entry to ten 500 word entries.

Hope this helps.

Jason

Thanks both - I just added the announcement link to the top of this page.

Hi David,

Thanks for your comment. I am also concerned about groupthink within homogenous communities. I hope this contest is one small push against groupthink at Open Phil. By default, I do, unfortunately, expect most of the submissions to come from people who share the same basic worldview as Open Phil staff. And for submissions that come from people with radically different worldviews, there is the danger that we fail to recognize an excellent point because we are less familiar with the stylistic and epistemic conventions within which it is embedded.

For ... (read more)

Hi Phil - just to clarify: the entries must entirely be the original work of the author(s). You can cite others and you can use AI-generated text as an example, but for everything that is not explicitly flagged as someone else's work, we will assume it is original to the author.

Hi David,

Thanks for your questions. We're interested in a wide range of considerations. It's debatable whether human-originating civilization failing to make good use of its "cosmic endowment" constitutes an existential catastrophe. If you want to focus on more recognizable catastrophes (such as extinction, unrecoverable civilizational collapse, or dystopia) that would be fine.

In a similar vein, if you think there is an important scenario in which humanity suffers an existential catastrophe by collectively losing control over an ecosystem of AGIs, that would also be an acceptable topic.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

We are just ironing out the final legal details. The official announcement will hopefully go live by the end of next week. Thanks for checking!

Thanks for your questions!

We plan to officially launch the contest sometime in Q1 2023, so end of March at the latest.

I asked our in-house counsel about the eligibility of essays submitted to other competitions/publications, and he said it depends on whether by submitting elsewhere you've forfeited your ability to grant Open Phil a license to use the essay. His full quote below:

Essays submitted to other competitions or for publication are eligible for submission, so long as the entrant is able to grant Open Phil a license to use the essay. Since we plan

Thanks Jason. I can now confirm that that is indeed the case!

Hi Zach, thanks for the question and apologies for the long delay in my response. I'm happy to confirm that work posted after September 23 2022 (and before whatever deadline we establish) will be eligible for the prize. No need to save your work until the formal announcement.

I think part of my confusion stems from the distinction between "X is a concern we're noting" and "X is a parameter in the cost-effectiveness model"

The distinction is largely pragmatic. Charter cities, like many complex interventions, are hard to model quantitatively. For the report, we replicated, adjusted, and extended a quantitative model that Charter Cities Institute originally proposed. If that's your primary theory of change for charter cities, it seems like the numbers don't quite work out. But there are many other possible theories of change, an... (read more)

One of the authors of the charter cities report here. I'll just add a few remarks to clarify how we intended the quoted passage. I'll highlight three disagreements with the interpretation offered in the original post.

We should care if neocolonialism is real, if it's bad, and if it's induced by Charter Cities. If so, that should impact the cost-effectiveness estimate, not just factor in as a side-comment about PR-risk.

(1) We absolutely care whether neocolonialism is bad (or, if neocolonialism is inherently bad, we care about whether charter cities would... (read more)

The person who replaces me has all my same skills but in addition has many connections to policymakers, more management experience, and stronger quantitative abilities than I do.

Hi James, thanks for your question. The climate change work currently on our research calendar includes:

1. A look at how climate damages are accounted for in various integrated assessment models
2. A cost effectiveness analysis of anti-deforestation interventions
3. A review of the landscape of climate change philanthropy
4. An analysis of how scalable different carbon offsetting programs are

Despite the skepticism about charter cities that Dave and I express in the report, I would be comfortable recommending @effective_jobs retweet openings at Charter Cities Institute. There are plenty of folks in the EA community who would be a good fit for CCI, and it seems to me that an aggregator like @effective_jobs should lean toward casting a wider rather than narrower net.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your comment. I've written a bit about the potential relevance of intelligence and emotional complexity to capacity for welfare here. But I share your skepticism about their relevance to moral status. I'm reminded of this comic:

Someone could say that they will torture animals unless vegans give them money, I guess. I think this doesn't happen for multiple reasons.

Interestingly, there is at least one instance where this apparently has happened. (It's possible it was just a joke, though.) There was even a law review article about the incident.

I'm pretty sure the Forum uses the same karma vote-power as LessWrong.

Great, thanks! Just added it.

I do think we have been able to acquire talent that would not have been otherwise counterfactually acquired by other organizations.

As an additional data point, I can report that I think it's very unlikely that I would currently be employed by an EA organization if Rethink Priorities didn't exist. I applied to Rethink Priorities more or less on a whim, and the extent of my involvement with the EA community in 2018 (when I was hired) was that I was subscribed to the EA newsletter (where I heard about the job) and I donated to GiveWell top charities. At the time, I had completely different career plans.

Hi David,

Thanks for the suggestions! Anyone who works on this topic in the future should probably investigate them further. My current rough impression is that, even if there were a market for the stubble, the process of baling the stubble for transport and sale would either be time-and-labor intensive or require equipment that the average farmer in the region can't afford. Because of the nature of the crop cycle, farmers are under intense pressure to clear the stubble quickly, hence the appeal of stubble burning.

Hey Harrison, I think the short answer is that it's just a really messy situation and any potential solution that has a shot at improving on the status quo has to take political reality into account.

Hey Harrison,

I'm also not knowledgeable about Indian politics, but it seems pretty clear that Indian farmers wield considerable political influence. (See the reaction to the introduction of three market-friendly farm laws for the most recent demonstration of this power.) I'd like to think political compromise is possible, but it's hard to know which compromises are feasible.

Fortunately, it appears that many of the potential solutions to stubble burning are essentially win-win. Although stubble burning is an effective way to deal with crop residue in the sh... (read more)

That's fine by me!

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your questions. I'll let Marcus and Peter answer the first two, but I feel qualified to answer the third.

Certainly, the large number of invertebrate animals is an important factor in why we think invertebrate welfare is an area that deserves attention. But I would advise against relying too heavily on numbers alone when assessing the value of promoting invertebrate welfare. There are at least two important considerations worth bearing in mind:

(1) First, among sentient animals, there may be significant differences in capacity for welfare o... (read more)

Hi Denis,

Lots of really good questions here. I’ll do my best to answer.

1. Thinking vs reading: I think it depends on the context. Sometimes it makes sense to lean toward thinking more and sometimes it makes sense to lean toward reading more. (I wouldn’t advise focusing exclusively on one or the other.) Unjustified anchoring is certainly a worry, but I think reinventing the wheel is also a worry. One could waste two weeks groping toward a solution to a problem that could have been solved in afternoon just by reading the right review article.

2. Self-consciou

Hi Roger,

There are different possible scenarios in which invertebrates turn out to be sentient. It might be the case, for instance, that panpsychism is true. So if one comes to believe that invertebrates are sentient because panpsychism is true, one should also come to believe that robots and plants are sentient. Or it could be that some form of information integration theory is true, and invertebrates instantiate enough integration for sentience. In that case, the probability that you assign to the sentience of plants and robots will depend on your assess... (read more)

Hey Edo,

I definitely receive valuable feedback on my work by posting it on the Forum, and the feedback is often most valuable when it comes from people outside my current network. For me, the best example of this dynamic was when Gavin Taylor left extensive comments on our series of posts about features relevant to invertebrate sentience (here, here, and here) back in June 2019. I had never interacted with Gavin before, but because of his comments, we set up a meeting, and he has become an invaluable collaborator across many different projects. My work is ... (read more)

Sometimes, they ask us to instead donate the money to a charity on their behalf, which we are also willing to do.

Oh, cool. I didn't realize this was a possibility. I've always claimed the money and then donated the same amount to Rethink Priorities (where I work). If I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity in the future, I'll do this instead.

(I basically get paid to write content for the Forum, so I'm not really comfortable accepting the prize money.)

Hey Michael,

Thanks for your comment! The point you raise is a good one. I’ve thought about related issues over the last few months, but my views still aren’t fully settled. And I’ll just reiterate for readers that my tentative conclusions are just that: tentative. More than anything, I want everyone to appreciate how much uncertainty we face here.

We can crudely ask whether motivation is tied to the relative intensity of valenced experience or the absolute intensity of valenced experience. (‘Crudely’ because the actual connection between motivation and vale... (read more)

Oh nice, that sounds really cool - definitely keep me updated!

Hey Peter,

Thanks for the kind words. There’s no current plan to pursue academic publication. This question comes up periodically at Rethink Priorities, and there’s a bit of disagreement about what the right strategy is here. Speaking personally, I would love to see more of my work published academically. However, thinking about strategic decisions like these is not my comparative advantage, so I’m happy to defer to others on this question, and leadership at Rethink Priorities generally isn’t keen on using researcher hours to pursue academic publication. Th... (read more)

Great, this is fantastic, thanks! Clearly there is a lot more I need to think about! I just sent you a message to arrange a chat. For anyone following this exchange, I'll try to post some more thoughts on this topic after Adam and I have talked.

Hey Adam,

Thanks for your comment! I agree that the distinction between the sensory and affective components of pain experience is an important one that merits more discussion. I briefly considered including such a discussion, but the report was already long and I was hoping to avoid adding another layer of complexity. My assumption was that, while it’s possible for the two components to come apart, such dissociation is rare enough that we can safely ignore it at this level of abstraction. That could be a naïve assumption, though. Even if not, you’re right ... (read more)

Hey Michael,

I think this is an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I'm woefully ignorant about the relevant details, so it's unclear to me if the differences between artificial neural networks and actual brains makes the analogy basically useless. Still, I think it would probably be worthwhile for someone with more specialized knowledge than myself to think through the analogy roughly along the lines you've outlined and see what comes of it. I'd be happy to collaborate if anyone (including yourself) wants to take up the task.

There are lots of potential points of contact. The most obvious is that to determine an individual's possible intensity range of valenced experience, we have to think about the most intense (in the sense of most positive and most negative) experiences available to that individual. I don't have a view about how long-tailed the distribution of pleasures and pains is in humans, but I agree that it's a question worth investigating. And if there are differences in how long-tailed the distribution of valenced experiences is across species, that would entail diff... (read more)

Thanks for the clarification, Brian!

It’s plausible to assign split-brain patients 2x moral weight because it’s plausible that split-brain patients contain two independent morally relevant seats of consciousness. (To be clear, I’m just claiming this is a plausible view; I’m not prepared to give an all-things-considered defense of the view.) I take it to be an empirical question how much of the corpus callosum needs to be severed to generate such a split. Exploring the answer to this empirical question might help us think about the phenomenal unity of creatures with less centralized brains than humans, such as cephalopods.

This seems like a pretty good reason to reject a simple proportion account

To be clear, I also reject the simple proportion account. For that matter, I reject any simple account. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from thinking about differences in the intensity of valenced experience, it’s that brains are really, really complicated and messy. Perhaps that’s the reason I’m less moved by the type of thought experiments you’ve been offering in this thread. Thought experiments, by their nature, abstract away a lot of detail. But because the neurological mech... (read more)

Hey Michael,

Thanks for engaging so deeply with the piece. This is a super complicated subject, and I really appreciate your perspective.

I agree that hidden qualia are possible, but I’m not sure there’s much of an argument on the table suggesting they exist. When possible, I think it’s important to try to ground these philosophical debates in empirical evidence. The split-brain case is interesting precisely because there is empirical evidence for dual seats of consciousness. From the SEP entry on the unity of consciousness:

In these operations, the corpus

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the comment and thanks for prompting me to write about these sorts of thought experiments. I confess I’ve never felt their bite, but perhaps that’s because I’ve never understood them. I’m not sure what the crux of our disagreement is, and I worry that we might talk past each other. So I’m just going to offer some reactions, and I’ll let you tell me what is and isn’t relevant to the sort of objection you’re pursuing.

1. Big brains are not just collections of little brains. Large brains are incredibly specialized (though somewhat plastic

Cool, thanks Michael, I hadn't seen that. (And thanks to Antonia as well for writing the summary!)

Yes, that post is fantastic!