All of Kelsey Piper's Comments + Replies

 I'm confused. "render internet related services as requested by the Company from time to time" is not at all a contractual obligation to produce content on an ongoing basis. If there were a contractual obligation to produce content on an ongoing basis, I'd expect the contract to specify how much content, for how long. I'd understand 'internet related services' to mean help with access to the account, authentication, etc. as relevant, not as an ongoing job as a content creator. 

I agree that Emerson argues that Emerson alone created content for th... (read more)

First; the formal employee drove without a license for 1-2 months in Puerto Rico. We taught her to drive, which she was excited about. You might think this is a substantial legal risk, but basically it isn't, as you can see here, the general range of fines for issues around not-having-a-license in Puerto Rico is in the range of $25 to $500, which just isn't that bad.

I have no knowledge specific to Puerto Rico, but my understanding is that by far the most important risk incurred when driving without a license is that an unlicensed driver will als... (read more)

Yep this changed my mind as well - thank you!

- at this point, Alice was just a friend traveling with us. There were no professional entanglements.

The post says

Alice worked there from November 2021 to June 2022,

Is that incorrect? When did Alice start working for Nonlinear?

I should also add that this (including the question of whether Alice is credible) is not very important to my overall evaluation of the situation, and I'd appreciate it if Nonlinear spent their limited resources on the claims that I think are most shocking and most important, such as the claim that Woods said "your career in EA would be over with a few DMs" to a former employee after the former employee was rumored to have complained about the company. 

It could be that I am misreading or misunderstanding these screenshots, but having read through them a couple of times trying to parse what happened, here's what I came away with:

On December 15, Alice states that she'd had very little to eat all day, that she'd repeatedly tried and failed to find a way to order takeout to their location, and tries to ask that people go to Burger King and get her an Impossible Burger which in the linked screenshots they decline to do because they don't want to get fast food. She asks again about Burger King and is told it's... (read more)

We're aiming for a pretty high post volume, enough that I assumed we shouldn't cross-post all posts, but if there were a ton of demand for that we could probably reconsider.

Do you happen to have a further breakdown between "EA" and "EA adjacent"? 

I do not think that bans on a person attending EA events or conferences necessarily should be interpreted as proof that that person was attending them before the ban.

 I would expect that in some cases, a person reports "hey, this person acted violently towards me; I have no idea whether they might apply to attend this event, but I want the community health team to know about this so that, should they ever apply, they would be refused." 

Furthermore, lots of people might attend a professional conference who don't identify with an associated movemen... (read more)

Yeah, I was surprised to see Davis claiming in this comment section that he merely thinks we should combat inappropriate pressure to be polyamorous (which of course we should do!) and of course I want to create space for his views to evolve if they have evolved, but the views he is expressing here are not the views he has routinely espoused in the past, and "I've faced backlash for my views" without explaining what the views were does seem disingenuous to me. 
 

Hmm, if Davis had said "I think pressure to be polyamorous has been a problem in the community..." or "I've received backlash for speaking out against dynamics surrounding polyamory" then I think I would have reacted differently.

But he said "I think polyamory has been a problem" and "I've received backlash for speaking out against polyamory". He has indeed long been outspoken against polyamory -- not against dynamics in polyamory that make the community unwelcoming or unprofessional, against the practice under all circumstances.  He has told me at oth... (read more)

That seems basically reasonable to me,  though it feels operative that you would be acting in your independent capacity as a person with opinions who tries to convince other people that your opinions are correct. I'd be much more uncomfortable with an EA institution that had a 'talking people out of polyamorous relationships' department. 

I think there are some forms of social pressure which are fine for individuals to apply but which are damaging and coercive if they have formal institutional weight behind them, so calls for "people who agree with me polyamorous relationships are damaging" to advocate for that stance don't make me uneasy the way calls for "the community" to "handle" those things make me uneasy. 

I am very bothered specifically by the frame "I wish we had resolved [polyamory] "internally" rather than it being something exposed by outside investigators."

I am polyamorous; I am in committed long-term relationships (6 years and 9 years) with two women, and occasionally date other people. I do not think there is anything in my relationships for "the community" to "resolve internally". It would not be appropriate for anyone to tell me to break up with one of my partners. It would not be appropriate for anyone to hold a community discussion about how to '... (read more)

I basically feel the same confusion and dissatisfaction that Josh is expressing here. This is a very big mistake. It doesn't feel to me like a misunderstanding that would be likely to happen in the normal course of business without several underlying things having gone quite wrong. I don't feel like I understand how those things went wrong, and so I don't feel sure they've been fixed. 

I'm not totally sure what I think the correct market behavior based on knowable information was, but it seems very hard to make the case that a large crash on Feb 20th is evidence of the markets moving "in tandem with rational expectations". 

Almost everyone I knew was concerned with the pandemic going global and dramatically disrupting our lives much sooner than Feb 20th. On January 26th, a post on the EA Forum, "Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak", made the case we should be worried. By a few weeks later than that, everyone I know was already bracing for covid to hit the US. Looking back at my house Discord server, we had the "if we have to go weeks without leaving the house, is there anything we'd run out of? Let's buy it now" conversation February 6th (which is also when ... (read more)

I felt a lot of this when I was first getting involved in effective altruism. Two of the things that I think are most important and valuable in the EA mindset -- being aware of tradeoffs, and having an acute sense of how much needs to get done in the world and how much is being lost for a lack of resources to fix it -- can also make for a pretty intense flavor of guilt and obligation. These days I think of these core elements of an EA mindset as being pieces of mental technology that really would ideally be installed gradually alongside other pieces of men... (read more)

I wonder if Berkeley had a notably high rate of both no-shows and last-minute interest in attending because the FTX crisis two weeks prior probably changed a lot of peoples' calculus about whether and in what ways they want to be engaged with the EA community/EA network. (Some in the direction of 'actually I don't want to attend; I have lost a lot of belief that EA is worthwhile', and some in the direction of 'I've been trying to make sense of this alone and would particularly benefit from attending discussions and talking with likeminded people'). 

A ... (read more)

I think Asterisk is deliberately trying to look different from Substack, Medium, news sites, etc., rather than doing so accidentally/ as a product of being unaware of how to look like those sites.

My best guess is:

- if you asked SBF "did you know that Kelsey was writing a story for Vox based on your conversation with her, sharing things you said to her in DMs?" the answer would be yes. Again, I sent an email explicitly saying I was writing about this, from my Vox account with a Vox Media Senior Reporter footer, which he responded to. 

- if you asked SBF "is Kelsey going to publish specifically the parts of the conversation that are the most embarrassing/look bad", the answer would be no. 

- if you asked me "is SBF okay with this being publis... (read more)

I believed that SBF thought not that the conversation was secret but that the coverage would be positive. 

Some thoughts about this --

I genuinely thought SBF spoke to me with the knowledge I was a journalist covering him, knew we were on the record, and knew that an article quoting him was going to happen.*** The reasons I thought that were: 

- I knew SBF was very familiar with how journalism works. At the start of our May interview I explained to him how on the record/off the record works, and he was (politely) impatient because he knew it because he does many interviews. 

- I knew SBF had given on the record interviews to the New York Times and Washin... (read more)

I think we added alt text to all screenshots in the piece and if we missed one let us know.

I've had some people say to me "I'd like all future conversations with you to be off the record/confidential unless we agree otherwise". I agreed to this. 

I think EAs are broadly too quick to class things as infohazards instead of reasoning them through, but natsec seems like a pretty well defined area where the reasons things are confidential are pretty concrete .

Some examples of information that is pretty relevant to nuclear risk and would not be discussed on this forum, even if known to some participants:

How well-placed are US spies in the Russian government and in Putin's inner circle?

How about Russian spies in the US government? Do the Russians know what the US response would be in the event of various ... (read more)

The black dots assumes Russia has 2000 functional missiles that they successfully launch against the US and that successfully detonate, and that the US is unable to shoot many of them down/destroy missile launch sites before launch. My understanding is, concretely, that even if all Russian missiles currently reported ready for launch are launched, there's 1500 of them not 2000, and that one would expect many to be used against non-US targets (in Ukraine and Europe). The 500 scenario (purple triangles) seems likelier to me for how many targets Russia would ... (read more)

Plausible cruxes: 

I strongly do not expect full nuclear exchange in immediate response to Russia tac nuke use; the situation that seems plausible to me would involve conventional retaliation against Russian forces in Ukraine, Syria, etc., followed by Russia responding to that.  So I think leaving at a further point still means leaving well ahead of a full exchange. 

I think my work is much more valuable in worlds without a full nuclear exchange; iirc you are pretty doomy on current trajectories, so maybe you actually think your work is ... (read more)

There are a bunch of preparations the US military would want to take in the face of elevated odds of nuclear war (bombers in the air, ships looking for submarines, changes of force concentration) and I don't believe they will sacrifice making those preparations for crowd management reasons. I agree it's possible they'll say something noncommittal or false while visibly changing force deployments to DEFCON 2 or whatever, though this is not what they did during the Cold War and it would be pretty obvious.

Yep, agree - I think it was warranted to be extremely cautious in February/March, and then the ideal behavior would have been to become much less cautious as more information came in. In practice, I think many people remained extremely cautious for a full year (including my family) out of some combination of inertia and exhaustion about renegotiating what had been strenuously negotiated in the first place.

Some people furthermore tried very aggressively to apply social pressure against fully vaccinated people holding events and returning to normalcy in spri... (read more)

I don't know, but I think likely days not weeks. Tactical nuke use will be a good test ground for this - do we get advance warning from US officials about that? How much advance warning?

Thanks for this thoughtful reflection. I do want to register that I think I disagree there wouldn't be much EA to do post- a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia - it would be a scary hard world to live in, and one where many of our previous priorities are no longer relevant, but it's work I think we could do and could improve the trajectory of civilization by doing. 

Though I should say that I think tac nuke use in Ukraine is also a reasonable trigger to leave, depending on your personal situation, productivity, ease of leaving, where you're going, etc - I really just want people to be sure they are doing the EV calculations and not treating risk-minimization as the sudden controlling priority.

My impression is that US intelligence has been very impressive with regard to Russia's military plans to date. US officials confidently called the war in Ukraine by December and knew the details of the planned Russian offensive. They're saying now that they think Putin is not imminently planning to use a tactical nuke. If they're wrong and Putin uses a tactical nuke next week, that'd be a big update they also won't predict further nuclear escalation correctly, but my model is that before the use of a tactical nuke, we'll get US officials saying "we're worr... (read more)

Hmm, what mechanism are you imagining for advantage from getting out of cities before other people? You could have already booked an airbnb/rented a house/etc before the rush, but that's an argument for booking the airbnb/renting the house, not for living in it. 

To be clear, I will also leave SF in the event of a strong signal that we're on the brink of nuclear war -- such as US officials saying they believe Russia is preparing for a first launch, or the US using a nuclear weapon ourselves in response to Russian use, or strategic rather than tactical Russian use (for example against Kyiv), or Russia declaring war on NATO or declaring intent to use nuclear weapons outside Russian territory. 

I mostly expect overreaction in cases of a weaker signal such as a Russian "test" on territory Russia claims as Russian, ... (read more)

In this framework, before the tac nuke use in Ukraine, your expected life hours lost was remaining life hours*P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine) * P (nuke in Ukraine), so your subsequent expected life hours last should change by a factor of 1/P(nuke in ukraine), or about six. 

Though I think straightforwardly applying that framework is wrong, because it assumes that if you don't flee as soon as there's nuke use in Ukraine, you don't flee at all even at subsequent stages of escalation; instead, you want P(nuke in your location| nuke in Ukraine a... (read more)

This is also tricky because I don't think it lets you compare to the option I'd actually advocate for, which is something like "flee at a slightly later point" - the US has good intel on Russia, and it seems likely that US officials will know if Russia appears to be headed towards nuclear war. If you have to compare "flee the instant a tactical nuke is used in Ukraine" or "stay no matter what", "stay no matter what" doesn't look good, but what you want to compare is "flee the instant a tactical nuke is used in Ukraine" to "flee at some subsequent sign of d... (read more)

You're right, my post doesn't make clear enough the difference between current risk and risk conditional on nuclear use in Ukraine. 

Trying to figure out expected hours lost in the latter case seems to depend a ton on which of their forecasts you look at. My instinctive reaction was that 2000 is way too high, as they're at 16% on Russia using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine so it can only increase risk by a factor of 6 or so if it happens, but they state it'd raise risk by a factor of 10 or so if it happened.  I'm going to use the factor of 6 because ... (read more)

And Buck Shlegeris and Nate Thomas and Eitan Fischer and Adam Scherlis (though Buck didn't attend Stanford and just hung out with us because he liked us). I wish I knew how to replicate whatever we were smoking back then. I've tried a couple times but it's a hard act to follow.

Fwiw, I gave Scott permission to mention the above; I think by some metrics of promisingness as an EA I was obviously a promising EA even when I was also failing out of college, and in particular my skillset is public communications which means people could directly evaluate my EAmpr... (read more)

To be clear, though, I don't think EAs should worry about monkeypox more than they currently are - EAs are already pretty aware that pandemics can be very bad and in favor of doing more to detect them early, understand how exponential growth works, and are in a pretty functional  information ecosystem where they'll hear about monkeypox if it becomes a matter of greater personal safety concern or if we get to the point where it's a good idea for people to get smallpox vaccinations.

Huh, interesting example of "should you reverse any advice you hear?". I have mostly encountered US articles in which CDC, etc experts are quoted telling the public unhelpful things like "very few people have monkeypox in the US right now" and "there's no evidence this variant is more transmissible" and "don't panic". 

I hadn't thought of this and I'm actually intrigued - it seems like prediction markets might specifically be good for situations where everyone 'knows' something is up but no one wants to be the person to call it out. The big problem to my mind is the resolution criterion: even if someone's a fraud, it can easily be ten years before there's a big article proving it.

Disclaimer that I've given this less than ten minutes of thought, but I'm now imagining a site pitched at journalists as an aggregated, anonymous 'tip jar' about fraud and misconduct. I think lo... (read more)

ooooops, I'm sorry re: the imposter syndrome - do you have any more detail? I don't want to write in a way that causes that!

I think checking whether results replicate is also important and valuable work which is undervalued/underrewarded, and I'm glad you do it. 

One dynamic that seems unique to fraud investigations specifically is that while most scientists have some research that has data errors or isn't robust, most aren't outright fabricating. Clear evidence of fake data more or less indicts all that scientists's other research (at least to my mind) and is a massive change to how much they'll tend to be respected and taken seriously. It can also get papers redacted, whi... (read more)

Update: I have since been told that the deadline is going to be sooner, August 4th! So sorry for the late change.

August 18th and unfortunately US only - I'm hoping to change that someday but Vox has not taken the legal and regulatory steps that'd make it possible for them as a US-based company to make hires outside the US.

One way in which geoengineering increases societal fragility is if we pump particles into the atmosphere and then find ourselves obliged to keep pumping particles into the atmosphere in order to maintain the effects, and then suffer a significant collapse of infrastructure that makes us not capable of this any longer. This could result in extremely sudden warming and a rapid, unpredictable change in weather patterns. Something would have to go very wrong first, of course, but it could compound an existing catastrophe and take it from recoverable to irrecoverable.

Hmm. I think I'm thinking of concern for justice-system outcomes as a values difference rather than a reasoning error, and so treating it as legitimate feels appropriate in the same way it feels appropriate to say 'an AI with poorly specified goals could wirehead everyone, which is an example of optimizing for one thing we wanted at the expense of other things we wanted' even though I don't actually feel that confident that my preferences against wireheading everyone are principled and consistent.

I agree that most peoples' concepti... (read more)

This is not for criminal investigation. This is for, when a person has been convicted of a crime, estimating when to release them (by estimating how likely they are to commit another crime).

Expanding on this: I don't think 'fairness' is a fundamental part of morality. It's better for good things to happen than bad ones, regardless of how they're distributed, and it's bad to sacrifice utility for fairness.

However, I think there are some aspects of policy where fairness is instrumentally really useful, and I think the justice system is the single place where it's most useful, and the will/preferences of the American populace is demonstrably for a justice system to embody fairness, and so it seems to me that w... (read more)