All of Xavier_ORourke's Comments + Replies

Love to see it.

The true valuation is probably a lot more than $26b USD - there was recently a secondary sale which valued company at closer to 42 billion. If the company became public, and were to trade at a revenue multiple similar to Figma's (extremely high at like 30x right now) - this would set the company's valuation a lot higher than that

I might not be the target audience for this proposal (my EA involvement weakened before FTX, and I'm not on track for high-leverage positions) - so take this perspective with appropriate skepticism. I'm also making predictions about something involving complex dynamics so good chance I'm wrong...

But I see fundamental challenges to maintaining a healthy EA movement in the shape you're describing. If we really encourage people to be vocal about their views in the absence of strong pressure to toe a party line - we can expect a very large, painful, disruptive... (read more)

I think an important consideration being overlooked is how comptetntly a centralised project would actually be managed.

In one of your charts, you suggest worlds where there is a single project will make progress faster due to "speedup from compute almagamation". This is not necessarily true. It's very possible that different teams would be able to make progress at very different rates even if both given identical compute resources.

At a boots-on-the-ground level, the speed of progress an AI project makes will be influenced by thosands of tiny decisions abou... (read more)

I don't really know... I'm suspect some kind of first-order utility calculus which tallies up the number of agents which are helped per dollar weighted according to what species they are makes animal welfare look better by large degree. But in terms of getting the world closer on the path of the "good trajectory", for some reason the idea of eliminating serious preventable diseases in humans feels like a more obvious next step along that path?

Not really a question but...  if you guys ever released a piece of merch that was insanely expensive but most of the cost went to charity (e.g. some special edition $3000 Mr Beast branded Tshirt where you guys give 3k to GiveDirectly for every unit sold), I'd wanna buy them for all my friends.

A priori, what is the motivation for elevating the very specific "biological requirment" hypothesis to the level of particular consideration? Why is it more plausible than than similarly prosaic claims like "consciousness requires systems operating between 30 and 50 degrees celsius" or "consciousness requires information to propegate through a system over timescales between 1 millisecond and 1000 milliseconds" or "consiousness requires a substrate located less than 10,000km away from the center of the earth"?

It seems a little weird to me that most of the replies to this post are jumping to the practicalities/logistics of how we should/shouldn't implement official, explicit, community-wide bans on these risky behaviours.

I totally agree with OP that all the things listsed above generally cause more harm than good. Most people in other cultures/communities would agree that they're the kind of thing which should be avoided, and most other people succeed in avoiding them without creatiing any explicit institution responsible for drawing a specific line between corr... (read more)

Sorry I might not have made my point clearly enough. By remaining anonymous, the OP has shielded themselves from any public judgement or reputational damage. Seems hypocritical to me given the post they wrote is deliberately designed to bring about public judgement and affect the reputation of Nick Bostrom.

So I'm saying "if OP thinks it's okay to make a post which names Nick and invites us all to make judgements about him, they should also have the guts to name themselves"

I really don't think the crux is people who disagree with you being unwilling to acknowledge their unconscious motivations. I fully admit that sometimes I experience desires to do unsavory things such as

- Say  something cruel to a person that annoys me
- Smack a child when they misbehave
- Cheat on my taxes
- Gossip about people in a negative way behind their backs
- Eat the last slice of pizza without offering it to anyone else
- Not stick to my GWWC pledge
- Leave my litter on the ground instead of carrying it to a bin
- Lie to a family member and say "I'm... (read more)

If EA community organisers are ending up isolated from everyone not involved in EA, that a really big problem!

Also the claim that

"We'll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love." 

Srikes me as patently false given myself and many people I know personally who engage with EA have partners from outside the EA community

The main reason I disagree is that to me it seems plainly obvious that it's far better for a community organiser's motivations to be related to earning respect/advancing their career/helping others, rather than their reason for participating in EA being so they can have more sex. This is because, if they're motivated by wanting to have more sex, then this predictably leads to more drama and more sexual harrassment.

I also don't think you did enough to back up the inference "lots of people are motivated by sex, therefore we should try to harness this, instea... (read more)

Why would it be a problem for long-term community builders?

Anecdote: I used to help run a local university group in Australia. While helping run that group, I didn't try to date or sleep with attendees. Also while running that group, I met wonderful woman in a separate context who wasn't involved in the EA community, we entered into a relationship, and are now happily married and expecting a child.

I've also got lots of EA friends who've done community building in the past and are in really happy romantic relationships with spouses they met in a non-EA context as well.

If Bostrom is not entitled to protection from random people on the forum making judgments about him, why should it be any different for OP?

From where I sit -It's really hard to guess at all the details and relevant context of what's going on (which is why I feel a bit stupid commenting on it... but I guess I can't resist lol).

Is FHI the only org being subject to a hiring freeze? Or is the university/philosophy department cutting costs in many places? Are conflicts with the philosophy department basically FHI's fault? Or is the bureaucracy dysfunctional/unfriendly to FHI in ways which made it impossible to keep them happy without making other costly tradeoffs? If Nick steps down as director, i... (read more)

If Bostrom did step down as FHI director, who is likely to replace him? How confident are you that  a new director will succeed in resolving conflicts with the broader philosophy department?

I have very little direct experience with FHI (just a very brief internship) but from the outside it looks like FHI has produced some really amazing research while Bostrom has directed it.

Perhaps a good way to appraise whether FHI has been performing above/below par during Bostrom's directorship is to compare its output to a similar organisation such as Global Prio... (read more)

We should be careful to avoid dismissing a simple easy solution to a real problem because it might fail to solve an imaginary one. Do you really think the community currently has a problem with bosses pressuring their direct reports to help them move house? 

How do you know we don't live in a world where >90% of the problem is specifically due to people having sex / trying to have sex with each other? What would convince you that sex is the culprit, rather than interpersonal relationships in general?

In my oppinion - a very attractive compromise which many other cultures adopt is to keep everythign you love about the deep relationships except for the sex. People having sex with each other is uniquely prone to causing harm+drama+conflict.

I don't think we'll ever see a TIME article exposing the problem that someone in EA had too many people offer to help them move house, or that community events were filled with too much warmth and laughter, or that people offered too much emotional support to someone when they lost a parent.

More friendship and loyalty and support and love and fun and shared moments of vulnerability is fine! Just leave out the sex part!

Thanks! Now that SBF has been disavowed do you think EA still has a big problem with under-emphasising conflicts of interest?

I still think the best critiques benefit from being extremely concrete and that article could have had more impact if it spent less time on the high-level concept of "conflicts of interest" and more time explicitely saying "crypto is bad and it's a problem that so many in the community don't see this"

Dear authors - could you please provide at least one concrete example of a high-quality "deep critique" of Effective Altruism which you think was given inadequate consideration?

If there was no difference at all between the beliefs/values/behaviours of a the average member of this community, versus the average member of the human species - then there would be no reson for the concept "Effective Altruism" to exist at all.

It would be a terrible thing for our community to directly discriminate against traits which are totally irrelevant to what someone has offer to the EA project (such as race/gender/sexual preference) - and I've never heard anyone around here disagree with that.

But when it comes to a traits such as being highly inte... (read more)

This is consistent with the point I'm trying to make - all human interactions in all contexts are happening within a super complex web of norms and taboos, and any proposal as simple as "just let people do whatever they want" is a non-starter

I agree that if all the concerns about relationship norms in EA culture were comming from small minority, then this would not justify changing them (but the minority are still entitled to try and advocate/persuade). 

But when it comes to culture/status, I think the dynamics mean majority rule is pretty much baked in by default anyway! So we might not have to worry much about that.

Interestingly, we might have different impressions about what the median attitude is in the community when it comes to questions like 

- "Is it a bad idea to have sex with... (read more)

I think it's worth keeping in mind that every functioning culture includes a vast list of taboos which people enforce on others. In both regular Western culture, and EA culture, all of the following are considered inappropriate:

- Making sexist jokes
- Not being sympathetic when someone else experiences a personal tragedy
- Nuidity in the workplace
- Answering somebody else's phone
- Smoking weed in the office
- Bragging about money
- Chewing with your mouth open
- Refusing to shake somebody's hand when you're introduced
- Making prolonged, intense eye contact with... (read more)

Great point! As well as "focus on the norms that are causing the most harm" I'd want to also add  "focus on the norms that promise the least benefit".

Doing weird things like giving away 10% of your income, or talking about shrimp welfare, or raising the alarm about the dangers of AGI are all very weird, but there are credible worldviews in which it's really important to do them anyway. 

Whereas weird things like having sex with multiple people within your professional network on a regular basis promise mild benefits at best, even according to worldviews which endorse them.

Another important difference with monogomy is that it's taboo to make a proposition to somebody who's already married or already in a serious relationship, so people don't make them as often.

Pollyamory is not necessarily a bad thing in all contexts and all implementations, and I'm not claiming that everyone who practices is an abuser - but on its face it seems intuitive that the prevalance of polly in a community would interact with frequency of sexual harrasment/assult (especially when layered on top of other things like high prevalance of aspergers+mood dissorders+professional relationships between members of the community).

I'm not advocating this entirely, but just to illustrate the point - imagine if most people in EA had cultural attitude... (read more)

For what it's worth, I'm on the 1 year "try giving" pledge atm. Even though I currently donate to "EA approved" orgs, I would never make the life-long commitment if I thought it meant giving up the right to use my own discretion when deciding which causes/organisations to give to.

That's true, but before the brand "Effective Altruism" existed, there was no reason why starting an organisation using that name should have made the founders beholden to the will of every single participant in this community - you'd need to conjecture a pretty unreasonable amount of foresight and scheming to think that even back then the founders were trying to structure these orgs in a manner designed to maintain central control over the movement.

If you or me or anyone else wanted to start our own organisation under a new brand with similar goals to CEA or GWWC I don't think anyone would try to stop us!

I encourage readers to consider whether they are the correct audience for this advice. As I understand it, this advice is directed at those for whom all of the following apply:

- Making a large impact on the world is overwhelmingly more important to you than other things people often want in their lives (such as spending lot of time with friends/family, raising children, etc.)
- You have already experienced a normal workload of ~38h per week for at least a couple of years, and found this pretty easy/comfortable to maintain
- You generally consider yourself to... (read more)

Sorry Sophia but I still don't completely understand how what we're talking about maps on to actual decisions community builders are making. I'm still suspicious that many of us are sensing a vibe problem but misdiagnosing it as a messaging/cause prioritization problem.

I would find it really helpful if you could an example of how you percieve the big tent / small tent abstraction could map on to a concrete action which a community organiser takes. 

Let's say someone was starting up a new a  EA group at an Australian university - what's an example of a mistake you worry this person might make if they're too directly focused on chasing the "tails"?

Thanks Holden and Luke for answering so many questions <3

Thinking in terms of broad generalisations/approximations - if you had to draw a graph depicting the value provided to OP by a new research analyst over time, what kind of shape would this graph have?

Or to ask the question in a different way: Are your efforts to hire for new OP roles motivated more by a desire to make better grants in the next couple of years, or by an intention to have a strong team in place several years from now which does high quality work in the future?