All of Peter Wildeford's Comments + Replies

Hi - thanks for this comment. As someone working on export control policy, let me give you my perspective.

Firstly, an important precondition for a cooperative pause is leverage. You don't get China to agree to a mutual pause by first giving away your main strategic advantage. You get them to agree by making the alternative to be "a race they're losing", which is worse than cooperation. Export controls are thus part of what creates the conditions for being able to pause. If you equalize compute access first, China has no reason to agree to a pause because t... (read more)

Hi! I'm a long time effective altruist (14+ years) and utilitarian/utilitarian-adjacent. This is a sweet and earnest post - you're clearly bright and I admire your dedication at such a young age. You're right to recognize that burnout isn't utilitarian, but I worry that your "donate everything / camper van" framing is premature and probably wrong.

At age 14/15, the highest-EV move is almost always building optionality, not making binding commitments to extreme frugality. You're right to maximize income, but I think you're thinking too much about this in ter... (read more)

Hi. Thanks for writing this. I find electoral reform to be a genuinely interesting cause area, and I appreciate the effort to apply EA frameworks to it. I have a few concerns with the framing and some factual details:

On neglectedness: The claim that this is "the most neglected intervention in EA" doesn't match the track record. The Center for Election Science has received over $2.4M from Open Philanthropy, $100K from EA Funds, and $40K+ from SFF. 80,000 Hours has a problem profile on voting reform calling it a "potential highest priority area" and did a fu... (read more)

Correct!

Ronnie had a bit of a script but also improvised a lot. I had no script, no knowledge of Ronnie's script, and was very blind to the whole thing. But we did many takes, so I was able to adapt accordingly.

See also "A Model Estimating the Value of Research Influencing Funders" that comes to a similar conclusion

This may be less fun but, for completeness, I want to present an alternative perspective -- I think I know exactly how I'd spend it and don't have any particular questions. Feel free to send the $20M over whenever works best.

You might like "A Model Estimating the Value of Research Influencing Funders" which makes a similar point, but quantitatively

Hi David - I work a lot on semiconductor/chip export policy, so very important to think about the strategy here.

My biggest issue is that "short vs. long" timelines is not a binary. I agree that under longer timelines, say post-2035, China likely can significantly catch up on chip manufacturing. (Seems much less likely pre-2035.) But I think the controls logic matters really strongly for timelines 2025-2035 and still might create a larger strategic advantage post-2035.

Who has the chips still matters, since it determines whether the country has enough comput... (read more)

Congrats! I also thought it was great.

Sorry for the slightly off-topic question but I noticed EAG London 2025 talks are uploaded to YouTube but I didn't see any EAG Bay Area 2025 talks. Do you know when those will go up?

I still stand by the book and I attribute a lot of my historical failures in management to not implementing this book well enough (especially the part about creating clarity around goals).

If you're considering a career in AI policy, now is an especially good time to start applying widely as there's a lot of hiring going on right now. I documented in my Substack over a dozen different opportunities that I think are very promising.

Thank you for sharing your perspective and I'm sorry this has been frustrating for you and people you know. I deeply appreciate your commitment and perseverance.

I hope to share you a bit of perspective from me as a hiring manager on the other side of things:

Why aren’t orgs leaning harder on shared talent pools (e.g. HIP’s database) to bypass public rounds? HIP is currently running an open search.

It's very difficult to run an open search for all conceivable jobs and have the best fit for all of them. And even if you do have a list of the top candidates ... (read more)

I think you should get the LLM to give you the citation and then cite that (ideally after checking it yourself).

At least in my own normative thought, I don't just wonder about what meets my standards. [...] I think the most important disagreement of all is over which standards are really warranted.

Really warranted by what? I think I'm an illusionist about this in particular as I don't even know what we could be reasonably disagreeing over.

For a disagreement about facts (is this blue?), we can argue about actual blueness (measurable) or we can argue about epistemics (which strategies most reliably predict the world?) and meta-epistemics (which strategies most reli... (read more)

You're right that I need to bite the bullet on epistemic norms too and I do think that's a highly effective reply. But at the end of the day, yes, I think "reasonable" in epistemology is also implicitly goal-relative in a meta-ethical sense - it means "in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality." The difference is that this goal is so universally shared, so universal across so many different value systems, and so deeply embedded in the concept of belief itself that it feels categorical.

You say I've "replaced all the important moral questions wi... (read more)

You raise a fair challenge about epistemic norms! Yes, I do think there are facts about which beliefs are most reasonable given evidence. But I'd argue this actually supports my view rather than undermining it.

The key difference: epistemic norms have a built-in goal - accurate representation of reality. When we ask "should I expect emeralds to be green or grue?" we're implicitly asking "in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality, what should I expect?" The standard is baked into the enterprise of belief formation itself.

But moral norms lack thi... (read more)

Thanks!

I think all reasons are hypothetical, but some hypotheticals (like "if you want to avoid unnecessary suffering...") are so deeply embedded in human psychology that they feel categorical. This explains our moral intuitions without mysterious metaphysical facts.

The concentration camp guard example actually supports my view - we think the guard shouldn't follow professional norms precisely because we're applying a different value system (human welfare over rule-following). There's no view from nowhere; there's just the fact that (luckily) most of us share similar core values.

You were negative toward the idea of hypothetical imperatives elsewhere but I don't see how you get around the need for them.

You say epistemic and moral obligations work "in the same way," but they don't. Yes, we have epistemic obligations to believe true things... in order to have accurate beliefs about reality. That's a specific goal. But you can't just assert "some things are good and worth desiring" without specifying... good according to what standard? The existence of epistemic standards doesn't prove there's One True Moral Standard any more than the... (read more)

"Nihilism" sounds bad but I think it's smuggling in connotations I don't endorse.

I'm far from a professional philosopher but I don't see how you could possibly make substantive claims about desirability from a pure meta-ethical perspective. But you definitely can make substantive claims about desirability from a social perspective and personal perspective. The reason we don't debate racist normative advice is because we're not racists. I don't see any other way to determine this.

Morality is Objective

People keep forgetting that meta-ethics was solved back in 2013.

I recently made a forecast based on the METR paper with median 2030 timelines and much less probability on 2027 (<10%). I think this forecast of mine is weaker to much fewer of titotal's critiques, but still weak to some (especially not having sufficient uncertainty around the type of curve to fit).

p(doom) is about doom. For AI, I think this can mean a few things:

• Literal human extinction

• Humans lose power over their future but are still alive (and potentially even have nice lives), either via stable totalitarianism or gradual disempowerment or other means

The second bucket is pretty big

What do the superforecasters say? Well, the most comprehensive effort to ascertain and influence superforecaster opinions on AI risk was the Forecasting Research Institute’s Roots of Disagreement Study.[2] In this study, they found that nearly all of the superforecasters fell into the “AI skeptic” category, with an average P(doom) of just 0.12%. If you’re tempted to say that their number is only so low because they’re ignorant or haven’t taken the time to fully understand the arguments for AI risk, then you’d be wrong; the 0.12% figure was obtained after

I just saw that Season 3 Episode 9 of Leverage: Redemption ("The Poltergeist Job") that came out on 2025 May 29 has an unfortunately very unflattering portrayal of "effective altruism".

Matt claims he's all about effective altruism. That it's actually helpful for Futurilogic to rake in billions so that there's more money to give back to the world. They're about to launch Galactica. That's free global Internet.

[...] But about 50% of the investments in Galactica are from anonymous crypto, so we all know what that means.

The main antagonist and CEO of Fu... (read more)

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

I think it's 20% likely based on the model I made.

I don't think this is as clear of a dichotomy as people think it is. A lot of global catastrophic risk doesn't come from literal extinction because human extinction is very hard. A lot of mundane work on GCR policy involves a wide variety of threat models that are not just extinction.

Here's my summary of the recommendations:

• National security testing
  • Develop robust government capabilities to evaluate AI models (foreign and domestic) for security risks
  • Once ASL-3 is reached, government should mandate pre-deployment testing
  • Preserve the AI Safety Institute in the Department of Commerce to advance third-party testing
  • Direct NIST to develop comprehensive national security evaluations in partnership with frontier AI developers
  • Build classified and unclassified computing infrastructure for testing powerful AI systems
  • Assemble interdisciplinary team

If you've liked my writing in the past, I wanted to share that I've started a Substack: https://peterwildeford.substack.com/

Ever wanted a top forecaster to help you navigate the news? Want to know the latest in AI? I'm doing all that in my Substack -- forecast-driven analysis about AI, national security, innovation, and emerging technology!

Yeah I think so, though there still is a lot of disagreement about crucial considerations. I the OP advice list is about as close as it’s going to get.

I'm very uncertain about whether AI really is >10x neglected animals and I cannot emphasize enough that reasonable and very well-informed people can disagree on this issue and I could definitely imagine changing my mind on this over the next year. This is why I framed my comment the way I did hopefully making it clear that donating to neglected animal work is very much an answer I endorse.

I also agree it's very hard to know whether AI organizations will have an overall positive or negative (or neutral) impact. I think there's higher-level strategic issu... (read more)

Since it looks like you're looking for an opinion, here's mine:

To start, while I deeply respect GiveWell's work, in my personal opinion I still find it hard to believe that any GiveWell top charity is worth donating to if you're planning to do the typical EA project of maximizing the value of your donations in a scope sensitive and impartial way. ...Additionally, I don't think other x-risks matter nearly as much as AI risk work (though admittedly a lot of biorisk stuff is now focused on AI-bio intersections).

Instead, I think the main difficult judgement ca... (read more)

I do agree the EA Funds made a mistake not returning to fixed grant rounds after the Mega Money era was over. It's so much easier to organize, coordinate, and compare.

Thanks for the comment, I think this is very astute.

~

Recently it seems like the community on the EA Forum has shifted a bit to favor animal welfare. Or maybe it's just that the AI safety people have migrated to other blogs and organizations.

I think there's a (mostly but not entirely accurate) vibe that all AI safety orgs that are worth funding will already be approximately fully funded by OpenPhil and others, but that animal orgs (especially in invertebrate/wild welfare) are very neglected.

I don't think that all AI safety orgs are actually fully funded... (read more)

I basically endorse this post, as well as the use of the tools created by Rethink Priorities that collectively point to quite strong but not overwhelming confidence in the marginal value of farmed animal welfare.

I think more EAs should consider operations/management/doer careers over research careers, and that operations/management/doer careers should be higher status within the community.

I get a general vibe that in EA (and probably the world at large), that being a "deep thinking researcher"-type is way higher status than being an "operations/management/doer"-type. Yet the latter is also very high impact work, often higher impact than research (especially on the margin).

I see many EAs erroneously try to go into research and stick to research despite having very ... (read more)

I really appreciate these dates being announced in advance - it makes it much easier to plan!

I'm not sure I understand the expectations enough about what these questions are looking for to answer.

Firstly, I don't think "the movement" is centralized enough to explicitly acknowledge things as a whole - that may be a bad expectation. I think some individual people and organizations have done some reflection (see here and here for prominent examples), though I would agree that there likely should be more.

Secondly, It definitely seems very wrong to me though to say that EA has had no new ideas in the past two years. Back in 2022 the main answer to "how... (read more)

I agree with all this advice. I also want to emphasize that I think researchers ought to spend more time talking to people relevant to their work.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, spend a bunch of time talking to them at the beginning, middle, and end of the project. At the beginning learn and take into account their constraints, at the middle refine your ideas, and at the end actually try to get your research into action.

I think it’s not crazy to spend half of your time on the research project talking.

That’s fair - you’re right to make this distinction where I failed and I’m sorry. I think I have a good point but I got heated in describing it and strayed further from charitableness than I should. I regret that.

Thanks Linch. I appreciate the chance to step back here. So I want to apologize to @Austin and @Rachel Weinberg and @Saul Munn if I stressed them out with my comments. (Tagging means they'll see it, right?)

I want to be very clear that while I disagree with some of the choices made, I have absolutely no ill will towards them or any other Manifest organizer, I very much want Manifold and Manifest to succeed, and I very much respect their rights to have their conference the way they want. If I see any of them I will be very warm and friendly and there's reall... (read more)

BTW I want to add -- to all those who champion Hanania because they think free speech should mean that anyone should be able to be platformed without criticism or condemnation, Hanania is no ally to those principles:

Here's Hanania:

I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter [pre-Musk] is a company that is overw

Yeah, because there's such a geographically clustered dichotomy in views between the London set and the SF set, it seems pretty important to me to give it 24 hours yeah.

Also just a general generic caution: we should know that this poll will mainly be seen by only the most active and most engaged people, which may not be representative enough to generalize.

I think the diurnal effect is real and is based on there being a lot of people in both the UK and the SF Bay Area that have opposite and geographically correlated views on this topic.

It's pretty interesting that Hanania just happens to frequently make these kinds of accidents, right?

here and here.

To be clear, I haven't cut ties with anyone other than Manifold (and Hanania). Manifold is a very voluntary use of my non-professional time and I found the community to be exhausting. I have a right to decline to participate there, just as much as you have a right to participate there. There's nothing controlling about this.

The precise quote for others to assess is "Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits."