https://www.alexirpan.com/2024/08/06/switching-to-ai-safety.html
This reaffirms my belief it's more important to look at the cruxes of existing ML researchers than internally within EAs on AI Safety.
[Epistemic status: unsure how much I believe each response but more pushing back against that "no well informed person trying to allocate a marginal dollar most ethically would conclude that GiveWell is the best option."]
I know Tarsney is a utilitarian but I'm just throwing him out there as a name that can change .
I think this is confused. WWOTF is obviously both aiming to be persuasive and coming from a place of academic analytical philosophical rigour. Many philosophers write books that are both, e.g. Down Girl by Kate Manne or The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. I don't think a purely persuasive book would have so many citations.
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[edited: last sentence for explicitness of my point]
I think this worry should be more a critique of the EA community writ-large for being overly deferential than for OP holding a contest to elicit critiques of its views and then following through with that in their own admittedly subjective criteria. OP themselves note in the post that people shouldn't take this to be OP's institutional tastes.
[edit: Fixed link for Stuart Russell's book. Initially linked to Brian Christiansen's Human Compatible.]
I think these polls would benefit from a clause along the lines of "On balance, EAs should X" because a lot of the discourse collapses into examples and corner cases about when the behaviour is acceptable (e.g. the discussion over illegal actions ending up being around melatonin). I think having a conversation centred about where the probability mass of these phenomena actually are is important.
I think this is imprecise. In my mind there are two categories:
I think measuring along only the axis of tractability of gaining allies is the wrong question but the real question is what are the fruits of collaboration.
To be clear I didn't downvote it because I didn't read it. I skimmed it and looked for the objectionable parts to steelman what I imagine the downvoter would have downvoted it for. I think the most egregious part of it is not understanding that there are costs to methods of zero fraud (literally means war torn areas get 0 aid and the risk tolerance is too high) and Vee just staunchly reiterates the claim we need to have 0 fraud.
I mean Dustin Moskovitz used to come on the forum and beg people to do earn to give yet I don't think the number of donors has grown that much. More people should go to Jane Street and do Y-Combinator but it feels as though that's taboo to say for some reason.