All of timfarkas's Comments + Replies

The event being a disaster doesn't match my experience of myself attending and talking to other attendees who - on the contrary - all seemed to find it very valuable, too. Also, given the circumstances, the venue swap seemed to have been professionally handled IMO.

data point: I attended, and while I'm glad I did I felt misled by the promotional material. I know of at least two other people who felt the same, and attributed some of the blame to EA as a whole rather than the organizers. 

I like this a lot, the world is an absurd place, and consciously realizing this once in a while can be very soothing, freeing, and strangely motivating!
I've found the books by Kurt Vonnegut, especially Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle supremely effective at reminding me of the glorious absurdity of civilization and the human experience and I try to re-read them semi-regularly for this reason. Big recommendation to anyone who wants to try a taste of realizing absurdity as it is described in this post but doesn't find it natural/easy to really viscerally see the world like that.

I strongly agree with this post.

Thinking consequentially, in terms of expected value and utility functions, will make you tend to focus on the first-order consequences of your actions and lead to a blind-spot for things that are fuzzy and not easily quantifiable, e.g. having loyal friends or being considered a trustworthy person. 

I think that especially in the realm of human relationships the value of virtues such as trust, honesty, loyalty, honor is tremendous - even if these virtues may often imply actions with first-order consequences tha... (read more)

Thanks for your comment, very interesting!

I do not agree that UOM is necessarily non-naturalist in essence, it might very well be that some natural property of the world turns out to be synonymous with good/meaningful/right/UOM. I am currently agnostic in regards to this. (I might be misunderstanding the terminology, though.)

>Without knowing anything about the concept's content and without understanding the success criteria for having found the right content, is there a way for the concept to have a well-specified meaning (instead of being a pointer to ... (read more)

4
Lukas_Gloor
2y
Views that say "we don't know the content of good/meaningful/right but it's what's important nonetheless" are usually non-naturalist because of the open-question argument: For any naturalist property we might identify as synonymous with good/meaningful/right, one can ask "Did we really identify the right property?" Moral naturalists would answer: "That's a superfluous question. We've already determined that the property in question is relevant to things we care about in ways xyz. That's what we mean when we use moral terminology." By contrast, non-naturalists believe that the open question argument has a point. I'd say the same intuition that drives the open question argument against moral naturalism seems to be a core intuition behind your post. The intuition says that the concepts "good/meaningful/right" have a well-specified and action-relevant meaning even though we're clueless about it and can't describe the success criteria for having found the answer. (Some non-naturalists might say is that good/meaningful/right may turn out to be co-extensional with some natural property, but not synonymous. This feels a bit like trying to have the cake and eat it; I'm confused about how to interpret that sort of talk. I can't think up a good story of how we could come into the epistemic position of understanding that non-naturalist moral concepts are co-extensional with specific naturalist concepts while maintaining that "things could have been otherwise.") I don't think these distinctions are inherently particularly important, but it's useful to think about whether your brand of moral realism is more likely to fail because of (1) "accommodation charges" ("queerness") or due to (2) expert moral disagreement / not being able to compellingly demonstrate that a specific natural property is unambiguously the thing everyone (who's altruistic?) ought to orient their lives towards. (I'd have thought that 2 is more typically associated with moral naturalism, but there seem to b

Hi Kat, thanks so much for your post, that's a lot of food for thought! Do you have any examples that you're thinking of when writing about crucial considerations, evidence, social/psychological factors? I'd love to hear more about the specific cases where these were so important. :)

A very small fraction of MDs are admitted to joint MD-PhDs. [...] in many other degrees a similar fraction of students would be publishing papers with supervisors. And the PhD that a medic does will not necessarily be as relevant as those of a computer scientist. <

It being a small fraction doesn't make it less viable for an EA approach to studying med school. Every EA approach to uni will incorporate some tight admission rate.. It might not be relevant for AI safety but it will be super relevant for e. g. neartermist EAs or EAs that don't rank AI ris... (read more)

Hi Ryan, thank you for your comment!

Great to hear that you agree with most of the post (two out of its three main points), let me focus on the disagreements regarding the impact potential of choosing to go to med school:

As far as I can see, you raise three general points of disagreement. (do let me know if you don't feel like I represented your points well)

  1. Disagreements based on personal experiences with studying medicine in Australia
  2. Disagreements regarding the value/transferability of knowledge taught in med school for high impact work
  3. Disagreements regard
... (read more)
6
RyanCarey
2y
Just to rebut a few points there. On (1) credentials/electives/workload: * A very small fraction of MDs are admitted to joint MD-PhDs. A medical degree is the only one that can come with optional extras - in many other degrees a similar fraction of students would be publishing papers with supervisors. And the PhD that a medic does will not necessarily be as relevant as those of a computer scientist. Basically, it seems like a way of avoiding an apples-with-apples comparison. * 15%-elective is terribly little. * Note that the workload may skyrocket in the clinical years Regarding (2) transferability: I believe you're overthinking it. From a zoomed out view, medical classes are approximately useless, and this talk of a specialised class becoming useful by being "embedded in a translational framework" is basically waffle. You understate the case for the usefulness of useful subjects. If I'd studied computer science for undergrad, I could've got where I am now 5+ years earlier. Even dropping out of medical school could have accelerated things. In such a scenario, I could've been a somewhat more credible applicant for things like top professor positions than is currently the case. (Of course, skill is the main thing, but getting promptly educated, and building a stellar CV at a young age does help, vs studying irrelevant subjects). Regarding (3) funding What kind of evidence would make you update your prior? Many funders say they are willing to fund any person doing excellent longtermist work, and many orgs are continually growing and hiring. To take one extreme example, $50k fellowships are being given out to interested teenagers. It's a movement that's >10 years old, with its funding-base growing double-digits per year. If you're smart enough to get into a German medical degree, and dedicated, then it should be possible to do excellent work...

Thanks for creating the event Toni, looking forward to seeing you all! :)

Great, congratulations on the high agency and the great success so far!
I like this a lot and I know from experience that other national groups are dealing with similar questions of balancing precaution/quality over proactiveness/quantity when discussing meta community building strategies!  (and currently balancing more on the precautionary side, e.g. High Impact Medicine Germany, EA Germany)
What do you think were the greatest risks of this fast approach and what did you do to proactively mitigate them?  

3
Amarins
2y
Hey Tim :) Yeah good question! I don't really see that many risks with a proactive approach, because right now, anyone can decide to start a group, and with this approach there is at least some form of quality control (first from EA Netherlands and then from UGAP). The biggest risk I currently see is value drift if the groups bring on too many new members/co-organizers too quickly, as well as the risk of the groups becoming too homogeneous because they used a somewhat similar approach to get started (intro events -> 4-week fellowship). What are your thoughts?

+1 für Zukunftsschutz, da sehr treffend und relativ kurz, dadurch wahrscheinlich für die breitere Öffentlichkeit weniger abschreckend als andere Wortmonster in diesem Thread; positiv konnotiert durch Nähe zu Naturschutz!

Thanks for your comment!
Fascinating, haven't heard of them thus far, I will look into their work!
Yes, I agree. I believe that past successes with cause prioritization and forecasting could lead to some overconfidence in regard to competence at discovering unknown cause areas: It will be important to keep up the cause-neutrality, especially in regards to the unknown!

Thanks for your comment! Yes I am not sure about this factor myself, it is not based on a comprehensive review of all EA efforts on global resilience relative to total efforts. 

Checking OpenPhil's Grant Database just now was not as conclusive as I'd hoped as grant categories such as 'Global Catastrophic Risks' or 'Global Health & Development' leave open whether these are spent on generalist resilience or specialist efforts. 

I love the idea , sign me up! Are you planning to also publish this in a printed form? I would be interested in ordering this as a haptic copy as well - if just for the feel of it.

5
Clara Collier
2y
Yes, the magazine will be both print and online.

I was one of the people that got to meet Ben at the Conference! I just wanted to independently verify that it was a great conversation and that it brought great value. :) 
Love the statistics here and the ESH mission generally, all the best and hopefully see you soon at the next conference! 

2
Ben Williamson
2y
Cheers! Really enjoyed chatting and hopefully see you in London!

Great points, thanks!
I think the well-being enhancements you describe definitely fit this post's definition of mind enhancement and could in many ways also affect 'Benevolence, Intelligence, Power' (especially 'Power'). This means that in this regard most of the post's considerations would equally apply to well-being enhancements too.

However, the aspects I list mostly focus on the instrumental implications of mind enhancements, i.e. how they could increase/decrease effective-altruist impact done by certain actors/society. As the enhancements you ... (read more)

Psychedelics could be a tool for enhancing 'benevolence' in a mind enhancement context.. (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FvZmZdqHNofJyw4Xv/mind-enhancement-a-high-impact-high-neglect-cause-area) Also, there is quite a bit of literature on moral enhancement, some of it focusing on psychedelics. I am planning on writing a cause area profile examining Importance, Neglectedness and Tractability of moral enhancement soon. Would be happy to collaborate/chat!

1
Question Mark
2y
There's also the psychedelics in problem-solving experiment. The experiment involved having groups engineers solve engineering problems while on psychedelics in order to see if the psychedelics would enhance their performance. 

Important point! I think a healthy lifestyle including optimal sleep, exercise, diet and sufficient recreational/social time are most probably the most important things you can do to reach optimal baseline for possible further mind enhancement. This has the nice effect of also reducing risk for almost all mental diseases. It would be exciting to know if certain MEIs further lower the risk of mental disease, but AFAIK there are already a few examples of this, e.g. certain substances having neuroprotective effects or language learning possibly postponing onset of dementia by a few years!