Important notice to readers. Please vote up even though it is not very carefully argued here, because it may be important to some readers to read it immediately.
DO NOT FOLLOW THIS POST’S ADVICE. IT IS PROBABLY VERY BAD ADVICE FROM A LEGAL STANDPOINT. IF IT DOESN’T GET YOU IN TROUBLE IT WILL ONLY BE BECAUSE PEOPLE IGNORED YOUR LETTERS.
NEVER FOLLOW ADVICE LIKE THIS FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT LAWYERS.
ONLY DO ANYTHING REMOTELY LIKE THIS IF YOU READ A POST FROM OPEN PHILANTHROPY’S LEGAL COUNSEL TELLING YOU TO DO IT.
NEVER FOLLOW ADVICE LIKE THIS FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT LAWYERS.
I agree this post has some kind of bad advice, but I also don’t believe this statement. I think there are many non-lawyers whose advice I would trust more than lawyer advice here, and I’ve generally found lawyer advice only a relatively weak guide to whether something is actually a good idea.
I do think it makes sense to say something weaker like “Do not follow advice like this from people who have not done pretty thorough legal research, and seem to have good judgement”.
I think the sort of people who look at this advice and find that it sounded plausible to them, might want to first follow the rule of only taking advice that originated in actual lawyers, because they couldn’t tell which nonlawyers had done real legal research. IDK, I don’t know what it’s like from the inside to read the original post and not scream.
Seems plausible to me, though the notice you posted didn’t really seem to distinguish between different people (and I prefer the world where we don’t say things like “never do X” when actually we only want some fraction of people to never do X, but hope that those people will learn to ignore the notices at the right time).
Hm, I think you may be reading the comment from a perspective of “what actions do the symbols refer to, and what would happen if readers did that?” as opposed to “what are the symbols going to cause readers to do?”[1]
The kinds of people who are able distinguish adequate vs inadequate good judgment shouldn’t be encouraged to defer to conventional signals of expertise. But those are also disproportionately the people who, instead of feeling like deferring to Eliezer’s comment, will respond “I agree, but...”
For lack of a better term, and because there should be a term for it: Dan Sperber calls this the “cognitive causal chain”, and contrasts it with the confabulated narratives we often have for what we do. I think it summons up the right image.
When you read something, aspire to always infer what people intend based on the causal chains that led them to write that. Well, no. Not quite. Instead, aspire to always entertain the possibility that the author’s consciously intended meaning may be inferred from what the symbols will cause readers to do. Well, I mean something along these lines. The point is that if you do this, you might discover a genuine optimiser in the wild. : )
On a matter of significance, one shouldn’t take legal advice for their specific situation from someone off an Internet message board—whether they claim to be a lawyer or not. Even if the poster is a lawyer, they are not your lawyer, they are not speaking to your individual situation, they are probably speaking outside their field of expertise, and their Internet musings are likely not up to the standards of rigor they would apply in their day jobs. If someone is giving you what sounds like specific legal advice about your specific situation (other than to consult a lawyer), they are probably not a lawyer.
People should consult their own lawyer before taking action on a matter of significance. Ask the lawyer why they are giving the advice they are giving. People are of course free to disregard their lawyer’s advice for any reason they find appropriate, but they should at least know what the “orthodox” advice is and why it is being given.
This seem far too conservative to me. I think the advice from Molly (Open Phil’s lawyer) will likely be substantially better than the advice by random people trying to find their own lawyer (but not having much experience with choosing a good lawyer), even without access to context. Separately, law is not a magical magisterium, and “legal advice” is not a natural category. Many parts of law can be understood to a totally sufficient degree by laymen, and can be explained to each other, and indeed is often superior to talking to lawyer who are often notoriously bad at communicating certain aspects of the law (like the likelihood of enforcement of various laws).
What suggested action or claim warrants this emergency-like statement? I can’t find it in this post.
Overall, this contributes to the squalid character of these events, that this whole thing is essentially 16 year olds who read too much online blog posts.
As an aside, I don’t think or don’t know if FTX grantees should give back all the money, but Yudkowsky’s post about is badly argued, intellectually and morally, and it’s disappointing, and amazing really, it got the upvotes and credibility it did without the obvious counterarguments appearing.
I think he was referring to the idea of getting in touch with the bankruptcy proceeding to let them know about the funds you’ve set aside.
I really wasn’t trying to advocate this as an immediate action, but when I went back and read the relevant paragraph, it does say that. I don’t think there’s actually so much danger of people taking my post as a recipe to follow—I hope it’s clear that I’m focussing more conceptually on what the right thing to do is, and that there’s still a significant gap between that and the exact way to carry anything out.
Another thing I’m saying is that the public discussion and leadership on this topic has been greatly lacking. On that much I have some agreement with what you’ve said. However I really think you should reconsider the way you’ve worded your sentiments. It’s fine to register an anonymous account to say something that you wouldn’t readily put your name to. But using that as an opportunity to insult is definitely not something that can make anything better.
Hi, I now found and I agree that the advice is bad, directionally.
However, I expect LT people who receive large amounts of funds, to be personally competent and responsible enough to say/write/prepare to set aside these funds. They would be looked down upon if they needed to be scolded on an online forum to navigate the moral and legal issues in the most basic way. Polite disagreement would have been adequate.
However I really think you should reconsider the way you’ve worded your sentiments. It’s fine to register an anonymous account to say something that you wouldn’t readily put your name to.
(I’m not anonymous, and this setup is intentional, but this is wildly hard to explain. )
More to the heart of the issue, unfortunately, the situation is exactly the opposite as I believe you perceive.
Outside of voting/writing on the EA forums, many parts of EA is treated with absolute contempt and seen as noxious, and this was before November and held by multiple senior EA people across all cause areas, people that you would respect.
Personally, it’s also hard not to just generally feel worse about the “EA community” as a set of social institutions distinct from the specific ideas. I always had sort of mixed feelings about this, and I gave money to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund for years before I ever attended my first EA conference. And while I thought the conference was fine, afterward I felt more confident that I would keep donating to GiveWell than that I would ever go to another EA conference.
If two weeks ago you found the whole scene to be obnoxious and weird and suffused with an odd mix of arrogance and credulity, recent events have tended to vindicate that.
What is especially bad and broken is that many people do actually act with great conscientiousness and care online, on the EA forum and Lesswrong, but this is effectively harvested by active people who want access to the resources, power structures, that has been built up by conscientious, unrelated work.
I literally suspected this was deliberate or at least tolerated, in part because this kept the related worldviews relatively weak. However, in the wake of the FTX collapse, this situation and the weakening of MacAskill and non-AI establishment, these latent issues might result in extremely bad states for EA.
I believe large parts of online EA discourse is intellectually bankrupt and dysfunctional. I believe I can decisively articulate why. This would really depress a lot of people without a solution, so I haven’t written it up.
Important notice to readers. Please vote up even though it is not very carefully argued here, because it may be important to some readers to read it immediately.
DO NOT FOLLOW THIS POST’S ADVICE. IT IS PROBABLY VERY BAD ADVICE FROM A LEGAL STANDPOINT. IF IT DOESN’T GET YOU IN TROUBLE IT WILL ONLY BE BECAUSE PEOPLE IGNORED YOUR LETTERS.
NEVER FOLLOW ADVICE LIKE THIS FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT LAWYERS.
ONLY DO ANYTHING REMOTELY LIKE THIS IF YOU READ A POST FROM OPEN PHILANTHROPY’S LEGAL COUNSEL TELLING YOU TO DO IT.
I’m happy to edit the post to prepend this notice.
Edit: Done.
I agree this post has some kind of bad advice, but I also don’t believe this statement. I think there are many non-lawyers whose advice I would trust more than lawyer advice here, and I’ve generally found lawyer advice only a relatively weak guide to whether something is actually a good idea.
I do think it makes sense to say something weaker like “Do not follow advice like this from people who have not done pretty thorough legal research, and seem to have good judgement”.
I think the sort of people who look at this advice and find that it sounded plausible to them, might want to first follow the rule of only taking advice that originated in actual lawyers, because they couldn’t tell which nonlawyers had done real legal research. IDK, I don’t know what it’s like from the inside to read the original post and not scream.
Seems plausible to me, though the notice you posted didn’t really seem to distinguish between different people (and I prefer the world where we don’t say things like “never do X” when actually we only want some fraction of people to never do X, but hope that those people will learn to ignore the notices at the right time).
Hm, I think you may be reading the comment from a perspective of “what actions do the symbols refer to, and what would happen if readers did that?” as opposed to “what are the symbols going to cause readers to do?”[1]
The kinds of people who are able distinguish adequate vs inadequate good judgment shouldn’t be encouraged to defer to conventional signals of expertise. But those are also disproportionately the people who, instead of feeling like deferring to Eliezer’s comment, will respond “I agree, but...”
For lack of a better term, and because there should be a term for it: Dan Sperber calls this the “cognitive causal chain”, and contrasts it with the confabulated narratives we often have for what we do. I think it summons up the right image.
When you read something, aspire to always infer what people intend based on the causal chains that led them to write that. Well, no. Not quite. Instead, aspire to always entertain the possibility that the author’s consciously intended meaning may be inferred from what the symbols will cause readers to do. Well, I mean something along these lines. The point is that if you do this, you might discover a genuine optimiser in the wild. : )
On a matter of significance, one shouldn’t take legal advice for their specific situation from someone off an Internet message board—whether they claim to be a lawyer or not. Even if the poster is a lawyer, they are not your lawyer, they are not speaking to your individual situation, they are probably speaking outside their field of expertise, and their Internet musings are likely not up to the standards of rigor they would apply in their day jobs. If someone is giving you what sounds like specific legal advice about your specific situation (other than to consult a lawyer), they are probably not a lawyer.
People should consult their own lawyer before taking action on a matter of significance. Ask the lawyer why they are giving the advice they are giving. People are of course free to disregard their lawyer’s advice for any reason they find appropriate, but they should at least know what the “orthodox” advice is and why it is being given.
This seem far too conservative to me. I think the advice from Molly (Open Phil’s lawyer) will likely be substantially better than the advice by random people trying to find their own lawyer (but not having much experience with choosing a good lawyer), even without access to context. Separately, law is not a magical magisterium, and “legal advice” is not a natural category. Many parts of law can be understood to a totally sufficient degree by laymen, and can be explained to each other, and indeed is often superior to talking to lawyer who are often notoriously bad at communicating certain aspects of the law (like the likelihood of enforcement of various laws).
???
What suggested action or claim warrants this emergency-like statement? I can’t find it in this post.
Overall, this contributes to the squalid character of these events, that this whole thing is essentially 16 year olds who read too much online blog posts.
As an aside, I don’t think or don’t know if FTX grantees should give back all the money, but Yudkowsky’s post about is badly argued, intellectually and morally, and it’s disappointing, and amazing really, it got the upvotes and credibility it did without the obvious counterarguments appearing.
This sort of behavior is obvious to outsiders.
I think he was referring to the idea of getting in touch with the bankruptcy proceeding to let them know about the funds you’ve set aside.
I really wasn’t trying to advocate this as an immediate action, but when I went back and read the relevant paragraph, it does say that. I don’t think there’s actually so much danger of people taking my post as a recipe to follow—I hope it’s clear that I’m focussing more conceptually on what the right thing to do is, and that there’s still a significant gap between that and the exact way to carry anything out.
Another thing I’m saying is that the public discussion and leadership on this topic has been greatly lacking. On that much I have some agreement with what you’ve said. However I really think you should reconsider the way you’ve worded your sentiments. It’s fine to register an anonymous account to say something that you wouldn’t readily put your name to. But using that as an opportunity to insult is definitely not something that can make anything better.
Hi, I now found and I agree that the advice is bad, directionally.
However, I expect LT people who receive large amounts of funds, to be personally competent and responsible enough to say/write/prepare to set aside these funds. They would be looked down upon if they needed to be scolded on an online forum to navigate the moral and legal issues in the most basic way. Polite disagreement would have been adequate.
(I’m not anonymous, and this setup is intentional, but this is wildly hard to explain. )
More to the heart of the issue, unfortunately, the situation is exactly the opposite as I believe you perceive.
Outside of voting/writing on the EA forums, many parts of EA is treated with absolute contempt and seen as noxious, and this was before November and held by multiple senior EA people across all cause areas, people that you would respect.
As for one example, see Matt Yglesias.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implosion
What is especially bad and broken is that many people do actually act with great conscientiousness and care online, on the EA forum and Lesswrong, but this is effectively harvested by active people who want access to the resources, power structures, that has been built up by conscientious, unrelated work.
I literally suspected this was deliberate or at least tolerated, in part because this kept the related worldviews relatively weak. However, in the wake of the FTX collapse, this situation and the weakening of MacAskill and non-AI establishment, these latent issues might result in extremely bad states for EA.
I believe large parts of online EA discourse is intellectually bankrupt and dysfunctional. I believe I can decisively articulate why. This would really depress a lot of people without a solution, so I haven’t written it up.