Oscar Delaney

446 karmaJoined Apr 2021Brisbane QLD, Australia

Bio

Participation
3

I studied maths, philosophy and genetics at The University of Queensland in Australia. I was drawn to EA through GiveWell and Singerian global health ethics, but am now also interested in animal welfare and the longterm.

I did a biosecurity project at CERI and an AI alignment project at SERI MATS.

Comments
61

This was enjoyable to read and I was surprised by some of the results, thanks!

I would also find this useful, the formatting makes me think it is made in LATEX though which would make that hard I think.

Great! I didn't realise Hilary has left/is leaving. Does anyone know what she is doing or planning? No special reason to know, just curious to hear what people whose thinking I respect are up to.

Nathan (or anyone else) I doubt I will read the whole google doc but would appreciate a ~1 page summary, and I think that would be appropriate to include in this post (with, of course, a disclaimer that it is your gloss on what Owen is saying)

Ah whoops, thanks! I have only ever subscribed to podcasts by searching for the name within my app, which didn't work, but using the RSS feed worked :)

Great! I would find a podcast version most convenient (akin to Joe Carlsmith Audio) and given the audio is already generated I imagine this is not that hard to set up (though I never have myself).

Ah OK, yes that seems right. I think the main context I have considered the values of future people previously is in trying to frontrun moral progress and get closer to the truth (if it exists) sooner than others, so that is where my mind most naturally went. But yes, if for instance, we were more in a Moloch style world where value was slowly disappearing in favour of ruthless efficiency then indeed that is good to know before it has happened so we can try to stop it.

I see some parallel between this project of predicting future (hopefully wiser and better-informed) values for moral antirealists and just doing moral philosophy to work out facts of the matter in ethics for moral realists. Both projects seem pretty hard. I expectantly await future posts!

Thanks, makes sense re funding and tradeoffs. I think it would be understandable if you decided for some fraction of your research projects that it would be too much work to write up for a public audience, my guess would be that there is something of a bimodal distribution or something where writing it up immediately or never are best and writing it up later is dominated by immediately. Also, there may already be this somewhere that I have missed, but (except of course for any secret/extra-sensitive projects) it seems low cost and potentially quite valuable to put up a title and perhaps just a one-para abstract of all the projects you have done/are doing, so that anyone else researching a similar topic can reach out, or even deprioritise researching that if they know you already have and are just yet to publish.

Great! I am curious why publishing has been so slow - I would have assumed it is easiest to put it up roughly immediately while the project is fresh in your mind and before the research is out of date. Also, I was pleased to see that the time estimates stack up pretty well in my ballpark calculation: research supply = 1.5 years * 48 work weeks/year * 7 researchers = 504 researcher-weeks research use = 6 weeks/report * 3 researchers * 23 reports = 414 researcher weeks Which is pretty close for a calculation like this I reckon :)

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