Piece that says “This actually makes me more interested in EA, because the criticism only really chips away small caveats in the idea it presents” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619831
Hacker news has this nice mixture: high signal to noise, being ruthless to hacks, and senior anonymous people who can excavate very inconvenient content.
With this context, the current discussion and thoughts seems like a genuinely good signal.
Like, it’s more than just nice PR, but goes a bit farther and amounts to almost a good review.
Someone I know speaks to some pretty nice, reasonable people. Something that person hears, in private, high-trust situations, about EA is that “it’s too demanding” and “I don’t want to give up my life to charity, man”.
So very talented, virtuous, people are saying they don’t want to engage in EA not because of bad values, bad epistemics, or culture, but because it’s just seems too much.
This is not a defect, I’m saying it’s sort of the opposite.
EA gets a lot of criticism like “the people fell in love with AI” and “too much measurement”, “we just need to start the left/libertarian revolution and the markets/democracy will fix everything”.
But what if these ideas are just the chaff that appears online?
What if 50% of “criticism” (or maybe 95% of the potential population, weighted by potential contribution) amounts to mundane yet important things like, “Hey, this seems good, but I don’t want to give up my series A to figure out how to contribute.”[1]
That’s not something a lot of people will write publicly, especially people who don’t have a philosophical bent or a culture of writing online, and work 50+ hours in pretty demanding jobs.
There’s issues about dilution here and I’m not saying EA should try to get most or even 10% of these people. Even a small fraction of these people a huge amount of talent.
Many of these people aren’t ideological, materialistic, or selfish, it’s more like, “Wow, this seems like a lot, and I don’t know how to engage.”
I just wanted to say that, as of Sat afternoon PST, EA seems to be holding up very very well on HN.
The top comments are currently:
JeffK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619037
Balanced piece about over demandingness and JSM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618941
Technical comment about kidneys, which is nice object level discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619775
Piece that says “This actually makes me more interested in EA, because the criticism only really chips away small caveats in the idea it presents” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619831
Hacker news has this nice mixture: high signal to noise, being ruthless to hacks, and senior anonymous people who can excavate very inconvenient content.
With this context, the current discussion and thoughts seems like a genuinely good signal.
Like, it’s more than just nice PR, but goes a bit farther and amounts to almost a good review.
Someone I know speaks to some pretty nice, reasonable people. Something that person hears, in private, high-trust situations, about EA is that “it’s too demanding” and “I don’t want to give up my life to charity, man”.
So very talented, virtuous, people are saying they don’t want to engage in EA not because of bad values, bad epistemics, or culture, but because it’s just seems too much.
This is not a defect, I’m saying it’s sort of the opposite.
EA gets a lot of criticism like “the people fell in love with AI” and “too much measurement”, “we just need to start the left/libertarian revolution and the markets/democracy will fix everything”.
But what if these ideas are just the chaff that appears online?
What if 50% of “criticism” (or maybe 95% of the potential population, weighted by potential contribution) amounts to mundane yet important things like, “Hey, this seems good, but I don’t want to give up my series A to figure out how to contribute.”[1]
That’s not something a lot of people will write publicly, especially people who don’t have a philosophical bent or a culture of writing online, and work 50+ hours in pretty demanding jobs.
There’s issues about dilution here and I’m not saying EA should try to get most or even 10% of these people. Even a small fraction of these people a huge amount of talent.
Many of these people aren’t ideological, materialistic, or selfish, it’s more like, “Wow, this seems like a lot, and I don’t know how to engage.”