MG

Matt Goodman

782 karmaJoined Jan 2020

Comments
89

Sure. I've written a short summary and my reaction to it, and made it a linkpost

My sincere apologies, I had missed that it had been updated! V. Embarrassing. Thankyou for doing that

I thought the bottom half was an OK response.- 'We have long term plans and value healthy funding' (paraphrasing)

I think this hints at a divide between EA and progressive thinking. EAs: we only have a set amount of money for food causes, we need to use it effectively Progressives: just allocate more money to good causes (like treating AIDS) and less on bad causes (like defense spending)

Objections to 'value of my time arguments'

I often hear EA/ rationalists saying something like 'it's not worth spending an hour to save £20, if your hourly rate of pay is over £20/ hour. I think this is wrong, but I might not understand the argument.

It could be understood as a hypotherical argument, you COULD earn this much in an hour, as a reference point to help you understand the value of your time. This hypothetical reference point isn't really useful, when I have the very real figure of my total balance, and upcoming outgoings to consider, and the factor of whether I can afford to spend on things I enjoy, if I don't save money now.

So, it could be a suggestion that I actually could work an extra hour for money. But I (and almost everyone I know) don't get paid hourly. I have a fixed amount of hours, she working over that doesn't gain me more money. To gain more, I'd need to set up a freelance/ side business, and there's all sorts of initial costs with getting that setup and advertising my services, and reporting my income for tax, and so on and so on.

Lastly, 'you could work an extra hour' doesn't factor in my enjoyment. Working an extra hour would have a negative effect on my mood. I don't want to work more than i already do. By contrast, walking an hour to save an Uber fee would be good for my mood, and health.

I agree with that rough claim. And I liked the rest of the blog.

I guess I do see people who are struggling behaving badly sometimes. I just don't think it's in any more frequent than the general population. Or I see sometimes see them using the fact they're struggling to justify their bad behaviour, and I don't buy that.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oGdCtvuQv4BTuNFoC/good-things-that-happened-in-ea-this-year

Is there any consensus on who's making things safer, and who isn't? I find it hard to understand the players in this game, it seems like AI safety orgs and the big language players are very similar in terms of their language, marketing and the actual work they do. Eg openAI talk about ai safety in their website and have jobs on the 80k job board, but are also advancing ai rapidly. Lately it seems to me like there isn't even agreement in the ai safety sphere over what work is harmful and what isn't (I'm getting that mainly from the post on closing the lightcone office)

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