JP Addison🔸
Bio
Head of the CEA Online Team, which runs this Forum.
A bit about me, to help you get to know me: Prior to CEA, I was a data engineer at an aerospace startup. I got into EA through reading the entire archive of Slate Star Codex in 2015. I found EA naturally compelling, and donated to AMF, then GFI, before settling on my current cause prioritization of meta-EA, with AI x-risk as my object-level preference. I try to have a wholehearted approach to morality, rather than thinking of it as an obligation or opportunity. You see my LessWrong profile here.
I love this Forum a bunch. I've been working on it for 5 years as of this writing, and founded the EA Forum 2.0. (Remember 1.0?) I have an intellectual belief in it as an impactful project, but also a deep love for it as an open platform where anyone can come participate in the project of effective altruism. We're open 24/7, anywhere there is an internet connection.
In my personal life, I hang out in the Boston EA and Gaymer communities, enjoy houseplants, table tennis, and playing coop games with my partner, who has more karma than me.
Posts 47
Comments695
Topic contributions17
Nice, I like this. Have you considered crossposting the full content? Usually those get a lot more people reading them, and more visibility, though do note the CC-BY restriction.
We're issuing @NobodyInteresting a warning for the above comment. The comment does not meet the expectations for civility and engaging in good faith. I would not recommend a public warning for this comment on it's own (though I would downvote it for the above reasons, and recommend a discrete DM), but we have less tolerance for users who have not yet shown that they can engage productively.
I expect that "labs" usefully communicates to most of my interlocutors that I'm talking about the companies developing frontier models and not something like Palantir. There's a lot of hype-based incentive for companies to claim to be "AI companies", which creates confusion. (Indeed, I didn't know before I chose Palantir as an example, but of course they're marketing themselves as an AI company.)
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That said, I agree with the consideration in your post. I don't claim which is the bigger consideration, only that they trade off.
Why don't you consider the reduction as part of of your donations? Unlike taking a direct-work job (where the counterfactual and non-monetary compensation questions are complicated and any estimate will involve a lot of guesswork)[1] your salary reduction is from a known very well-understood baseline.
I'm sympathetic overall to your desire for this not to become a norm in EA, due to the concerns you listed, but I would (and do) count it towards my donation target, and would generally advise others to do so.
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There's an argument in your case that your counterfactual salary is extremely clear. I would expect for most people taking a salary reduction, the answer is much harder. I'd estimate that half of people I've heard of leaving EtG jobs would have had a hard time being happy at that job any more, and many more people are like me where I haven't worked in industry for 7 years and so I would have to guess, which makes it a bit of a weird norm question if a peer of mine gets to claim a 50% reduction, but I have no idea if I could have made double my (reduced) salary in industry in a very distant counterfactual world.
Fair, I was probably too loose there. I believe specifically that posts which were copied from google docs[1] failed to wrap at the screen width. But I wasn't a much of a mobile reader at the time.
Also thank you! I didn't realize you were the one who added mobile support.
IIRC, maybe it was some other cause that affected a subset of posts