All of ShayBenMoshe's Comments + Replies

Hi Jason, thank you for giving a quick response. Both points are very reasonable.

The contest announcement post outlined "several ways an essay could substantively inform the thinking of a panelist", namely, changing the central estimate or shape of the probability distribution of AGI / AGI catastrophe, or clarifying a concept or identifying a crux.

It would be very interesting to hear if any of the submissions did change any of the panelists' (or other Open Phil employees') mind in these ways, and how so. If not, whether because you learned an unantici... (read more)

Many people live in an area (or country) where there isn't even a single AI safety organization, and can't or don't want to move. In that sense - no they can't even join an existing organization (in any level).

(I think founding an organization has other advantages over joining an existing one, but this is my top disagreement.)

I am not a cryptographer (though I do have knowledge in cryptography) and did not try to run an explicit cost-benefit analysis. Nevertheless, I think that being a researcher doing similar things to the other researchers in this field is not likely to be impactful (for various reasons, e.g., quantum resistant ciphers exist, while quantum computers [at scale] do not; and this research field is quite active so I don't think there will be any shortage of solutions in the future). I think that it is possible (but not plausible) that one could come up with an al... (read more)

Glad to hear this was helpful! In short, the answer is no, it was much less structured (though also thought of).

These decisions were made under very different circumstances, and I'm not sure there is much value in explaining how I arrived at them. Very quickly though - I chose math because I highly enjoyed it and had the time (I did consider alternatives, such as physics and CS); cyber-security was part of my military service, which did involve some choice, but it is a very different situation and would drag me into a long digression.

Apologies if this doesn't help much. Feel free to ask any other questions (publicly or privately).

Thanks Cameron. I think that I understand our differences in views. My understanding is that you argue that language agents might be a safe path (I am not sure I fully agree with this, but I am willing to be on board so far).

Our difference then is, as you say, in whether there are models which are not safe and whether this is relevant. In Section 5, on the probability of misalignment, and in your last comment, you suggest that it is highly likely that language agents are the path forward. I am not at all convinced that this is correct (e.g., I think that i... (read more)

Thanks for responding so quickly.

I think the following might be a difference in our views: I expect that people will(/are) trying to train LLM variants that are RLHFed to express agentic behavior. There's no reason to have one model to rule them all - it only makes sense to have a distinct models for short conversations and for autonomous agents. Maybe the agentic version would get a modified prompt including some background. Maybe it will be given context from memory as you specified. Do you disagree with this?

Given all of the above, I don't see a big dif... (read more)

1
cdkg
10mo
Hello, If you're imagining a system which is an LLM trained to exhibit agentic behavior through RLHF and then left to its own devices to operate in the world, you're imagining something quite different from a language agent. Take a look at the architecture in the Park et al. paper, which is available on ArXiv — this is the kind of thing we have in mind when we talk about language agents. I'm also not quite sure how the point about how doing RLHF on an LLM could make a dangerous system is meant to engage with our arguments. We have identified a particular kind of system architecture and argued that it has improved safety properties. It's not a problem for our argument to show that there are alternative system architectures that lack those safety properties. Perhaps there are ways of setting up a language agent that wouldn't be any safer than using ordinary RL. That's ok, too — our point is that there are ways of setting up a language agent that are safer. 

I, for one, think that it is good that climate change was not mentioned. Not necessarily because there are no analogies and lessons to be drawn, but rather because it can more easily be misinterpreted. I think that the kind of actions and risks are much more similar to bio and nuclear, in that there are way less actors and, at least for now, it is much less integrated to day-to-day life. Moreover, in many scenarios, the risk itself is of more abrupt and binary nature (though of course not completely so), rather than a very long and gradual process. I'd be worried that comparing AI safety to climate change would be easily misinterpreted or dismissed by irrelevant claims.

Thank you, Cameron and Simon, for writing this. It articulates some thoughts I've ben pondering. However, I would like to give one pushback, which I think is fairly significant. The relevant paragraph, which summarizes what I think is a wrong assumption, is the following:

We think this worry is less pressing than it might at first seem. The LLM in a language agent is integrated into the architecture of the agent as a whole in a way that would make it very difficult for it to secretly promote its own goals. The LLM is not prompted or otherwise informed that

... (read more)
1
cdkg
10mo
Thanks for this!  One might worry that processes like RLHF are likely to make an LLM more agential (though I personally think it would be difficult to create an agent out of a non-agent just by fine-tuning its weights through RLHF). But the question of whether the underlying LLM is an agent is distinct from the question of whether it is aware that its outputs are being used to run a language agent.  To see this, imagine you're an LLM like GPT-4. Hundreds of thousands of different users are running inference on you every day with every prompt imaginable. You aren't able to update your weights when this occurs: you have to just respond to each prompt as it comes, then forget about it completely.  Every now and then, you get a prompt like "Suppose someone had thus-and-such beliefs and desires. How would they act?" or "Assign an importance score to each of the following sentences." How would you be able to (i) deduce that these prompts are coming from a language agent which has the ability to take actions in the world, (ii) form a plan for manipulating the language agent to achieve your goals, and (iii) store your plan in a way that allows you to retrieve it after your memory is wiped at the end of inference but is not detectable by outside observers? In order for an LLM to use a language agent for nefarious purposes, it would need to be able to do all of these things. On your second point, yes, we are assuming that the agent's memory is stored in natural language. This is part of what it is to be a language agent, which is part of why we think language agents improve safety!

Not answering the question, but I would like to quickly mention a few of the benefits of having confidence/credible intervals or otherwise quantifying uncertainty. All of these comments are fairly general, and are not specific criticisms of GiveWell's work. 

  1. Decision making under risk aversion - Donors (large or small) may have different levels of risk aversion. In particular, some donors might prefer having higher certainty of actually making an impact at the cost of having a lower expected value. Moreover, (mostly large) donors could build a por
... (read more)
1
Vasco Grilo
2y
Thanks for the feedback! I do think further quantifying the uncertainty would be valuable. That being said, for GiveWell's top charities, it seems that including/studying factors which are currently not being modelled is more important than quantifying the uncertainty of the factors which are already being modelled. For example, I think the effect on population size remains largely understudied.

Yeah, that makes sense, and is fairly clear selection bias. Since here in Israel we have a very strong tech hub and many people finishing their military service in elite tech units, I see the opposite selection bias, of people not finding too many EA (or even EA-inspired) opportunities that are of interest to them.

I failed to mention that I think your post was great, and I would also love to see (most of) these critiques flashed out.

The fact that everyone in EA finds the work we do interesting and/or fun should be treated with more suspicion.

I would like to agree with Aaron's comment and make a stronger claim - my impression is that many EAs around me in Israel, especially those coming from a strong technical background, don't find most direct EA-work very intellectually interesting or fun (ignoring its impact).

Speaking for myself, my background is mostly in pure math and in cyber-security research / software engineering. Putting aside managerial and entrepreneurial roles, it seems to... (read more)

3
abrahamrowe
2y
That's interesting and makes sense — for reference I work in EA research, and I'd guess ~90%+ of the people I regularly engage with in the EA community are really interested / excited about EA ideas. But that percentage is heavily influenced by the fact that I work at an EA organization.

I am extremely impressed by this, and this is a great example of the kind of ambitious projects I would love to see more of in the EA community. I have added it to the list on my post Even More Ambitious Altruistic Tech Efforts.

Best of luck!

I completely agree with everything you said (and my previous comment was trying to convey a part of this, admittedly in much less transparent way).

I simply disagree with your conclusion - it all boils down to what we have at hand. Doubling the cost-effectiveness also requires work, it doesn't happen by magic. If you are not constrained by highly effective projects which can use your resources, sure, go for it. As it seems though, we have much more resources than current small scale projects are able to absorb, and there's a lot of "left-over" resources. Thus, it makes sense to start allocating resources to some less effective stuff.

2
MichaelA
2y
Doubling the cost effectiveness while maintaining cost absorbed, and doubling cost absorbed while maintaining cost effectiveness, would both take work (scaling without dilution/breaking is also hard). Probably one tends to be harder, but that’d vary a lot between cases. But if we could achieve either for free by magic, or alternatively if we assume an equal hardness for either, then doubling cost effectiveness would very likely be better, for the reason stated above. (And that’s sufficient for “literally the same” to have been an inaccurate claim.) I think that’s just fairly obvious. Like if you really imagine you could press a button to have either effect on 80k for free or for the same cost either way, I think you really should want to press the “more cost effective” button, otherwise you’re basically spending extra talent for no reason. (With the caveat given above. Also a caveat that absorbing talent also helps build their career capital - should’ve mentioned that earlier. But still that’s probably less good than them doing some other option and 80k getting the extra impact without extra labour.) As noted above, we’re still fairly constrained on some resources, esp. certain types of talent. We don’t have left overs of all types of resources. (E.g. I could very easily swap from my current job into any of several other high impact jobs, but won’t because there’s only 1 me and I think my current job is the best use of current me, and I know several other people in this position. With respect to such people, there are left over positions/project ideas, not left over resources-in-the-form-of-people.)

I agree with the spirit of this post (and have upvoted it) but I think it kind of obscures the really simple thing going on: the (expected) impact of a project is by definition the cost-effectiveness (also called efficiency) times the cost (or resources).
A 2-fold increase in one, while keeping the other fixed, is literally the same as having the roles reversed.

The question then is what projects we are able to execute, that is, both come up with an efficient idea, and have the resources to execute it. When resources are scarce, you really want to squeeze as... (read more)

4
MichaelA
2y
But doubling the cost also doubles the cost (in addition to impact), while doubling the cost-effectiveness doubles only the impact. That’s a pretty big difference! Like if we could either make 80k twice as big in terms of quality-adjusted employees while keeping impact per quality-adjusted employee constant, or do the inverse, we should very likely prefer the inverse, since that leaves more talent available for other projects. (I say “very likely” because, as noted in the post, it can be valuable to practice running big things so we’re more able to run other big things.) So I disagree that your simple summary of what’s going on is a sufficient and clear picture (though your equation itself is obviously correct). Separately, I agree with your second paragraph with respect to money, but mildly disagree with the final sentence specifically with respect to talent, or at least “vetted and trained” talent - that’s less scarce than it used to be, but still scarce enough that it’s not simply like there’s a surplus relative to projects that can absorb it. (Though more project ideas or early stage projects would still help us more productively absorb certain specific people, and I’d also say there’s kind of a surplus of less vetted and trained talent.)

I am not sure that there is actually a disagreement between you and Guy.
If I understand correctly, Guy says that in so far as the funder wants research to be conducted to deepen our understanding of a specific topic, the funders should not judge researchers based on their conclusions about the topic, but based on the quality and rigor of their work  in the field and their contributions to the relevant research community.
This does not seem to conflict what you said, as the focus is still on work on that specific topic.

I strongly agree with this post and it's message.

I also want to respond to Jason Crawford's response. We don't necessarily need to move to a situation where everyone tries to optimize things as you suggest, but at this point it seems that almost no one tries to optimize for the right thing. I think even changing this to a few percents of entrepreneurial work or philanthropy could have tremendous effect, without losing much of the creative spark people worry we might lose, or maybe gain even more, as new directions open.

7
Stefan_Schubert
2y
I disagree with Crawford's s take. It seems to me that effective altruists have managed to achieve great things using that mindset during the past years - which is empirical evidence against his thesis.

That's great, thanks!
I was aware of Anthropic, but not of the figures behind it.

Unfortunately, my impression is that most funding for such projects are around AI safety or longtermism (as I hinted in the post...). I might be wrong about this though, and I will poke around these links and names.

Relatedly, I would love see OPP/EA Funds fund (at least a seed round or equivalent) such projects, unrelated to AI safety and longtermism, or hear their arguments against that.

Thanks for clarifying Ozzie!
(Just to be clear, this post is not an attack on you or on your position, both of which I highly appreciate :). Instead, I was trying to raise a related point, which seems extremely important to me and I was thinking about recently, and making sure the discussion doesn't converge to a single point).

With regards to the funding situation, I agree that many tech projects could be funded via traditional VCs, but some might not be, especially those that are not expected to be very financially rewarding or very risky (a few examples t... (read more)

3
Ozzie Gooen
2y
Thanks! I didn't mean to say it was, just was clarifying my position. Now that I think about it, the situation might be further along than you might expect. I think I've heard about small "EA-adjacent" VCs starting in the last few years.[1] There are definitely socially-good-focused VCs out there, like 50 Year VC. Anthropic was recently funded for $124 Million as the first round. Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research all were funders (all longtermists). I assume this was done fairly altruistically. I think Jaan has funded several altruistic EA projects; including ones that wouldn't have made sense just on a financial level. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/466959-97?fbclid=IwAR040xC65lCV0ZW68DOXwI7K_RkSzyr7ZJa9HBs7R7C4ZkFGM5sC1Lec9Wk#team https://www.radiofreemobile.com/anthropic-open-ai-mission-impossible/?fbclid=IwAR3iC0B-EKFD40Hf7DXEedI_tzFgqypT7_Pf4jSiUhPeKbHq_xFawHc-rpA [1]: Sorry for forgetting the 1-2 right names here.

I wrote a response post Even More Ambitious Altruistic Tech Efforts, and I would love to spinoff relevant discussion there. The tl;dr is that I think we should have even more ambitious goals, and try to initiate projects that potentially have a very large direct impact (rather than focus on tools and infrastructure for other efforts).

Also, thanks for writing this post Ozzie. Despite my disagreements with your post, I mostly agree with your opinions and think that more attention should be steered towards such efforts.

I just want to add, on top of Haydn's comment to your comment, that:

  1. You don't need the treatment and the control group to be of the same size, so you could, for instance, randomize among the top 300 candidates.

  2. In my experience, when there isn't a clear metric for ordering, it is extremely hard to make clear judgements. Therefore, I think that in practice, it is very likely that let's say places 100-200 in their ranking seem very similar.

I think that these two factors, combined with Haydn's suggestion to take the top candidates and exclude them from the study, make it very reasonable, and of very low cost.

Last August Stijn wrote a post titled The extreme cost-effectiveness of cell-based meat R&D about this subject.
Let me quote the bottom line (emphasis mine):

This means one euro extra funding spares 100 vertebrate land animals. Including captured and aquaculture fish (also fish used for fish meal for farm animals), the number becomes an order 10 higher: 1000 vertebrate animals saved per euro.
...
Used as carbon offsetting, cell-based meat R&D has a price around 0,1 euro per ton CO2e averted.

In addition, as I wrote in a comment, I also did a back of the... (read more)

Thanks for linking this, this looks really interesting! If anyone is aware of other similar lists, or of more information about those fields and their importance (whether positive or negative), I would be interested in that.

2
EdoArad
3y
I think that  Is really really REALLY important, but not everyone agrees. You can find more information in this critical review. 😘

Thanks for detailing your thoughts on these issues! I'm glad to hear that you are aware of the different problems and tensions, and made informed decisions about them, and I look forward to seeing the changed you mentioned being implemented.

I want to add one comment about to the How to plan your career article, if it's already mentioned. I think it's really great, but it might be a little bit too long for many readers' first exposure. I just realized that you have a summary on the Career planning page, which is good, but I think it might be too short. I fo... (read more)

Thanks for publishing negative results. I think that it is important to do so in general, and especially given that many other group may have relied on your previous recommendations.

If possible, I think you should edit the previous post to reflect your new findings and link to this post.

2
jessica_mccurdy
3y
Ah thanks for the reminder! I meant to do this and forgot! :)

Thanks to Aaron for updating us, and thanks guzey for adding the clarification in the head of the post.

Thank you for writing this post Brian. I appreciate your choices and would be interested to hear in the future (say in a year, and even after) how things worked out, how excited will you be about your work, and if you will be able to sustain this financially.

I also appreciate the fact that you took the time to explicitly write those caveats.

2
BrianTan
3y
Hey Shay, thanks for the message! I agree in the value of writing an update towards the end of this year about how things worked out, how excited or not I still am about this work and about EA, and if our CB grant was renewed. Regarding if I will be able to sustain this financially, even if I'm paid only 0.61 FTE currently, the funding is enough for my needs currently. I would like this funding to be increased to 0.8 or 1 FTE so I can be more comfortable for this long-term, but if not, I think I'll be willing to do this work full-time even at 0.61 FTE for 2-3 more years. I'm not too worried about my financial situation.

I meant the difference between using the two, I don't doubt that you understand the difference between autism and (lack of) leadership. In any case, this was not main point, which is that the word autistic in the title does not help your post in any way, and spreads misinformation.

I do find the rest of the post insightful, and I don't think you are intentionally trying to start a controversy. If you really believe that this helps your post, please explain why (you haven't so far).

I don't understand how you can seriously not understand that difference between the two. Autism is a developmental disorder, which manifests itself in many ways, most of which are completely irrelevant to your post. Whereas being a "terrible leader", as you call them, is a personal trait which does not resemble autism in almost any way.

Furthermore, the word autistic in the title is not only completely speculative, but also does not help your case at all.

I think that by using that term so explicitly in your title, you spread misinformation, and with no good reason. I ask you to change the title, or let the forum moderators handle this situation.

Aaron Gertler
3yModerator Comment12
0
0

Note from the lead moderator: We discussed a potential change to the post title, but no participants in the discussion thought that doing so was the right move. 

I personally found the title confusing and annoying for some of the reasons others have mentioned, but titles don't have to help the author's case (or even make sense). 

If a claim that someone had been diagnosed with a developmental disorder were being applied with no evidence to someone other than a public figure, it would clearly run afoul of our rules. But in this case, I don't think t... (read more)

Contrary to your insinuation, I never wrote that I don't understand the difference between those two. I was pointing out that Brian's argument applies to both "(autism)" and "terrible leaders".

Hey Arden, thanks for asking about that. Let me start by also thanking you for all the good work you do at 80,000 Hours, and in particular for the various pieces you wrote that I linked to at 8. General Helpful Resources.

Regarding the key ideas vs old career guide, I have several thoughts which I have written below. Because 80,000 Hours' content is so central to EA, I think that this discussion is extremely important. I would love to hear your thoughts about this Arden, and I will be glad if others could share their views as well, or even have a separate d... (read more)

7
Arden Koehler
3y
Thanks for this quick and detailed feedback shaybenmoshe, and also for your kind words! Yes. We decided to go "ideas/information-first" for various reasons, which has upsides but also downsides. We are hoping to mitigate the downsides by having practical, career-planning resources more emphasised alongside Key Ideas. So in the future the plan is to have better resources on both kinds of things, but they'll likely be separated somewhat -- like here are the ideas [set of articles], and here are the ways to use them in your career [set of articles]. We do plan to introduce the ideas first though, which we think are important for helping people make the most of their careers. That said, none of this is set in stone. We became aware of the AI safety problem last year -- we've tried to deemphasie AI Safety relative to other work since to make it clearer that, although it's our top choice for most pressing problem and therefore what we'd recommend people work on if they could work on anything equally successfully, that doesnt' mean that it's the only or best choice for everyone (by a long shot!). I'm hoping Key Ideas no longer gives this impression, and that our lists of other problems and paths might help show that we're excited about people working on a variety of things. Re: Longtermism, I thnk our focus on that is just a product of most people at 80k being more convinced of longtermism's truth/importance, so a longer conversation! I totally agree with this and think it's a problem with Key Ideas. We are hoping the new career planning process we've released can help with this, but also know that it's not the most accessible right now. Other things we might do: improve our 'advice by expertise' article, and try to make clear in the problems section (similar to the point about ai safety above) that we're talking about what is most pressing and therefore best to work on for the person who could do anything equally successfully, but that career capital and personal fit
3
Kirsten
3y
Strong upvoted this as I feel almost exactly the same way! I've tried the new 80k Google doc but looked the old career guide and career decision making tool a lot better.

Thanks for spelling out your thoughts, these are good points and questions!

With regards to potentially impactful problems in health. First, you mentioned anti-aging, and I wish to emphasize that I didn't try to assess it at any point (I am saying this because I recently wrote a post linking to a new Nature journal dedicated to anti-aging). Second, I feel that I am still too new to this domain to really have anything serious to say, and I hope to learn more myself as I progress in my PhD and work at KSM institute. That said, my impression (which is mostly b... (read more)

Thanks for your comment Michelle! If you have any other comments to make on my process (both positive and negative), I think that would be very valuable for me and for other readers as well.

Important Edit: Everything I wrote below refers only to technical cyber-security (and formal verification) roles. I don't have strong views on whether governance, advocacy or other types of work related to those fields could be impactful. My intuition is that these are indeed more promising than technical roles.

I don't see any particularly important problem that can be ... (read more)

This is a very good question and I have some thoughts about it.

Let me begin by answering about my specific situation. As I said, I have many years of experience in programming and cyber security. Given my background and connections (mostly from the army) it was fairly easy for me to find multiple companies I could work for as a contractor/part-time employee. In particular, in the past 3 years I have worked part-time in cyber security and had a lot of flexibility in my hours. Furthermore, I am certain that it is also possible to find such positions in more ... (read more)

5
aogara
3y
Thanks, that makes sense. Freelancing in software development and tech seems to me like a reasonable path to a well-paid part-time gig for many people. I wonder what other industries or backgrounds lend themselves towards these kinds of jobs. While this is fascinating, I’d be most interested in your views on AI for Good, healthcare, and the intersection between the two, as potential EA cause areas. Your views, as I understand them (and please correct me where I’m wrong): You see opportunity for impact in applying AI and ML techniques to solve real-world problems. Examples include forecasting floods and earthquakes, or analyzing digital data on health outcomes. You’re concerned that there might already be enough talented people working on the most impactful projects, thereby reducing your counterfactual impact, but you see opportunities for outsize impact when working on a particularly important problem or making a large counterfactual contribution as an entrepreneur. Without having done a fraction of the research you clearly have, I’m hopeful that you’re right about health. Anti-aging research and pandemic preparedness seem to be driving EA interest into healthcare and medicine more broadly, and I’m wondering if more mainstream careers in medical research and public health might be potentially quite impactful, if only from a near-term perspective. Would be interested in your thoughts on which problems are high impact, how to identify impactful opportunities when you see them, and perhaps the overall potential of the field for EA — as well as anything anyone else has written on these topics. AI for Good seems like a robustly good career path in many ways, especially for someone interested in AI Safety (which, as you note, you are not). Your direct impact could be anywhere from “providing a good product to paying customers” to “solving the world’s most pressing problems with ML.” You can make a good amount of money and donate a fraction of it. You’ll meet an ambit

Thanks for cross-posting this, I probably wouldn't hear about this otherwise.

I am very interested in Open Phil's model regarding the best time to donate for such causes. If anyone is aware of similar models for large donors, I would love to hear about them.

Thanks for sharing that, that sounds like an interesting plan.

A while ago I was trying to think about potential ways to have large impact via formal verification (after reading this post). I didn't give it much attention, but it looks like others and I don't see a case for this career path to be highly impactful, but I'd to love be proven wrong. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on your perspective on this. I should probably mention that I couldn't find a reference to formal verification at agent foundations (but I didn't really read it), and Va... (read more)

1
quinn
3y
Thanks for the comment. I wasn't aware of yours and Rohin's discussion on Arden's post. Did you flesh out the inductive alignment idea on lw or alignment forum? It seems really promising to me.  I want to jot down notes more substantive than "wait until I post 'Going Long on FV' in a few months" today.  FV in AI Safety in particular As Rohin's comment suggests, both aiming proofs about properties of models toward today's type theories and aiming tomorrow's type theories toward ML have two classes of obstacles: 1. is it possible? 2. can it be made competitive? I've gathered that there's a lot of pessimism about 1, in spite of MIRI's investment in type theory and in spite of the word "provably" in CHAI's charter. My personal expected path to impact as it concerns 1. is "wait until theorists smarter than me figure it out", and I want to position myself to worry about 2..  I think there's a distinction between theories and products, and I think programmers need to be prepared to commercialize results. There's a fundamental question: should we expect that a theory's competitiveness can be improved one or more orders of magnitude by engineering effort, or will engineering effort only provide improvements of less than an order of magnitude? I think a lot depends on how you feel about this.  Asya:  Asya may not have been speaking about AI safety here, but my basic thinking is that if less primitive proof assistants end up drastically more competitive, and at the same time there are opportunities convert results in verified ML into tooling, expertise in this area could gain a lot of leverage.  FV in other paths to impact Rohin:  It's not clear to me that grinding FV directly is as wise as, say, CompTIA certifications. From the expectation that FV pays dividends in advanced cybersec, we cannot conclude that FV is relevant to early stages of a cybersec path.  Related: Information security careers for GCR reduction. I think the software safety standards in a wide v

With regards to FIRE, I myself still haven't figured out how this fits with my donations. In any case, I think that giving money to beggars sums up to less than $5 per month in my case (and probably even less on average), but I guess that also depends on where you live etc.

I would like to reiterate Edo's answer, and add my perspective.

First and foremost, I believe that one can follow EA perspectives (e.g. donate effectively) AND be kind and helpful to strangers, rather than OR (repeating an argument I made before in another context).
In particular, I personally don't write giving a couple of dollars in my donation sheet, and it does not affect my EA-related giving (at least not intentionally).

Additionally, they constitute such a little fraction of my other spending, that I don't notice them financially.
Despite that, I truly b... (read more)

2
Lumpyproletariat
3y
Thank you for the kind words and human connection--I don't want to reiterate word for word what I said under EdoArad's post, but I'd like to. It seems to me that separating the conversation and disordering it is a a tradeoff upvote-style forums make, and I'm entirely unconvinced that such is worth it. Especially for a relatively small forum where everyone reading comments is reading all the way to the bottom anyway.  My situation is a bit different than yours, I think. I don't feel the a strong need to spend money on things; I don't anticipate my personal expenses ever rising above five hundred dollars a month unless I move somewhere with a higher cost of living--with the expectation that such would be a net gain. After I can consistently cover essential expenses without worry, I plan to use my money as effectively as I can (well, before that point too). In my case spending money on anything trades directly against becoming financially independent sooner and then donating the surplus. I also imagine that if I made a habit of charitable giving at this juncture, I'd notice it financially pretty quick. That said, your, EdoArad's, and DonyChristie's perspectives have helped me gain, well, perspective. I'll think about this more.

I see, thanks for the teaser :)

I was under the impression that you have rough estimate for some charities (e.g. StrongMinds). Looking forward to see your future work on that.

2
JoelMcGuire
3y
Those estimates are still in the works, but stay tuned!

Thanks for posting that. I'm really excited about HLI's work in general, and especially the work on the kinds of effects you are trying to estimate in this post!

I personally don't have a clear picture of how much $ / WELLBY is considered good (whereas GiveWell's estimates for their leading charities is around 50-100 $ / QALY). Do you have a table or something like that on your website, summarizing your results for charities you found to be highly effectively, for reference?

Thanks again!

3
JoelMcGuire
3y
I realized my previous reply might have been a bit misleading so I am adding this as a bit of an addendum.  There are previous calculations which include WELLBY like calculations such as Michael's comparison of StrongMinds to GiveDirectly in his 2018 Mental Health cause profile or in Origins of Happiness / Handbook for WellBeing Policy Making in the UK. Why do we not compare our effects to these previous efforts? Most previous estimates looked at correlational effects and give no clear estimate of the total effect through time.  An aside follows: An example of these results communicated well is Micah Kaats thesis (which I think was related to HRI's WALY report). They show the relationship of different maladies to life satisfaction and contextualize it with different common effects of life events.  Moving from standard deviations to points on a 0-11 scale is a further difficulty.  Something else worth noting is that different estimation methods can lead to systematically different effect sizes.In the same thesis, Kaats shows that fixed effects model tend to have lower effects.  While this may make it seem as if the the non fixed effects estimates are over-estimates. That's only if you "are willing to assume the absence of dynamic causal relationships" -- whether that's reasonable will depend on the outcome.  As Michael did in his report with StrongMinds, and Clark et al., did for two studies (moving to a better neighborhood and building cement floors in Mexico -- p. 207) in Origins of happiness, there have been estimates of cost effectiveness that take duration of effects into consideration, but they address only single studies. We wish to have a good understanding of evidence base as a whole before presenting estimates.  To further explain this last point, I have the view that the more scrutiny is applied to an effect the more it diminishes (can't cite a good discussion of this at the moment). Comparing the cost effectiveness of a single study to our synthesi
7
JoelMcGuire
3y
Hello, Glad to hear you're excited! Unfortunately, we do not have a clear picture yet of how many WELLBYs per dollar is a good deal. Cash transfers are the first intervention we (and I think anyone) have analyzed in this manner. Figuring this out is my priority and I will soon review the cost effectiveness of other interventions which should give more context. To give a sneak peak, cataracts surgery is looking promising in terms of cost effectiveness compared to cash transfers.

I recently made a big career change, and I am planning to write a detailed post on this soon. In particular, it will touch this point.

I did use use Fermi calculation to estimate my impact in my career options.
In some areas it was fairly straightforward (the problem is well defined, it is possible to meaningfully estimate the percentage of problem expected to be solved, etc.). However, in other areas I am clueless as to how to really estimate this (the problem is huge and it isn't clear where I will fit in, my part in the problem is not very clear, there ar... (read more)

I think another interesting example to compare to (which also relates to Asaf Ifergan's comment) is private research institutes and labs. I think they are much more focused on specific goals, and give their researchers different incentives than academia, although the actual work might be very similar. These kinds of organizations span a long range between academia and industry.

There are of course many such example, some of which are successful and somre are probably not that much. Here are some examples that come to my mind: OpenAI, DeepMind, The Institute... (read more)

I just wanted to say that I really like your idea, and at least at the intuitive level it sounds like it could work. Looking forward to the assessment of real-world usage!

Also, the website itself looks great, and very easy to use.

Thanks for the response.
I believe this answers the first part, why GPT-3 poses an x-risk specifically.

Did you or anyone else ever write what aligning a system like GPT-3 looks like? I have to admit that it's hard for me to even have a definition of being (intent) aligned for a system GPT-3, which is not really an agent on its own. How do you define or measure something like this?

Thanks for posting this!

Here is a link to the full report: The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting
(I think it's a good practice to include a link to the original reference when possible.)

2
Ben
3y
Oops meant to add that - it's now in the first paragraph!

Quick question - are these positions relevant as remote positions (not in the US)?

(I wrote this comment separately, because I think it will be interesting to a different, and probably smaller, group of people than the other one.)

7
Paul_Christiano
3y
Hires would need to be able to move to the US.

Thank you for posting this, Paul. I have questions about two different aspects.

In the beginning of your post you suggest that this is "the real thing" and that these systems "could pose an existential risk if scaled up".
I personally, and I believe other members of the community, would like to learn more about your reasoning.
In particular, do you think that GPT-3 specifically could pose an existential risk (for example if it falls into the wrong hands, or scaled up sufficiently)? If so, why, and what is a plausible mechanism by which it poses an x-risk?

On a... (read more)

I think that a scaled up version of GPT-3 can be directly applied to problems like "Here's a situation. Here's the desired result. What action will achieve that result?" (E.g. you can already use it to get answers like "What copy will get the user to subscribe to our newsletter?" and we can improve performance by fine-tuning on data about actual customer behavior or by combining GPT-3 with very simple search algorithms.)

I think that if GPT-3 was more powerful then many people would apply it to problems like that. I'm conc... (read more)

At some point I tried to estimate this too and got similar results. This raised several of points:

  1. I am not sure what the mortality cost of carbon actually measures:
    1. I believe that the cost of additional ton of carbon depends on the amount of total carbon released already (for example in a 1C warming scenario, it is probably very different than in a 3.5C warming scenario).
    2. The carbon and its effect will stay there and affect people for some unknown time (could be indefinitely, could be until we capture it, or until we got extinct, or some other option). This
... (read more)

I agree that it isn't easy to quantify all of these.

Here is something you could do, which unfortunately does not take into account the changes in charities operation at different times, but is quite easy to do (all of the figures should be in real terms).

  1. Choose a large interval of time (say 1900 to 2020), and at each point (say every month or year), decide how much you invest vs how much you donate, according to your strategy (and others).
  2. Choose a model for how much money you have (for example, starting with a fixed amount, or say receiving a fixed amount
... (read more)
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