This is a fascinating and important topic, but I fear that many EA Forum readers might not be familiar with some of the more technical economic and behavioral sciences terms that you’re using here.
I’d kindly suggest revising or reposting something where terms like ‘value estimation’, ‘discrete choice models’, ‘graded pairwise comparisons’, etc are explained just a bit more, and where the overall significance of value estimation for EA is unpacked a little more? Just a friendly suggestion!
I think it’s important to build more connections between EA approaches to value (e.g. in AI alignment) and existing behavioral sciences methods for studying values.
Thanks for your suggestions! Big fan of yours for many years, by the way. Mating intelligence being the article collection that made we want to become an evolutionary psychologist (ended up a statistician though, mostly due to its much safer career path).
Now I noticed that I didn’t write in the post that these four points are just a summary. The meat of the post is being linked to. I think I have explained these terms in the linked post, at least graded pairwise comparisons and discrete choice models. But yeah… I will modify the summary to use less technical jargon and provide an introduction.
I think it’s important to build more connections between EA approaches to value (e.g. in AI alignment) and existing behavioral sciences methods for studying values.
Yes, and also to academia in general. I honestly didn’t think about AI alignment when writing this post, but that could be one of the applications.
Hi Jonas,
This is a fascinating and important topic, but I fear that many EA Forum readers might not be familiar with some of the more technical economic and behavioral sciences terms that you’re using here.
I’d kindly suggest revising or reposting something where terms like ‘value estimation’, ‘discrete choice models’, ‘graded pairwise comparisons’, etc are explained just a bit more, and where the overall significance of value estimation for EA is unpacked a little more? Just a friendly suggestion!
I think it’s important to build more connections between EA approaches to value (e.g. in AI alignment) and existing behavioral sciences methods for studying values.
Thanks for your suggestions! Big fan of yours for many years, by the way. Mating intelligence being the article collection that made we want to become an evolutionary psychologist (ended up a statistician though, mostly due to its much safer career path).
Now I noticed that I didn’t write in the post that these four points are just a summary. The meat of the post is being linked to. I think I have explained these terms in the linked post, at least graded pairwise comparisons and discrete choice models. But yeah… I will modify the summary to use less technical jargon and provide an introduction.
Yes, and also to academia in general. I honestly didn’t think about AI alignment when writing this post, but that could be one of the applications.
Jonas—Hi! Glad that Mating Intelligence was inspiring! I agree that statistics is generally a much safer career path than ev psych.
Will have a proper look at your linked essay...