Thanks for the update, this sounds pretty reasonable to me. I can well imagine that this will even increase your legibility, as written materials are easier to skim for the information one is looking for.

I stumbled on a related IGM poll (a survey of many of the top economists from the US) the other day, and they seem to believe that economic incentives through IP rights are important:

That makes a lot of sense to me, especially the points about how little time this might take and that there is not conflict with prefering the discussion to be public. Thanks! 

I might be a little bit less worried about the time delay of the response. I'd be surprised if fewer than say 80% of the people who would say they find this very concerning won't end up also reading the response from ACE. I'd be more worried if this would be a case where most people would just form a quick negative association and won't follow up later when this all turns out to be more or less benign.

Because I'm worried that this post could hurt my future ability to get a job in EAA, I'm choosing to remain anonymous.

I personally would also find it emotionally draining to criticize possible employers and would understand if one decides against contacting them privately. Not saying this happened here, but another seemingly valid reason I’d want to keep in mind.

Your question reads a bit like you disapprove of the author posting it without doing this. I agree that people criticizing an org should strongly consider contacting the org before their public criticism. But I think there are reasons to not contact an org before, besides urgency, e.g. lacking time, or predicting that private communication will not be productive enough to spend the little time we have at our disposal. So I currently think we should approve if people bring up the energy to voice honest concerns even if they don’t completely follow the ideal playbook. What do you, or others think?

Good point. I suppose I could end up being more optimistic because

• some politicians might think supporting it will, all in all, still make it more likely for them to win office
• they might not believe that too many people would take part in this, so they could win relatively cheap virtue points
• they might just be convinced that this is a great idea and are open to testing it out with voters
• no idea if true, but I imagine many politicians also don’t have too close relationships with a significant proportion of their (seasonal?) campaign staff and have enough slack cutting other things if necessary? Or to rely more on volunteers?

Probably it would help if you could find ways for the politicians to reap as much positive public recognition from this as possible, e.g. trying to place things like „Voters of both Richard Roe and Jane Doe donated 30.000$ as part of the One America Charity Campaign“ in the local news. Maybe also by letting them recommend a charity they’d like to be associated with.

Another thought, I guess you might face less opposition in areas where campaigning is less professionalized and connected to the respective party‘s campaign apparatuses, who I guess will not like this idea (assuming they exist).

Cool! Maybe you could reach out to politicians who have depolarization as part of their political program, who I expect to more likely want to support/be associated with projects like this.

EA Hannover uses qv for choosing books for our reading club!

An online poll generator for quadratic voting is qv.geek.sg, which wasn’t too easy to find a couple months ago and might be interesting to play around with to get an impression.

Thanks, I enjoyed reading this! I read The Selfish Gene some years ago and your post made me realize that my mind hasn‘t yet settled on how to think about all this.

One thought that came up was that we might want to distinguish between evolutionary processes and genes? This is related to the saying „Don’t hate the player, hate the game“, only that the players/the genes are not even real agents with intentions, like you argued. And furthermore we maybe shouldn’t even lay blame on evolution, as it’s just a non-agentic dynamic that probably sprang to life randomly at some point.

Thanks, yes, that seems much more relevant. The cases in that paper feel slightly different in that I expect AI and ML to currently be much more "open" fields where I expect orders of magnitude more paths of ideas that can lead towards transformative AI than

• paths of ideas leading to higher transistor counts on a CPU (hmm, because it's a relatively narrow technology confronting physical extremes?)
• paths of ideas leading to higher crop yields (because evolution already invested a lot of work in optimizing energy conversion?)
• paths of ideas leading to decreased mortality of specific diseases (because this is about interventions in extremely complex biochemical pathways that are still not well understood?)

Maybe I could empirically ground my impression of "openness" by looking at the breadth of cited papers at top ML conferences, indicating how highly branched the paths of ideas currently are compared to other fields? And maybe I could look at the diversity of PIs/institutions of the papers that report new state-of-the-art results in prominent benchmarks, which indicates how easy it is to come into the field and have very good new ideas?