I'm a researcher at London School of Economics and Political Science, working in the intersection of moral psychology and philosophy.
Yes. The Life You Can Save and Doing Good Better are pretty old. I think it's natural to write new content to clarify what EA is about.
"Co-writing with Julia would be better, but I suspect it wouldn't go well. While we do have compatible views, we have very different writing styles, and I understand taking on projects like this is often hard on relationships."
Perhaps there are ways of addressing this. For instance, you could write separate chapters, or parts; or have some kind of dialogue between the two of you. The idea would be that each person owns part of the book. I'm unsure about the details, but maybe you could find a solution.
Do you mean EAGx Berkeley 2022 or EA Global: Bay Area 2023?
Informed speculation might ... confuse people, since there's already plenty of work people call "AI forecasting" that looks similar to what I'm talking about.
Yes, I think using the term "forecasting" for what you do is established usage - it's effectively a technical term. Calling it "informed speculation about AI" in the title would not be helpful, in my view.
Great post, btw.
I find some of the comments here a bit implausible and unrealistic.
What people write online will often affect their reputation, positively or negatively. It may not necessarily mean they, e.g. have no chance of getting an EA job, but there are many other reputational consequences.
I also don't think that updating one's views of someone based on what they write on the EA Forum is necessarily always wrong (even though there are no doubt many updates that are unfair or unwarranted).
Hm, Rohin has some caveats elaborating on his claim.
(Not literally so -- you can construct scenarios like "only investors expect AGI while others don't" where most people don't expect AGI but the market does expect AGI -- but these seem like edge cases that clearly don't apply to reality.)
Unless they were edited in after these comments were written (which doesn't seem to be the case afaict) it seems you should have taken those caveats into account instead of just critiquing the uncaveated claim.
Fwiw I think this is good advice.
If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.
This discussion seems a bit of a side-track to your main point. These are just examples to illustrate that intuition is often wrong - you're not focused on the minimum wage per se. Potentially it could have been better if you had chosen more uncontroversial examples to avoid these kinds of discussions.
Fwiw I think it would have been good to explain technical terminology to a greater extent - e.g. TAI (transformative artificial intelligence), LLM (large language model), transformers, etc.
It says in the introduction:
I expect some readers to think that the post sounds wild and crazy but that doesn’t mean its content couldn’t be true.
Thus, the article seems in part directed to readers who are not familiar with the latest discussions about AI - and those readers presumably would benefit from technical concepts being explained when introduced.
Yes, I think that him, e.g. being interviewed by 80K didn't make much of a difference. I think that EA's reputation would inevitably be tied to his to an extent given how much money they donated and the context in which that occurred. People often overrate how much you can influence perceptions by framing things differently.