All of Gavin's Comments + Replies
Yeah I asked em to fix this
This isn't much independent evidence I think: seems unlikely that you could become director of MIRI unless you agreed. (I know that there's a lot of internal disagreement at other levels.)
In the Q&A after this talk, Sandberg asked "What is the moral relevance of Apple laptops booting half a second slower?" (since on Parfit's simple view of aggregation, with millions of devices, this is equivalent to a massive loss of life). I always thought Parfit was being rude by ignoring the question, but your comment makes it seem more like joshing.
Synthesis: Reading is overrated in normal intellectual circles and slightly underrated among our gingered-up maximisers.
On fiction, I seem to remember Rob Wiblin saying "Fiction is a non-rational means of persuasion: beware." But I can't find the tweet.
On nonfiction, I remember my shock the first time I saw a false claim in a pop science book. They just don't check very hard. They probably check less than newspapers, famously untrustworthy. Arguably I never recovered.
In my day the philistine/maximiser move was to read textbooks, and while this mostly... (read more)
(So as not to be mystical, here's something which sketches what the Tractarian move is. But trust me, it isn't the same.)
There are nonfiction books which lose a lot in summarisation. This is almost the definition of a great book. Take Wittgenstein's Tractatus : its central rhetorical move, which is also one of its main points about metaphysics, will simply not happen unless you make an effort to read it.
The question assumes that books are just baggy vehicles for schematic bullet-point arguments. Julia Galef has a wonderful list of the many other ways books can update you.
Check this out: https://www.eaforchristians.org/
We should praise the class of worker in general but leave the individuals alone.
I'm confused about whether I should note my disagreements here or just wait for someone to write the proper versions.
So I'll just note one that I really want to see: I was unpersuaded by this
Alternative models for distributing funding are probably better and are definitely under-explored in EA.
until I saw
Grantmakers brain-drain organizations — is this good?
Alternate funding models as a solution to the grantmaking bottleneck could be great!
The criticism contest has an anonymous submission form too.
It's not anonymous, it records the name associated with your google account. (Of course you can just create a google account with a fake name, but then you can also just make an EA forum account with a fake name and post here.)
Nice work, but I wonder at the consequences. Sure, it's inevitable that forums like ours will soon be bot-ridden and will need to bring in clunky authentication features, but aren't you speeding that up?
Are you trying to spook people, or just playing, or trying to give us a tool to make writing easier? The last two of those seem not worth it to me in expectation.
Charles, consider going for that walk now if you're able to. (Maybe I'm missing it, but the rhetorical moves in this thread seem equally bad, and not very bad at that.)
Reminds me of the result in queueing theory, where (in the simplest queue model) going above ~80% utilisation of your capacity leads to massive increases in waiting time.
From memory:
As an occasional antidote to forced-march life: consider yourself as a homeostatic organism with a particular trajectory. Like a plant in a pot.
What does a plant need? Water, light, space, soil, nitrogen, pest defence, pollinators. What are the potted human equivalents? What would an environment which gave you this without striving look like? What do you need to become yourself?
(You can reshape a plant, like bonsai, but really not too much or you'll kill it or stunt it.)
[Was this title written by an inner optimiser?]
More seriously, this is a very powerful set of ideas and attitudes and I wish I had known them about 15 years earlier. (For contrast, during my school work experience I painted lines on country roads.)
You know my views about high schoolers being systematically underestimated and fully capable of greatness, so well done for bucking the trend. That said, there is such a thing as too much agency (e.g. starting a company without checking the competition or without knowing what the market fit is; e.g. starting a bi... (read more)
This could be a good submission for the criticism contest. Clean, tightly reasoned, not going in with the bottom line written.
Also a question about seniority:
I found it hard to interpret from the post and context what level of seniority the role required.
Pardon: asks that it not be your first rodeo, that you can handle founding (especially hiring and culture-setting). But we don't need VP or C-level.
More questions from offline:
How are reservists incentivized to prioritize ALERT over their other work when activated?
It's a good question. I doubt that binding contracts are the right way to do this. We will probably do peacetime stipends and emergency pay. But I suppose it's a matter of self-selection: we will be responding to the current most important thing in the world and, in this crowd, that should be enough.
After the director, what is the org most limited by?
Org strategy > org ops (existence, banking, authorisation, etc) > hiring > fundraising > wargame planning. Reservists and forecasters are fairly ready to go.
Great questions. Most of the below could be reshaped by the director:
- No physical location - director has discretion. (One cool idea we had was to enlist existing teams at EA orgs, so that they're constantly building readiness and already colocated or functionally remote.)
- Role reports to the board, currently Jan Kulveit, Vishal Maini, Ales Flidr and me but likely to need more.
- Some unvetted examples we came up with: COVID in late December 2019; Russia-Ukraine (minor investigation from December 2021, expanding to active nuclear risk forecasting by end January
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3OY4Q9y8AOjUOyIsC9NKR4?si=c10b8777ea6a4e94
ALERT (the active longtermist emergency response team) is looking for a Director to lead the project.
The role is fully funded and we've organised fiscal sponsorship from a UK registered charity. We have a longlist of reservists and interest from people at Rethink Priorities, Our World in Data, Bluedot, ALLFED, and CEA.
Some good characteristics for the job:
- Resilience. It's possible that your decisions will have major consequences, in a relatively short time.
- Ability to function well in crisis situations. Our impression is that this is a relatively stable tra
Is there a physical location or office? Whom does the role report to? What are example emergencies where reservists would be activated? What would they do when activated? Are there comparable orgs in other domains I should index to when thinking about ALERT? How many hours / week, roughly? What does it mean that the role would not be on duty most days? Is there an existing staff or would one need to be hired? When the National Guard is activated they are called away to a physical space to work with others, is it like that?
https://docdrop.org/video/58RMpLkmITg/
Thanks! I still think the translation should be posted to the EA Forum, to make this content more discoverable.
Naively, UK disarmament in 1980 would have done one of two things 1) given the Soviets under Brezhnev much more power, lengthening the cold war and producing unknown effects on reform; or 2) forced even more US nuclear deployment in European bases, forcing a response from the Soviets, and so destabilising the world. (As I say, there's a chance that it could instead have lead to a better equilibrium, but I can't see why anyone would think this was the most likely outcome.)
If the locations of your post-nuke decentralised government are known, then they can be targeted by nukes.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1185207859728076800
Seems likely to me
I don't think MIRI has tried this much; we were unusually excited about Edward Kmett.
Didn't they try this? e.g. Kmett
I'd be fine with some false positives
I want to run this at some point. Pro statistical consultants could handle many posts, and philosophy grad students many of the rest. I was thinking in terms of one review per important post here.
Riffing further:
- Academic peer review generally doesn't run code, so this is one way we could surpass them.
- Also publishing the reviews,
- and doing them within a month, rather than within a year.
TIL I learned about the Utilitarian Fandom.
(Derives from old Felicifia, and so I guess Pablo wrote a lot of it.)
Don't see why not, as long as it's not salami sliced.
See also
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kyJtzRHd6hLzfxshd/announcing-the-legal-priorities-project-writing-competition
Yeah, I agree for Berkeley. I think I was silently assuming a domain of world top 200 or something.
One better bar could be "improves taste more than 4+ years of independent work fit around some other full time job".
Couldn't find any public OP analyses on a cursory look
I'd say Michael Dickens and Sam Nolan are probably peak performance.
This is a classic, devastating methodological piece too.
The Alignment of Complex Systems Group is a new lab hosted by Charles University Prague. They work on formal theories to help with neglected AGI scenarios.
They're looking for postdocs, predocs, fellows, technical writers, research engineers, and students at MSc or PhD level. Also, critically: a project manager with research experience. They are fully funded by the SFF among others.
The principals, Jan and Tomáš, are two of my favourite researchers. This will be a wonderful place to learn an extremely important field, or to push it on.
I sympathise with this and generally think that EA should take conflicts of interest more seriously.
That said, I think this is subtly the wrong question: what we really want is, "how rational are the judges?" How often did they change their mind in response to arguments of various kinds from various places of various tones?
Can we say anything to convince you of that? Maybe.
Anyway: Most days I feel like more of a "holy shit x-risk" guy than a strong longtermist. I briefly worked in international development, was a socialist, a feminist, a vegan, an e2g, etc... (read more)
Random personal examples:
- This won the community's award for post of the decade. Its disagreement with EA feels half-fundamental; a sweeping change to implementation details and some methods.
- This was much-needed and pretty damning. About twice as long as it needed to be though.
- This old debate looks good in hindsight
- The initial patient longtermist posts shook me up a lot.
- Robbie's anons were really good
- This is on the small end of important, but still rich and additive.
- This added momentum to the great intangibles vibe shift of 2016-8
- This was influe
Your chosen method - refuting a rule with a counterexample - throws out all moral rules, since every moral theory has counterexamples. This includes common sense ethics - recall the protracted cross-cultural justification of slavery, for one upon thousands of instances. (Here construing "go with your gut dude" as a rule.)
If we were nihilists, we could sigh in relief and stop here. But we're not - so what next? Clearly something not so rigid as rules.
You're also underselling the mathematical results: as a nonconsequentialist, you will make incoherent action... (read more)
Best I can think of is looking for the announcement posts inside each of these tags
Back in my day my enemies did instrumental harm like a rational person.
I would call the cluster "AI ethics". But there's no hard cutoff, no sufficient philosophical difference: it's mostly just social clustering. Here's my short diplomatic piece about the gap.
We should do our best to resist forming explicit competing factions; as Prunkl and Whittlestone note, it's all one space. Here's a principled argument for doing this.
(Though it is hard to avoid being factional when one group are being extremely factional at you. And we don't need to think that each point in the space is equally worrying.)
I like Jon Kleinberg,... (read more)
Sounds right
The problem is, we're not an agent and so no one makes The decision to shift and so no one is noticeably responsible for acknowledging credit and blame. But it's still fair to want it.
Maybe the lesson is: "even if you don't win, you might shape the movement"
Think that changed after Aleks commented