In my read, this post is not about whether having children (literal 'pro' 'natalism') is correct or not. I think having a debate about that is great, and I'm inclined towards the 'yes' side.
It's about pointing to signs suggesting the existence of power-seeking faction within EA, that (by their own admission) is attempting to coopt the movement for their own aims.
(Why the hedging in the previous paragraph: stating that your faction is "now 100X more likely to become a real, dominant faction" is not quite stating your intention to make it dominate, it just ...
Work trials (paid, obviously) are awesome for better hiring, especially if you're seeking to get good candidates that don't fulfill the traditional criteria (e.g. coming from an elite US/UK university). Many job seekers don't have a current employment.
Living with other EAs or your coworkers is mostly fine too, especially if you're in a normal living situation, like most EA group houses are.
These suggestions aren't great. I agree with the "Don't date" ones, but these were already argued for before.
In general, I think it is helpful in discussing work trials if people (including the OP) distinguished between three different things that are commonly called work trials:
Great thanks, I've set up a recurring donation!
EDIT: apparently they're very time-constrained, so I'll give $13.3k as a lump sum instead.
I would say you should just donate it now. Gift Aid is just very efficient, and we have plenty of effective interventions in all these areas to do now.
For x- and s-risk and global development (areas that benefit from research and can accumulate knowledge) the time of highest leverage is plausibly now, and the earlier the better.
The report you link says that the largest cause of later cost-effectiveness is "exogenous learning", i.e. research that happens regardless and makes marginal interventions more effective. If that is the case, why not invest in the l...
No, I think your table is substantially better than chatgpt’s because it factors out the two alignment dimensions into two spatial dimensions.
Very cool, I didn't actually believe that other regulatory regimes emulated the EU, but I believe it a little bit now. The large number of GDPR emulations surprised me.
One thing I don't quite get
This complicated architecture has also had a 5.2% growth rate in all its bodies combined, with most of the staff being highly educated (usually possessing a master's degree).
This is a growth in the number of staff?
...Both of these factors resulted in a signal of competence to other countries in the world, which results in a higher degree of trust in the EU's dec
No, getting rid of factory farming (“fiat iustitia”) won’t increase X-risk (“pereat mundus”).
Or are you implying that resources are in competition for the two? (Perhaps weakly true)
Literally everyone knows he was the Masculine Mongoose. Superheros don’t even try to hide their identity any more.
Oops, thank you for the correction! My mistake. I still like "EA workshop" more, since attendees are thinking about their life plans and working on improving them.
Seminar is also pretty religious. I very much like "EA workshops"
In 1951, Alan Turing argued that at some point computers would probably exceed the intellectual capacity of their inventors, and that “therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.” Whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on whether the machines are benevolent towards us or not. (Partial source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom )
[for policy makers]
It is a mistake to assume that AI researchers are driven by the positive consequences of their work. Geoffrey Hinton, winner of a Turing Award for his enormous contribution to deep neural networks, is not optimistic about the effects of advanced AI, or whether humans can decide what it does. In a 2015 meeting of the Royal Society, he stated that "there is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence", and that "political systems will use [AI] to terrorize people". Nevertheless, he press...
It is unclear to me if this is a good idea. Sci-hub is great, but whoever does this would face a good amount of legal risk. If EA organisations (eg American ones) are known to be funding this, they face the risk of lawsuits and reputational damage.
I think at least this post should not be publicized too widely. Maybe nobody else commented on this post for precisely this reason?
What does the WANBAM acronym (assuming it is one) stand for? Presumably Women And Non Binary... Altruism Movement?
(apologies if the question is irrelevant but I'm very curious, and I couldn't find this in the post or the website)
My impression is that it might be easy to miss some amino acid types if you're not careful (e.g. tryptophan is almost exclusively found in meat/dairy and is the only way your body can make serotonin
I am pretty confident that this particular impression is incorrect. The essential amino-acid profiles of the protein of most plant sources is very close to human requirements. See in particular Figure 14 of the WHO report on amino-acid requirements. (https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43411/WHO_TRS_935_eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, &nbs...
So, if I understand correctly, the central claim is that: if naturalism is true and we make a "Scientist AI" whose initial goal is to gain knowledge and which can change its goals, then the AI will be aligned. Is that accurate?
I think this is dangerously wrong. Even if the AI comes to gain perfect knowledge of morality for humans (either because naturalism is true, or because it reads about it on human-written books), there is no guarantee that it will then try to act as it is moral. Why does the orthogonality thesis not apply? Why would the AI not disrega...
You can get research taste by doing research at all, it doesn't have to be a PhD. You may argue that PIs have very good research taste that you can learn from. But their taste is geared towards satisfying academic incentives! It might not be good taste for what you care about. As Chris Olah points out, "Your taste is likely very influenced by your research cluster".
I don't see how this is a counterargument. Do you mean to say that, once you are on track to tenure, you can already start doing the high-impact research?
It seems to me that, if this research is too diverged from the academic incentives, then our hypothetical subject may become one of these rare cases of CS tenure-track faculty that does not get tenure.
Thank you for the write-up. I wish I had this advice, and (more crucially) kept reminding myself of it, during my PhD. As you say, academic incentives did poison my brain, and I forgot about my original reasons for entering the programme. I only realised one month ago that it had been happening slowly; my brain is likely still poisoned, but I'm working on it.
I'm curious about your theory of change, if you have time to briefly write about it. You wrote that
...addressing these risks goes substantially through EAs taking on a lot more object level work— founding
I think even among such selected crowd, Anita would stand out like a bright star. The average top-university PhD student doesn't end up holding a top faculty job. (This may seem elitist, but it is important: becoming a trainer of mediocre PhD students is likely not more effective than non-profit work). A first-author Nature paper in undergrad (!) is quite rare too.
Good insight, thank you for writing this post! I agree with it. Now that you point it out, I find striking how knowlege has compounded, even more impressively than money.
I would like to add another contestant: influence, within or out of mainstream institutions. As a movement, social capital and influence on other people (especially politicians) could prove very useful to be able to have a large impact when the time is right. I'm thinking especially of the Mont Pelerin society: how they spread in economics academia by convincing people and placing pe...
That's one way to see it, but I thought that ideally you're supposed to keep considering all the possible "interventions" you can personally do to help moral patients. That is, if the most effective cause that matches your skills (and is neglected, etc etc) changes, you're supposed to switch.
In practice that does not happen much, because skills and experience in one area are most useful in the same area, and because re-thinking your career constantly is tiring and even depressing; but it could be that way.
If it was that way, people who have decided on their cause area (for the next say, 5 years) should still call themselves EAs.
I was scared when seeing the title. Then I read a little bit more:
I already thought that was the case. It's really sad, but at least it's not another massive source of suffering to add to my list. Thank you for substantiating this with a calculation!