All of konrad's Comments + Replies

Disclaimer: I have aphantasia and it seems that my subjective conscious experience is far from usual.^[1] I don't have deep meditation experience; I have meditated a cumulative 300+ hours since 2015. I have never meditated for more than 2 hours a day.

I've found Headspace's mindfulness stuff unhelpful, albeit pleasant. It was just not what I needed but I only figured it out after a year or so. Metta (loving-kindness) is the practice I consistently benefit from most, also for my attention and focus. It's the best "un-clencher" when I'm by myself. And it ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up, excited for the next!

One major bottleneck to adoption of software & service industries is that the infrastructure doesn't exist - more than 50% of people don't have access to the bandwidth that makes our lives on the internet possible. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fixing-the-global-digital-divide-and-digital-access-gap/ (That's also not solved by Starlink because it's too expensive.)

For export of services to benefit the workers, you'd need local governance infrastructure that effectively maintains public goods, which a... (read more)

I didn't say Duncan can't judge OP. I'm questioning the judgment.

FWIW, this sounds pretty wrongheaded to me: anonymization protects OP from more distant (mis)judgment while their entourage is aware of them having posted this. That seems like fair game to me and not at all as you're implying. 

We didn't evolve to operate at these scales, so this appears like a good solution.

Dear Nuño, thank you very much for the very reasonable critiques! I had intended to respond in depth but it's continuously not the best use of time. I hope you understand. Your effort has been thoroughly appreciated and continues to be integrated into our communications with the EA community. 

We have now secured around 2 years of funding and are ramping up our capacity . Until we can bridge the inferential gap more broadly, our blog offers insight into what we're up to. However, it is written for a UN audience and non-exhaustive, thus you may understandably remain on the fence.

Maybe a helpful reframe that avoids some of the complications of "interesting vs important" by being a bit more concrete is "pushing the knowledge frontier vs applied work"?

Many of us get into EA because we're excited about crucial considerations type things and too many get stuck there because you can currently think about it ~forever but it practically contributes 0 to securing posterity. Most problems I see beyond AGI safety aren't bottlenecked by new intellectual insights (though sometimes those can still help). And even AGI safety might turn out in practice to come down to a leadership and governance problem.

This sounds great. It feels like a more EA-accessible reframe of the core value proposition of Nora and my post on tribes. 

tl;dr please write that post

I'm very strongly in favor of this level of transparency. My co-founder Max has been doing some work along those lines in coordination with CEA's community health team. But if I understand correctly, they're not that up front about why they're reaching out. Being more "on the nose" about it, paired with a clear signal of support would be great because these people are usually well-meaning and can struggle parsing ambiguous signals. Of course, that's a question of qualified manpower - arguably our most limited resource - but we shouldn't let our limited capacity for immediate implementation stand in the way of inching ever closer to our ideal norms.

Yes, happily!

Thanks very much for highlighting this so clearly, yes indeed. We are currently in touch with one potential such grantmaker. If you know of others we could talk to, that would be great.

The amount isn't trivial at ~600k. Max' salary also guarantees my financial stability beyond the ~6 months of runway I have. It's what has allowed us to make mid-term plans and me to quit my CBG.

The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI) is developing the capacity to do a) more practical research on many of the issues you're interested in and b) the kind of direct engagement necessary to play a role in international affairs. For now, this is with a focus on the UN and related institutions but if growth is sustainable for SI, we think it would be sensible to expand to EU policy engagement. 

You can read more in our 2021 review and 2022 plans.  We also have significant room for more funding, as we have only started fundraising again l... (read more)

In my model, strong ties are the ones that need most work because they have highest payoff. I would suggest they generate weak ties even more efficiently than focusing on creating weak ties.

This hinges on the assumption that the strong-tie groups are sufficiently diverse to avoid insularity. Which seems to be the case at sufficiently long timescales (e.g 1+years) as most strong tie groups that are very homogenous eventually fall apart if they're actually trying to do something and not just congratulate one another. That hopefully applies to any EA group.

Th... (read more)

EAs talk a lot about value alignment and try to identify people who are aligned with them. I do, too. But this is also funny at a global level, given we don't understand our values nor aren't very sure about how to understand them much better, reliably. Zoe's post highlights that it's too early to double down on our current best guesses and more diversification is needed to cover more of the vast search space.

Disclaimer: I have disagreeable tendencies, working on it but biased. I think you're getting at something useful, even if most people are somewhere in the middle. I think we should care most about the outliers on both sides because they could be extremely powerful when working together.

I want to add some **speculations** on these roles in the context of the level at which we're trying to achieve something: individual or collective.

When no single agent can understand reality well enough to be a good principal, it seems most beneficial for the collective to ... (read more)

Thank you (and an anonymous contributor) very much for this!

you made some pretty important claims (critical of SFE-related work) with little explanation or substantiation

If that's what's causing downvotes in and of itself, I would want to caution people against it - that's how we end up in a bubble.

What interpretations are you referring to? When are personal best guesses and metaphysical truth confused?

E.g. in his book on SFE, Vinding regularly cites people's subjective accounts of reality in support of SFE at the normative level. He acknowledges that each... (read more)

Intrigued by which part of my comment it is that seems to be dividing reactions. Feel free to PM me with a low effort explanation. If you want to make it anonymous, drop it here.

Strong upvote. Most people who identify with SFE I have encountered seem to subscribe to the practical interpretation. The core writings I have read (e.g. much of Gloor & Mannino's or Vinding's stuff) tend to make normative claims but mostly support them using interpretations of reality that do not at all match mine.  I would be very happy if we found a way to avoid confusing personal best guesses with metaphysical truth. 

Also, as a result of this deconfusion, I would expect there to  be very few to no decision-relevant cases of divergence between "practically SFE" people and others, if all of them subscribe to some form of longtermism or suspect that there's other life in the universe.

Thanks for starting this discussion! I have essentially the same comment as David,  just a different body of literature: policy process studies. 

We reviewed the field in the context of our Computational Policy Process Studies paper (section 1.1). From that, I recommend Paul Cairney's work, e.g. Understanding public policy (2019), and Weible & Sabatier’s Theories of the Policy Process (2018).

Section 4 of the Computational Process Studies paper contains research directions we think are promising and can be investigated with other methods, too. ... (read more)

Dear Khorton, I just wanted to say thank you for this vote of confidence - it is very motivating to see civil servants who think we're on to something.

Our World in Data has created two great posts this year, highlighting how the often proposed dichotomy between economic growth & sustainability is false.

In The economies that are home to the poorest billions of people need to grow if we want global poverty to decline substantially, Max Roser points out that given our current wealth,

the average income in the world is int.-$16 per day

Which is far below what we'd think of as the poverty line in developed countries. This means that mere redistribution of what we have is insufficient - we'd all end up poor ... (read more)

To avoid spamming more comments, one final share: our resource repository is starting to take shape.  Two recent additions that might be of use to others:

• United Nations for the future - a collection of key international texts for long-term governance
• An overview of fields to improve decision-making in policy systems

In the works: a brief guide to decision-making on wicked problems, an analysis of 28 policymaker interviews on "decision-making under uncertainty and information overload" and a summary of our first working paper.

We have set up an RSS feed f... (read more)

We have published a few additional blog posts of interest:

• Building the field of long-term governance - SI’s research approach

• Setting expectations for extreme risk mitigation through policy change

• Our Theory of Change

Hi! We uploaded drafts for two pieces last week: 

• The preprint of "Computational Policy Process Studies" (also has a video presentation linked to it)
• A draft of working paper #1 "Policymaking for the Long-term Future: Improving Institutional Fit"

It’s all somewhat mixed up - highly targeted advocacy is a great way to build up capacity because you get to identify close allies, can do small-scale testing without too much risk, join more exclusive networks because you’re directly endorsed by “other trusted actor x*, etc. 

Our targeted advocacy will remain general for now - as in “the long-term future matters much more than we are currently accounting for” and “global catastrophic threats are grossly neglected”. With increasing experience and clout, it will likely become more concrete. 

Until t... (read more)

Yup, the portfolio approach makes a lot of sense to us. Also, as always, thanks for the summary and links!

A big question is how to define “extremely nearby”. Within the next 5 years, SI should be in a position to directly take meaningful action. Ironically, given SI’s starting point, making short-term action the main goal seems like it could make it less likely to attain the necessary capacity. There’s just no sustainable way in which a new actor can act urgently, as they first have to “stand the test of time” in the eyes of the established ones. 

Yeah, public attention can also be a carrot, not just a stick. But it’s a carrot that grows legs and will run its own way, possibly making it harder when you want to change course upon new learnings.

Our current take here is something like “public advocacy doesn’t create windows of opportunity, it creates windows of implementation”. When public pressure mounts, policymakers want to do something to signal they are trying. And they will often do whatever looks best in that moment. It would only be good to pressure once proposals are worked out and just need t... (read more)

Thanks a lot for the compliments! Really nice to read.

The metrics are fuzzy as we have yet to establish the baselines. We will do that until the end of September 2021 via our first pilots to then have one year of data to collect for impact analysis.

The board has full power over the decision of whether to continue SI’s existence. In Ralph Hertwig’s words, their role is to figure out whether we “are visionary, entirely naïve, or full of cognitive biases”. For now, we are unsure ourselves. What exactly happens next will depend on the details of the conclusion of the board.

I prefer the lower pitch "wob-wob-wob" and thus would like to make a bid to simply rename Robert Wiblin to "the Wob". Maybe Naming What We Can could pick this up?

Hi Khorton, thanks for the pointer - we will make sure to update. Is there something you'd be particularly keen on reading? We're happy to share drafts - just drop me an email konrad@simoninstitute.ch

4. Two of our forthcoming working papers deal with “the evidence underlying policy change” and “strategies for effective longtermist advocacy”. A common conclusion that could deserve more scrutiny is the relative effectiveness of insider vs outsider strategies (insiders directly work within policy networks and outsiders publicly advocate for policy change). Insider strategies seem more promising. What is well-validated, especially in the US, is that the budget size of advocacy campaigns does not correlate with their success. However, an advocate’s number o... (read more)

3. I sympathize strongly with the feeling of urgency but it seems risky to act on it, as long as the longtermist community doesn’t have fully elaborated policy designs on the table that can simply be lobbied into adoption and implementation. 

Given that the design of policies or institutional improvements requires a lot of case-specific knowledge, we see this as another reason to privilege high-bandwidth engagement. In such settings, it’s also possible to become policy-entrepreneurs who can create windows of opportunity, instead of needing to wait for ... (read more)

2. You’re right. We’re assuming that policy analysis is being done by more and more organizations in increasing quantities. Highly targeted advocacy is well within the scope of what we mean by “building capacity locally”. There are some things one can propose to advance discussions (see e.g. Toby Ord’s recent Guardian piece). The devil is in the details of these proposals, however. Translating recommendations into concrete policy change isn’t straightforward and highly contextual (see e.g. missteps with LAWS). As advocacy campaigns can easily take on a lif... (read more)

1. Quick definitions first, an explanation below. “Policy engagement” - interacting with policy actors to advance specific objectives; “start locally”: experimenting with actions and recommendations in ways that remain within the scope of organizational influence; “organizational capacity” capability to test, iterate and react to external events in order to preserve course.

Achieving policy change requires organizational capacity to sustain engagement for indefinite amounts of time because (a) organizations have to have sufficient standing within, or strong... (read more)

I really liked this comment. I will split up my answer into separate comments to make the discussion easier to follow.  Thanks also for sharing Hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value, hadn't read it and it seems under-appreciated.

Thanks, I have this wherever possible. Strong upvote for the practical usefulness of the comment.

There are cases, though, where the core problem is not the ability to record  but the lack of appreciation of the value of making things explicit and documenting them as such. Then I can one-sidedly record all I want, it won't shape my environment in the way I want to.

That's why I'm asking about the appreciation aspect in particular. I think there are a lot of gains from attitudes that are common in EA that are just lost in many other circles because peopl... (read more)

it also allows people to qualify and clarify thinking as they go, resulting in what feels like a smooth evolution of thinking as opposed to the seemingly discontinuous and inelegant show of changing your mind after being corrected or learning new information via asynchronous communication.

This gets exactly to the core of the potential I see: groups get stuck in a local equilibrium where progress happens and everybody is content but the payoff from going meta and improving self-knowledge and transparency would compound over time - and that seems to be easie... (read more)

Thanks for the feedback! I gave it another pass. Is there anything concrete that threw you off or still does? I'd appreciate pointers as I had other people look at it before.

Yeah, agreed that your conclusion applies to the majority of interactions from a 1-off perspective.

But I observe a decent amount of cases where it would be good to have literal documentation of statements, take-aways etc. because otherwise, you'll have to have many more phone calls.

I'm especially thinking of co-working and other mutually agreed upon mid- to long-term coordination scenarios. In order to do collective world-modelling better, i.e. to find cruxes, prioritize, research, introspect, etc., it seems good to have more bandwidth AND more memory. But... (read more)

Evaluating the UN based on news from the security council is like evaluating the US government based on news from hollywood.

The SC is a circus, but the UN fosters lots of multilateral progress through meetings you don't hear about because everybody's scared of showing that they just want world peace in a world where realism reigns. 

Hollywood shows American superheroes fighting evil, while the government tries to operationalize the coordination of 300mio people. Sure, hollywood memes might foster popular American dream narratives and the government fai... (read more)

Pre- vs post-Cuban-Missile-Crisis Kennedy quotes illustrating a too common development pattern I have observed in people who dabble in world-improvement. They start out extremely determined to do Good and end up simply reminding themselves of our humanity. In a somewhat desperate way, holding onto the last straw of hope they could find.

Pre: 

> We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

Post: 

> weapons acquired for the purpose of maki... (read more)

I am somewhat disappointed by Yuval Noah Harari's Lessons from a year of Covid (https://ft.com/content/f1b30f2c-84aa-4595-84f2-7816796d6841…). He says many great things in the article but furthers a weird misconception of political decision-making.

Two quotes to illuminate what bothers me 

One reason for the gap between scientific success and political failure is that scientists co-operated globally, whereas politicians [...] have failed to form an international alliance against the virus and to agree on a global plan.

a global anti-plague system a

Hi Markus, only just saw this, sorry! 

Might still be helpful: you can find somewhat more extensive answers in our annual reports.

In short:

We have quite good engagement data now, since starting a zulip chat server, allowing better tracking of activity. We have stopped running individual workshops and replaced them with a standardized intro seminar series and a personalized fellowship program.

The core group of heavily-involved individuals is still growing: >30 people now, which is more than double what we had at the time of the previous comment. With... (read more)

Just got an email saying 230k are still left, so worth pushing this further. 

Yes, happily! konrad@eageneva.org

As a data point:

We have organized different "collective ABZ planning sessions" in Geneva that hinge on peer feedback given in a setting I would call a light version of CFAR's hamming circles.

This has worked rather well so far and with the efficient pre-selection of the participants can probably scale quite well. We tried to do so at the Student Summit and it seemed to have been useful to 100+ participants, even though we didn't get to collect detailed feedback in the short time frame. 

Already providing the Schelling point for people to meet, pre-selecting participants & improving the format  seems potentially quite valuable.

I think we can assume that people on this forum seek truth and personal growth. Of course, this is challenging for all of us from time to time.

I think having a norm of speaking truthfully and not withholding information is important for community health. Each one of us has to assume the responsibility of knowing our own boundaries and pushing them within reasonable bounds, as few others can be expected to know ourselves well enough. Combined with the fact that in this case people have consciously decided to *opt in* to the discussion by posting a comment,... (read more)

Didn't downvote but my two cents:

I am unsure about the net value of encouraging people to simply need less management and wait for less approval.

• Some (most?) people do need guidance until they are able to run projects independently and successfully, ignoring the need doesn't make it go away.
• The unilateralist's curse is scary. A lot of decisions about EA network growth and strategy that the core organizations have come to are rather counter-intuitive to most of us until we got the chance to talk it through with someone who has spent significa