Thank you for the recommendations. To be honest, the parts of The good it promises that I read struck me as very low quality and significantly worse than the average EA critique. The authors did not seem to me to engage in good-faith critique, and I found a fair amount of their claims and proposed alternatives outlandish and unconvincing. I also found many of the arguments to be relying on buzzwords rather than actual arguments, which made the book feel a bit like a vicious twitter thread. I read only about half of the book; maybe I focused on the wrong parts.
I will check the GPI working paper series for alternative critiques. Thank you for recommending them.
On another note, I recently heard an interesting good-faith critique of EA called “But is it altruism?” by Peruzzi&Calderon. It is not published yet, but when it comes out, I could send it to you—it may be an interesting critique to dissect on the blog.
Again, thanks for your work on this blog. It’s really appreciated, and it is impressive you are able to spend so much time thoughtfully reflecting on EA on this blog while being a full-time academic.
Thank you for the recommendations. To be honest, the parts of The good it promises that I read struck me as very low quality and significantly worse than the average EA critique. The authors did not seem to me to engage in good-faith critique, and I found a fair amount of their claims and proposed alternatives outlandish and unconvincing. I also found many of the arguments to be relying on buzzwords rather than actual arguments, which made the book feel a bit like a vicious twitter thread. I read only about half of the book; maybe I focused on the wrong parts.
I will check the GPI working paper series for alternative critiques. Thank you for recommending them.
Two AI papers I’d be particularly interested to see you engage with are
”Concrete Problems in AI Safety”
and
“The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective”
On another note, I recently heard an interesting good-faith critique of EA called “But is it altruism?” by Peruzzi&Calderon. It is not published yet, but when it comes out, I could send it to you—it may be an interesting critique to dissect on the blog.
Again, thanks for your work on this blog. It’s really appreciated, and it is impressive you are able to spend so much time thoughtfully reflecting on EA on this blog while being a full-time academic.
Thanks mhenric! Those are both good papers to consider and I’ll do my best to address them.
I didn’t know the “But is it altruism” paper. Please do send it when it is out—I’d like to read it any hopefully write about it.