All of Luise's Comments + Replies

I found the framing of "Is this community better-informed relative to what disagreers expect?" new and useful, thank you!

To point out the obvious: Your proposed policy of updating away from EA beliefs if they come in large part from priors is less applicable for many EAs who want to condition on "EA tenets". For example, longtermism depends on being quite impartial regarding when a person lives, but many EAs would think it's fine that we were "unusual from the get-go" regarding this prior. (This is of course not very epistemically modest of them.)

Here are ... (read more)

My impression is that others have thought so much less about AI x-risk than EAs and rationalists, and for generally bad reasons, that EAs/rats are the "largest and smartest" expert group basically 'by default'. Unfortunately with all the biases that come with that. I could be misunderstanding the situation tho.

Thanks a lot, I think it's really valuable to have your experience written up!

Thanks Max!

Sounds like a plausible theory that you lost motivation because you pushed yourself too hard. I'd also pay attention to "dumber" reasons like maybe you had more motivation from supervisors/social environment/more achievable goals in the past.

Similar to my call to take a vacation, maybe it's worth it for you to only do motivating work (like a side project) for 1.5 weeks and see if the tiredness disappears.

All of this with the caveat that you understand your situation a lot better than I do ofc!

yes! From reading about burnout it can seem like it only happens to people who hate their job, work in bad environments, etc. But it can totally happen to people who love their job!

thanks and big agree; I want to see many more different experiences of energy problems written up!

the causes of people's energy problems are so many and varied! It would be great to have many different experiences written up, including stress and anxiety-induced problems.

Thanks for feedback re:appendix, will see if others say the same :)

Optimistic note with low confidence:

In my impression, SBF thought he was doing an 'unpalatable' but right thing given the calculations (and his epistemic immodesty). Promoting a central meme in EA like "naïve calculations like this are too dangerous and too fallible" might solve a lot of the issue. I think dangerously-optimize-y people in EA are already updating in this direction as a result of FTX. Before FTX, being "hardcore" and doing naïve calculations was seen as cool sometimes. If we correct hard for this right now, it may be less of an issue in the ... (read more)

ah, the thing about fragile cooperative equilibria makes sense to me.

I'm not as sure as you that this shift would happen to core EA though. I could also imagine that current EAs will have a very allergic reaction to new, unaligned people coming in and trying to take advantage of EA resources. I imagine something like a counterculture forming where aligned EAs start purposefully setting themselves apart from people who're only in it for a piece of the pie, by putting even more emphasis on high EA alignment. I believe I've already seen small versions of this... (read more)

It's unclear to me whether you are saying that the potentially huge number of new people in EA will try to take advantage of EA resources for personal gain or that WE, who are currently in EA for altruistic reasons, will do so. The former sounds likely to me, the latter doesn't.

I might be missing crucial context here since I'm not familiar with the Thielosphere and all that, but overall I also don't think a huge number of new, unaligned people will be the downfall of EA. As long as leadership, thought-leaders, and grantmakers in EA stay aligned, it m... (read more)

Thanks for commenting this. Any tips for how to get disordered breathing diagnosed reliably? 

pls make one!

If effective altruists' messages are hacked, taken out of context, and publicly revealed, it could substantially and even permanently harm the movement. Consider the example of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Many of his emails, including those that made Clinton and her campaign look bad, were obtained by hackers in a data breach and published in Wikileaks.

How likely is it that someone would target the EA movement by hacking messages and taking them out of context?

I agree with you, being "a highly cool and well networked EA" and "do  things which need to be done" are different goals. This post is heavily influenced by my experience as a new community builder and my perception that, in this situation,  being "a highly cool and well networked EA" and "do  things which need to be done" are pretty similar. If I wasn't so sociable and network-y, I'd probably still be running my EA reading group with ~6 participants, which is nice but not "doing things which need to be done". For technical alignment researchers, this is probably less the case, though still much more than I would've expected.

Hi Claire,

what are your thoughts on "going one meta-level up" and trying to build the meta space? Specifically creating opportunities like UGAP, the GCP internships, or running organisers' summits to get more and better community builders? I'm unsure but I thought this might be at odds with some of the points you raised, e.g., that we might neglect object-level work and its community-building effect. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

So when I entered university I was probably capable of doing 0.5 hours per day on average.

hahah I feel this

(I'm an organiser at EA Edinburgh and from Germany.)

Yes. Your point about the social culture at German universities seems crucial. The lack of an extensive extracurricular life in and around the university should lead to smaller EA groups (because of people not looking for student groups, less enthusiasm from organisers, lacking knowledge about how to build such groups, ...)

In terms of action plans, I think an important component is getting EA group organisers excited and ambitious. Communication between large, vibrant EA groups and German groups would be ... (read more)

Thanks! I need to ask a lot of clarifying questions:

When you say "This is because the type of centralized support CEA might provide and the type of skills/characteristics required of someone working full-time running a university group or a city/national professional network might look very different depending on the ultimate model.", (1) does "This" refer to the fact that you have 2 subteams working with focus locations as opposed to everyone working on all locations? (2) If so, could I reword the explanation the sentence gives to "We need to work on focu... (read more)

I'm running two retreats this week whilst working with Swarthmore College EA. Both retreats are along the lines of what you described as a bootcamp

Ah, super exciting! I'll DM you

I agree you could let someone run a social straight off. In general I guess people are more likely to agree to running a social if they are already a fellowship facilitator (fellowship social), and more likely to agree to become a committee member if they are already organising socials. The whole idea of moving people down a funnel etc.

To your skepticism: Thanks for raising the point! It's true that if we had perfect organiser training either locally in the groups or in one big bootcamp, it's unclear the bootcamp would cost less organiser hours. However organisers locally often don't have the time/skills to train new organisers. So the comparison probs isn't decisive. Hope that makes sense!

Thanks for asking! The pitch goes something like this:

Uni groups are constrained by their organisers' time. The typical way of getting a new organiser is to find an excited EA and to slowly give them more and more responsibilities (e.g. intro fellowship facilitator -> run a social -> committee member). This takes time and there's dropout at every stage. The observation is that organisers are usually the most motivated after a retreat/conference/... So we might be able to significantly speed up this process and reduce dropout by having a retreat-ish t... (read more)

Agreed! In the meantime, it's definitely worth it contacting a prior organiser of an organisers' retreat for guidance. Henry Sleight ran this one, and Jessica McCurdy ran the one in Boston.

CEA has asked EAIF to assess applications from groups that are not eligible for CBG funding. CEA chose to do this rather than hire more staff, as we believe there will be benefits from us running a more focused programme.

We expect to include more universities in this list as we build up capacity for our university program. However, we think there are benefits to piloting our university support program with a smaller number of groups. 

This seems to be saying there was the option of hiring more staff and rolling out the CBG programme and sup... (read more)

My understanding is that CEA is limited by the time of their employees. Because hiring rounds and all the support rolled out to focus groups as listed above take time

Have you considered applying for funding from the EA Infrastructure fund? They're keen to support community building as far as I know :)

Thanks, your perspective on this is really helpful! Especially the points you made about consciousness research not being very neglected. On the other hand, AI research can also not really be described as neglected anymore. Maybe the intersection of both is the way to go - as you said, C might be crucial to AGI.

I'm not sure why your answer is so full of repetition, but I will definitely check those orgs out, thanks!

I did not know about the meta-problem of consciousness before. I will have to think about this, thank you!