All of Tom Gardiner 🔸's Comments + Replies

Cheers! I agree that focus, discipline, and grit are great qualities to have, even underrated, but it's probably not surprising/insightful for me to say that. 

I think military experience does a lot to build grit across the board and is very good for discipline in some situations, especially those enforced by cultural norms. I'm not convinced that being in the military inherently makes you a focused person though. At least, not away from the imminent pressure of the job. I spent 16 days in COVID quarantine as a Midshipman, and most of my peers in this situation did very little with intent. 

Have you read the Intelligence Curse, linked at the beginning of this post? It explains the case for this better than I would.

The long-running future seems like it could well be unacceptably awful. From the perspective of a battery hen, it would seem much better that it's distant ancestors were pushed out of an ecological niche before humanity domesticated them. Throwing all our effort into X-risk mitigation without really tackling S-risks in a world of increasing lock-in across domains seems deeply unwise to me. 

That was the point I had meant to convey, Aaron. Thanks for clarifying that. 

This seems like an important critique, Tobias, and I thank you for it. It was a useful readjustment to realise I wouldn't be exceptionally wealthy for doing this in either society at large or the EA community. My sense is still that even being in the 92nd percentile of the UK going into this would be really valuable. Not world-changing valuable, but life-changing for many. That everything might get solved by technology and richer people is plausible, given the challenges in predicting how the future will pan out. I see this strategy mainly as a backstop to mitigate the awfulness of the most S-risk intensive ways this could go. 

Thanks for the input, Theodore!

I agree that my chances of getting a trader role are higher than average and whoever would get the job instead is almost certainly not going to donate appreciable sums. Naturally, I would devote a very large amount of time and energy to the decision of how to give away this money. 

I'm very sceptical about my ability to become an "expert" on these questions surrounding AI. This is largely based on my belief that my most crippling flaw is a lack of curiosity but I also doubt that anyone could come up with robust prediction... (read more)

I'm sympathetic to this point and stress that my argument above only applies if one is relatively optimistic about solving alignment and relatively pessimistic about these governance/policy problems. I don't think I'm informed enough to be optimistic on alignment but I do feel very pessimistic on preventing immense wealth inequality. The amount of coordination between so many actors for this not to be the default seems unachievable to me. 

This may be available elsewhere and I accept that I might not have looked hard enough, but are there impactful, funding-constrained donation opportunities to solve these problems?

Further to this, if the primary goal is to learn about how the general public thinks about charitable giving, you could probably achieve the same result for far less than 100k. The remainder could be held in reserve and given to that cause if you really do think it's the best use of the money, or to your current best guess if you do not. It seems like there's an insight you wish to have and you've set a needlessly big pricetag on obtaining it. 

Lot of good points here. One slight critique and one suggestion to build on the above. If I seem at all confrontational in tone, please note that this is not my aim - I think you made a solid comment. 

Critique: I have a great sense of caution around the belief that "smart, young EAs", and giving them grants to think about stuff, are the best solution to something, no matter how well they understand the community. In my mind, one of the most powerful messages of the OP is the one regarding a preference for orthodox yet inexperienced people over those w... (read more)

The first point here seems very likely true. As for the second, I suspect you're mostly right but there's a little more to it. The first of the people I quote in my comment was eventually persuaded to respect my views on altruism, after discussing the philosophy surrounding it almost every night for about three months. I don't think shorter timespans could have been successful in this regard. He has not joined the EA community in any way, but kind of gets what it's about and thinks it's basically a good thing. If his first contact with the community he had... (read more)

Thank you for writing this. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree, but it seems like a case well made. 

While I do not mean to patronise, as many others will have found this, the one contribution I feel I have to make is an emphasis on how very differently people in the wider public may react to ideas/arguments that seem entirely reasonable to the typical EA. Close friends of mine, bright and educated people, have passionately defended the following positions to me in the past:
-They would rather millions die from preventable diseases than Jeff Bezos... (read more)

Agreed - Scott Alexander does this very well, as does Yudkowsky in Rationality: A-Z. Both of these also benefit from being blogs of their own creation, where they can dictate a lot of the norms, and so I expect to have a fair bit more slack in how high the ceiling is. 

As a teenager, I came up with a set of four rules that I resolved ought to be guiding and unbreakable in going through life. They were, somewhat dizzyingly in hindsight, the product of a deeply sad personal event, an interest in Norse mythology and Captain America: Civil War. Many years later, I can't remember what Rules 3 and 4 were; the Rules were officially removed from my ethical code at age 21, and by that point I'd stop being so ragingly deontological anyway. I recall clearly the first two.

Rule 1 - Do not give in to suffering. Rule 2 - Ease the suffe... (read more)

As both a member of the EA community and a retired mediocre stand-up act, I appreciate that you took the time to write this. You rightly highlight that some light-heartedness has benefited some writers within the EA community, and outside of it. My intuition is that the level of humour we can see being used is, give or take, the right level given the goals the community has. A lot of effort and money has been spent on making the community, along with many job opportunities within it, seem professional in the hope that capable individuals will infer that we... (read more)

I'd be interested to know, if any of the powers that be are reading, to what extent the Long Term Future Fund could step in to take up the slack left by FTX in regard to the most promising projects now lacking funding. This would seem a centralised way for smaller donors to play their part, without being blighted by ignorance as to who all the others small donors are funding. 

Thanks! I'll definitely check those out.

Were they wearing an Emporio Armani t-shirt, by any chance?

That was really interesting to read. Let me know if you intend to continue down this line of research!

It's certainly a much easier way to transport things in bulk!

Really interesting that you say that; astro nav is a big part of the Officer Of the Watch qualification in the UK, which is roughly in line with it's civilian equivalent. That being said, if the laptop with the relevant software went down it would be a noticeable setback. I'd like to believe we'd pull through though.

I'm definitely going to change my attitude to community building, to the extent I am involved with it, as a result of reading this. Making sure that criticisms are addressed to the satisfaction of the critic seems hugely important and I don't think I had grasped that before.

My first thought on reading this suggestion for working groups was "That's a great idea, I'd really support someone trying to set that up!"

My second thought was "I would absolutely not have wanted to do that as a student. Where would I even begin?"

My third thought was that even if you did organise a group of people to try implementing the frameworks of EA to build some recommendations from scratch, this will never compare to the research done by long-standing organisations that dedicate many experienced people's working lives to finding the answers. The co... (read more)

To clarify, my position could be condensed to "I'm not convinced small scale longtermist donations are presently more impactful than neartermist ones, nor am I convinced of the reverse. Given this uncertainty, I am tempted to opt for neartermist donations to achieve better optics."

The point you make seems very sensible. If I update strongly back towards longtermist giving I will likely do as you suggest.

That seems like a very robust approach if one had a clear threshold in mind for how many qualified AI alignment researchers is enough. Sadly, I have no intuition or information for this, nor a finger on the pulse of that research community.

That's a really interesting point about Toby Ord!

Hi Olivia, really good of you to share these experiences. A few points I think might be helpful for your next conference:

-The social norms in EA are probably the most open and accepting of any group I've seen in my life. Provided two people aren't engaged in a focused one-on-one, walking up to a group and saying "Hi, can I join this conversation?" seems universally allowed with no sense of alienation or awkwardness at all. People would always catch me up on the conversation topic and include me fully. 
- It was my first conference too and I also hadn't... (read more)

Will we need to email Clare whenever some new oxygen needs producing?

I was going to suggest the last point, but you're way ahead of me! In the next couple of years, the first batch of St Andrews EAs will have fully entered the world of work/advanced study, and keeping some record of what the alumni are doing would be meaningful. 
[As highlighted in the thread post, we are two EAs who know each other outside the forum.]

I think some form of this could be valuable, noting Sebastian's point that decreasing risk should be the main priority. It struck me reading the main article that the tendency for EAs to congregate to some extent geographically poses a challenge from a long-term perspective. Oxford, the community's beating heart, is uncomfortably close to London (the obvious civilian target) and Portsmouth (home of the Royal Navy, probably second-top priority military target), meaning a large fraction of the community would be wiped out in a nuclear war. It might be prudent for EAs who can work remotely to set up 'colonies' in places unlikely to be devastated by a nuclear exchange, to provide resilience.