I enjoyed the post and I thought the platform for collective action looked quite cool.
I also want to mention that I think tractability is just generally a really hard thing for longtermism. It’s also a newer field and so on expectation I think you should just believe that the projects will look worse than in animal welfare. I don’t think there’s any need for psychoanalysis of the people in the space even though it has its fair share of wackos.
Fwiw it felt like a more concrete difference than that. My overall sense is that the animal welfare projects tended to be backed by multiple people with years of experience doing something relevant, have a concrete near term goal or set of milestones, and a set of well-described steps for moving forwards, while the longtermist/AI stuff tended to lack some or all of that.
I think that still makes sense under my model of a younger and less tractable field?
Experience comes partly from the field being viable for a longer period of time since there can be a lot more people who have worked in that area in the past.
The well-described steps and concrete near-term goals can be described as a lack of easy tractability?
I’m not saying that it isn’t the case that the proposals in longtermism are worse today but rather that it will probably look different in 10 years? A question that pops up for me is about how great the proposals and applications were in the beginning of animal welfare as a field. I’m sure it was worse in terms of legibility of the people involved and the clarity of the plans.(If anyone has any light to shed on this, that would be great!)
Maybe there’s some sort of effect where the more money and talent a field gets the better the applications get. To get there you first have to have people spend on more exploratory causes though? I feel like there should be anecdata from grantmakers on this.
That might be part of the effect, but I would think it would apply more strongly to EA community building than AI (which has been around for several decades with vastly more money flowing into it) - and the community projects were maybe slightly better over all? At least not substantially worse.
I don’t really buy that concrete steps are hard to come up with for good AI or even general longtermism projects—one could for e.g. aim to show or disprove some proposition in a research program, aim to reach some number of views, aim to produce x media every y days (which IIRC one project did), or write x-thousand words or interview x industry experts, or use some tool for some effect, or any one of countless ways of just breaking down what your physical interactions will be with the world between now and your envisioned success.
I enjoyed the post and I thought the platform for collective action looked quite cool.
I also want to mention that I think tractability is just generally a really hard thing for longtermism. It’s also a newer field and so on expectation I think you should just believe that the projects will look worse than in animal welfare. I don’t think there’s any need for psychoanalysis of the people in the space even though it has its fair share of wackos.
Fwiw it felt like a more concrete difference than that. My overall sense is that the animal welfare projects tended to be backed by multiple people with years of experience doing something relevant, have a concrete near term goal or set of milestones, and a set of well-described steps for moving forwards, while the longtermist/AI stuff tended to lack some or all of that.
I think that still makes sense under my model of a younger and less tractable field?
Experience comes partly from the field being viable for a longer period of time since there can be a lot more people who have worked in that area in the past.
The well-described steps and concrete near-term goals can be described as a lack of easy tractability?
I’m not saying that it isn’t the case that the proposals in longtermism are worse today but rather that it will probably look different in 10 years? A question that pops up for me is about how great the proposals and applications were in the beginning of animal welfare as a field. I’m sure it was worse in terms of legibility of the people involved and the clarity of the plans.(If anyone has any light to shed on this, that would be great!)
Maybe there’s some sort of effect where the more money and talent a field gets the better the applications get. To get there you first have to have people spend on more exploratory causes though? I feel like there should be anecdata from grantmakers on this.
That might be part of the effect, but I would think it would apply more strongly to EA community building than AI (which has been around for several decades with vastly more money flowing into it) - and the community projects were maybe slightly better over all? At least not substantially worse.
I don’t really buy that concrete steps are hard to come up with for good AI or even general longtermism projects—one could for e.g. aim to show or disprove some proposition in a research program, aim to reach some number of views, aim to produce x media every y days (which IIRC one project did), or write x-thousand words or interview x industry experts, or use some tool for some effect, or any one of countless ways of just breaking down what your physical interactions will be with the world between now and your envisioned success.