All of Adrià Garriga Alonso's Comments + Replies

I was scared when seeing the title. Then I read a little bit more:

That is, the entire good of humanity may be outweighed by the cumulative suffering of farmed animals, with total animal suffering growing faster than human wellbeing is increasing, especially in recent decades

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!

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 ... (read more)

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:

  • Take-home trial tasks / timed online tests, which typically take somewhere in the region of 2-8 hours and are designed to be doable on a weekend or otherwise without work disruption.
  • Short (usually 1-3-day) work trials prior to receiving a job offer. This is what I usually think of as being referred to by the term "work trial". While it's technically true that these "interruption of regula
... (read more)
5
Yonatan Cale
7mo
I agree that work trials are a different category - and seem ok to me. It's not an abuse of power dynamics or anything like that. If you demand work trials (or various other things) - you will get less candidates, but it's ok, it's a tradeoff you as an employer can chose to do when nobody is dependent on you, people can just chose not to apply. No? @Rockwell    P.S I sometimes try helping orgs with hiring so I'm very interested in noticing if I'm wrong here

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... (read more)

1
ClimateDoc
1y
Thanks Adria. Are there good resources on investing in learning in the different cause areas, and how it compares to donating to do direct work?

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

... (read more)
1
Yadav
1y
Thanks for engaging with this post, Adrià! Yup, it's the growth in staff.  I suspect it isn't the number of staff but rather how highly elite and educated the EU body is. Other countries seem to trust their decisions on this ground.

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)

2
Ramiro
1y
Actually, I was just reminding that [spoiler alert] Jalaketu was willing to destroy the world in order to destroy Hell. But he eventually compromised, causing only nuclear war and killing his kids to go to Hell and destroy it.

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"

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9
Pablo
2y
I think you get that vibe because, in Spanish, the word seminario can mean both seminar ("an occasion in which a group of people meet to study and discuss something") and seminary ("a college for training people to become priests").
3
Charles He
2y
I have never heard of "seminar" having a lot of religious overtones (but I'm in North America).  (Speaking from a North American perspective) "seminar" has some negative properties if you’re trying to describe a meeting where a lot of value comes from interactions between participants: * It gives connotations of teaching and being "didactive" (getting knowledge instructed to you by an authority). * In North America, there are also unlikeable hucksters that call things "seminars" (so just borrowing the name is bad if it’s not genuinely a lecture or instruction, there can be sort of an “uncanny valley” of “bad vibes”)  
3[anonymous]2y
I have flown "seminar" by many people without religious perception. Do you think that you have this perception because of the Spanish seminario ?

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... (read more)

This seems better than having to make an entirely new dating site.

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)

3
MaxRa
3y
It's Women and Non-Binary Altruism Mentorship . I also couldn't find it on the website but googling did it. 

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

2
Michele Campolo
3y
What you wrote about the central claim is more or less correct: I actually made only an existential claim about a single aligned agent, because the description I gave is sketchy and really far from the more precise algorithmic level of description. This single agent probably belongs to a class of other aligned agents, but it seems difficult to guess how large this class is. That is also why I have not given a guarantee that all agents of a certain kind will be aligned. Regarding the orthogonality thesis, you might find 1.2 in Bostrom's 2012 paper interesting. He writes that objective and intrinsically motivating moral facts need not undermine the orthogonality thesis, since he is using the term "intelligence" as "instrumental rationality". I add that there is also no guarantee that the orthogonality thesis is correct :) About psychopaths and metaethics, I haven't spent a lot of time on that area of research. Like other empirical evidence, it doesn't seem easy to interpret.

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".

9
eca
3y
Strong +1 to this. I think I have observed people who have really good academic research taste but really bad EA research taste

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

... (read more)
2
eca
3y
Appreciate your comment! I probably won't be able to give my whole theory of change in a comment :P but if I were to say a silly version of it, it might look like: "Just do the thing" So, what are the constituent parts of making scientific progress? Off the cuff, maybe something like: 1. You need to know what questions are worth asking / problems are worth solving 2. You need to know how to decompose these questions in sub-questions iteratively until a subset are answerable from the state of current knowledge 3. You need to have good research project management skills, to figure out what order it makes sense to tackle these sub-questions and most quickly make progress toward the goal which is where all the impact is 4. You need people to have smart ideas to guess the answers to sub-questions and generate hypotheses 5. You need people to do or build things, like run experiments, code, or fab physical objects 6. You need operations and logistics to turn money into materials and people, and to coordinate the materials and people 7. You need managers to foster productive environments and maintain healthy relationships 8. You need advisors to hold you accountable to the actual goal 9. You often need feedback loops with the actual goal, in case you've decomposed the problem incorrectly or something else in the system has gone awry. 10. You need money I'm making this up, but do you see what I mean? Then my advice would be to figure out which subset of these are so constraining that you can't start the business of doing the thing, and to solve those constraints e.g. by cultivating instrumental resources like research ability. Otherwise, set yourself up with the set of 1-10 which maximize your likelihood of succeeding at the thing, and start doing the thing. Figure the rest out as you go. It's totally conceivable that an academic lab is the best place available to you. But I would want you to come to that conclusion after having thought hard about it,

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... (read more)

5
nora
3y
I agree something about influence is important. As a counterpoint, I think many manifestations of "having influence" don't store well (e.g. the fact that at a given time, a relatively large number of EAs have an "influential role" (whatever that means exactly) is only weakly related to how many EAs will have an influential role in t+1 (say a generation later).   Wrt accumulation, influence also seems less straightforward to grow when you compare it to e.g. money (and to a lesser extent to knowledge) which, thanks to interest rates, accumulates at a certain rate basically for free (without you having to do anything) and fairly robustly. I'm not saying that influence is clearly a worse investment than money when it comes to future impact potenital, but that money is a pretty good and stable baseline that might not be as easy to beat as one might think at first sight. Also I think approaches of using "influence" to store and accumulate impact potential will vary a lot on these dimensions, so we'd probably want to talk about such approaches in the concrete rather than the abstract > under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism +1 and also worth flagging that e.g. Philip Trammel explicitly says so too in his work on patient longtermism (though he clarifies that this is only true for specific types of community building)

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.