I fought for EA to mean something simpler— just someone who 1. Figured out the best way to improve the world and 2. Does it— but I lost.
For what it is worth, this is not how I feel in my local EA community. There are people leading effective giving organisations and others who just go on with their usual lives with trial pledges; and I feel we are fairly non judgemental.
Why use the EA name? There is a leadership and they’re telling people where to donate that money and how to think. You have some responsibility for that.
I don’t think we see much top-down leadership. There’s eg GiveWell, which I take seriously, but sometimes prioritising between different broad cause areas is very hard, and my understanding is that people in my local community feel the same way and are broadly supportive of diverse points of view.
So will you join me in denouncing the horrible mistakes around AI Safety like working with the labs that the actual people in control of the name EA have made?
I think there are good arguments why those actions might have indeed been horrible mistakes. But I’m also quite uncertain about what would have been the best course of action at the time. Eg, there’s a reasonable case that the best we might hope for is steering the development of AI. I unfortunately don’t know.
Let me give a non AI example: I find it reasonable that some EAs try to steer how factory farming works (most animal advocacy), despite I preferring no animal died or was tortured for food.
But on the other hand I believe people at leadership positions failed to detect and flag the FTX scandal ahead of time. And that’s a shame.
There’s no need for a group like yours to be implicated in AI company wheeling and dealing. Being connected to EA’s decisions has probably made the issue much more confusing for you than it should be— PauseAI is suited for local groups and only involves talking about the danger and giving grassroots support to AI Safety bills. That should obviously have been the sort of thing local EA groups did for AI Safety, but the AI Safety part of EA has always been this weird elitist conspiracy to have stake in the Singularity.
For what it is worth, this is not how I feel in my local EA community. There are people leading effective giving organisations and others who just go on with their usual lives with trial pledges; and I feel we are fairly non judgemental.
Why use the EA name? There is a leadership and they’re telling people where to donate that money and how to think. You have some responsibility for that.
I don’t think we see much top-down leadership. There’s eg GiveWell, which I take seriously, but sometimes prioritising between different broad cause areas is very hard, and my understanding is that people in my local community feel the same way and are broadly supportive of diverse points of view.
So will you join me in denouncing the horrible mistakes around AI Safety like working with the labs that the actual people in control of the name EA have made?
I think there are good arguments why those actions might have indeed been horrible mistakes. But I’m also quite uncertain about what would have been the best course of action at the time. Eg, there’s a reasonable case that the best we might hope for is steering the development of AI. I unfortunately don’t know.
Let me give a non AI example: I find it reasonable that some EAs try to steer how factory farming works (most animal advocacy), despite I preferring no animal died or was tortured for food.
But on the other hand I believe people at leadership positions failed to detect and flag the FTX scandal ahead of time. And that’s a shame.
There’s no need for a group like yours to be implicated in AI company wheeling and dealing. Being connected to EA’s decisions has probably made the issue much more confusing for you than it should be— PauseAI is suited for local groups and only involves talking about the danger and giving grassroots support to AI Safety bills. That should obviously have been the sort of thing local EA groups did for AI Safety, but the AI Safety part of EA has always been this weird elitist conspiracy to have stake in the Singularity.