I'd be doing less good with my life if I hadn't heard of effective altruism

The principles have given me a great framework to think about things, and a community to motivate me to keep being rigorous about it!

However, I've become a lot more worried about relying on consequentialist calculations and I've ended up being a bit more virtues ethics-y as a result. I am not sure I'm not good for the world - it's possible if I tried to have less impact I would have more confidence I'm not net negative? The perils of working in AI!

Thanks for writing about this!

I'm thinking a lot about this question and would welcome chatting more with people about this - particularly on the impacts on invertebrates & wild animals. I work at Anthropic (note: not in a technical capacity, and my views are purely my own) and so am feeling like I might be relatively better-placed (at least for now) to think about the intersection of AI and animals, but I have a lot to learn about animal welfare!

Thanks a lot for your work on this neglected topic!

You mention,

Those counter-considerations seem potentially as strong as the motivations I list in favor of a focus on malevolent actors. 

Could you give more detail on which of the counter-considerations (and motivations) you consider strongest?

People being less scared to post! (FWIW I think this has increasingly become the case)

Thanks for this - I think this captures a quality (or set of qualities?) that has previously not had so accurate a handle! I think, in many ways, sincerity is the quality that leads people to really 'take seriously' (i.e., follow through in a coherent way) the project of doing good.

I see!  Yes, I agree that more public "buying time" interventions (e.g. outreach) could be net negative. However, for the average person entering AI safety, I think there are less risky "buying time" interventions that are more useful than technical alignment.

To clarify, you think that "buying time" might have a negative impact [on timelines/safety]?

Even if you think that, I think I'm pretty uncertain of the impact of technical alignment, if we're talking about all work that is deemed 'technical alignment.' e.g., I'm not sure that on the margin I would prefer an additional alignment researcher (without knowing what they were researching or anything else about them), though I think it's very unlikely that they would have net-negative impact.

So, I think I disagree that (a) "buying time" (excluding weird pivotal acts like trying to shut down labs) might have net negative impact and that & thus also that (b) "buying time" has more variance than technical alignment.

edit: Thought about it more and I disagree with my original formulation of the disagreement. I think "buying time" is more likely to be net negative than alignment research, but also that alignment research is usually not very helpful.

Haha aw, thanks! I would love to keep doing these some day.

To clarify, I agree that 80k is the main actor who could + should change people's perceptions of the job board!

I find myself slightly confused - does 80k ever promote jobs they consider harmful (but ultimately worth it if the person goes on to leverage that career capital)?

My impression was that all career-capital building jobs were ~neutral or mildly positive. My stance on the 80k job board—that the set up is largely fine, though the perception of it needs shifting—would change significantly if 80k were listing jobs they thought were net negative if they didn't expect the person to later take an even higher-impact role because of the net negative job.