Always happy to see someone change their mind on the forum!
I agree it would be great for there to be a competitor. My only doubt would be whether the market is large enough to support a second group. My guess is they would probably have to be significantly better than ACE along multiple axis.
I think I might be missing what’s distinctive here. A lot of the traits listed — strong knowledge of the field, engagement with the community, epistemic humility, broad curiosity — seem like general predictors of success in any many fields.
Are you pointing at something that’s unusually clustered in EA, or is your claim more about how trainable and highly predictive this combination is within the EA context?
Have you had a chat with the 80k hours team?
Thanks to all the EAs who attended Gabby’s memorial in Wellington and showed their support in other ways. It’s been wonderful to see the outpouring of love from our community.
That’s a fair point, but a lot of the scenarios you describe would mean rapid economic growth and equities going up like crazy. The expectation of my net worth in 40 years on my actual views is way, way higher than it would be if I thought AI was totally fake and the world would look basically the same in 2065. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t save up though (higher yields are actually a reason to save, not a reason to refrain from saving).
Hi Kaleem,
Impact Ops has been providing and will continue to provide operational support to Anti Entropy and Sparkwell, hence the involvement of Impact Ops team members both publicly and behind the scenes.
Via the SparkWell program, AntiEntropy is offering fiscal sponsorship to early stage organisations, this is not something Impact Ops provides.
To answer your second question more directly, a project would approach SparkWell if they are looking for mentoring and temporary fiscal sponsorship to test their idea before launching a new entity. Whereas a project would approach Impact Ops if they have already decided to launch a new entity and need support doing so, or if they already have an entity and require outsourced support from one of the 6 service areas that Impact Ops provides.
Impact Ops just posted a 2 year reflection piece on the lessons learned from the first 2 years of serving high impact non-profits which might help clarify the differentiation between Impact Ops and SparkWell- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NWTEuaMDiGhcJQvLZ/lessons-learned-from-two-years-supporting-high-impact
I didn’t fully understand your opinion, but I noticed you’re not against the principle of stopping births. My concern is that this line of thinking can open the gates to very dangerous ideas.
If you accept that saving people isn’t always good, or that preventing certain births can be morally justified, then it becomes possible to argue that we should stop genetically defected people from having children—also for the “greater good.” Just like one might argue we should prevent births to avoid suffering, one could now argue that we should prevent certain types of people from being born in order to “improve humanity.”
This is a very slippery slope. It might start with the idea of doing good, but it risks justifying things like eugenics. Once you accept that some lives shouldn’t be saved or born, you risk treating some people as worth less than others.
Exciting! Great if you can connect and support impact-focused freelancers to achieve their goals.
As someone who may be looking for freelance support in the next few weeks/months, I’m wondering what I gain by posting or using the directory here, rather than other (not-altruism-focused) platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, etc?
This sounds amazing!
Would you consider providing support for a startup that is already generating profits and aims to donate at least 10% of revenue to EA affiliated charities (along with innovative charitable initiatives) but could really use help with bookkeeping and scaling up faster?
Insightful. Thanks for sharing
I find the Big Think article surprisingly nasty towards EA. Does Bregman see it as “a misguided movement that sought to weaponize the country’s capitalist engines to protect the planet and the human race”?
I was also not aware that EA’s “demise” has apparently already occurred: “Bregman saw EA’s demise long before the downfall of the movement’s poster child, Sam Bankman-Fried (...)”
EA still seems to have a pulse and much more.
This is a REALLY good point. Thank you for posting this. I come from the animal rights movement. We have a similar problem in that movement. People in the AR movement tend to feel isolated, because they care so much about animals and perhaps they feel that the rest of the world, their family, and their society doesn’t get it. So they are so eager to meet and befriend another AR person. It’s really fun to make friends so easily! I love how quick other AR people are to trust me when they find out I’m an animal advocate. But there’s also a downside to the trust in AR, similar to what you’re describing. People can be too trusting when they’re part of an ethical movement like AR or EA. And it can let others take advantage of them. I even imagine that people who want to take advantage of others might intentionally be motivated to join ethical communities like EA, AR, charity work, religious work, political activism, etc., so they can be accepted more easily with fewer questions. (Not sure—Just a hypothethis.) Thank you for writing this!
This is such a cool and interesting post. And it totally helps understand why things for humans seem like they’re materially getting better in many ways, but our culture involves a lot of people saying a lot of negative things about how humanity is doing. I love that you’re challenging the assumption that people accurately remember, or accurately report their memory of, their own happiness! This is super smart and matches my own experience of what it’s like to be a human. Often, I’m not super sure how happy I’ve been over the past week, or the past day. When someone asks me, it feels like a hard question. All I can remember is how I feel right now. And even that can sometimes be hard to articulate.
And thank you for mentioning that GDP growth could still be bad due to its effects on animals!
Hi Vasco — your die roll example is helpful for illustrating my point, thanks!
So there is a sense in which I am “unaware or only coarsely aware” of not only “some possible worlds”, but practically all possible worlds. However, I can still precisely estimate the probability of outcomes of rolling a dice.
When you’re predicting the “outcome” of a die roll in the typical sense, all you care about is the number of pips on the upward-facing side of the die. So all the physical variations between the trajectories of the die rolls don’t matter at this level of abstraction. You don’t have coarse awareness here relative to the class of outcomes you care about.
By contrast (as I note in this section), impartial altruists intrinsically care about an extremely detailed set of information: how much welfare is instantiated across all of space and time. With respect to that class of value systems, we do have (severely) coarse awareness of the relevant outcomes. You might think we can precisely estimate the value of these coarse outcomes “better than chance” in some sense (more on this below), but at the part of the post you’re replying to, I’m just making this more fundamental point: “Since we lack access to possible worlds, our precise guesses don’t directly come from our value function , but from some extra model of the hypotheses we’re aware of (and unaware of).” Do you agree with that claim?
still informative, at least negligibly so, as long as they are infinitesimaly better than chance
I recommend checking out the second post, especially these two sections, for why I don’t think this is valid.
That post also spells out my response to your claim “It is obvious for me the 2nd option is much better.” I don’t think anything is “obvious” when making judgments about overall welfare across the cosmos. (ETA: I do think it’s obvious that you shouldn’t do option 1 all-things-considered, because of various moral norms other than impartial altruism that scream against that option.) Interested to hear if there’s something in your claim that that post fails to address.
I gave some reasons why I don’t think AI companies will want to externally deploy their best models (like less benefit from user growth), so maybe you disagree with that, or do you disagree with 1,2, or 3?
I understand that there are some reasons that companies might do this. One 1/2/3, I’m really unsure about the details of (2). If capabilities accelerate, but predictably and slowly, I assume this wouldn’t feel very discontinuous.
Also, there’s a major difference between AIs getting better and them becoming more useful. Often there are diminishing returns to intelligence.
> I do think that more than one actor (e.g. 3 actors) may be trying to IE at the same time, but I’m not sure why this is implied by my post. I think my model isn’t especially sensitive to single vs multiple competing IEs, but possible you’re seeing something I’m not.
Sorry, I may have misunderstood that. But if there is only one or two potential actors, that does seem to make the situation far easier. Like, it could be fairly clear to many international actors that there are 1-2 firms that might be making major breakthroughs. In that case, we might just need to worry about policing these firms. This seems fairly possible to me (if we can be somewhat competent).
Do you expect competition to increase dramatically from where we are at rn? If not then I think current level of competition empirically do lead to people investing a lot in AI development so I’m not sure I quite follow your line of reasoning.
I’d expect that market caps of these companies would be far higher if it were clear if there would be less competition later, and I’d equivalently expect these companies to do (even more) R&D.
I’m quite sure investors are quite nervous about the monopoly abilities of LLM companies.
Right now, I don’t think it’s clear to anyone where OpenAI/Anthropic will really make money 5+ years from now. It seems like [slightly worse AIs] often are both cheap / open-source and good enough. I think that both companies are very promising, but just that the future market value is very unclear.
I’ve heard that some of the Chinese strategy is, “Don’t worry too much about being on the absolute frontier, because it’s far cheaper to just copy from 1-2 steps behind.”
I wasn’t saying that “competition would greatly decrease the value of the marginal intelligence gain” in the sense of “things will get worse from where we are now”, but in the sense of “things are generally worse from where they would be without such competition”
Sorry, you did say this in the other thread as well and I should have made that clear in my comment originally. Have now edited.
One dynamic worth considering here is that a person with near-typical longtermist views about the future also likely believes that there are a large number of salient risks in the future, including sub-extinction AI catastrophes, pandemics, war with China, authoritarian takeover, “white collar bloodbath” etc.
It can be very psychologically hard to spend all day thinking about these risks without also internalizing that these risks may very well affect oneself and one’s family, which in turn implies that typical financial advice and financial lifecycle planning are not well-tailored to the futures that longtermists think we might face. For example, the typical suggestion to save around 6 months in an emergency fund makes sense for the economy of the last hundred years, but if there is widespread white collar automation, what are the odds that there will be job disruption lasting longer than six months? If you think that your country may experience authoritarian takeover, might you want to save enough to buy residence elsewhere?
None of this excuses not making financial sacrifices. But I do think it’s hard to simultaneously think “the future is really risky” and “there is a very achievable (e.g., <<$1M) amount of savings that would make me very secure.”
Glad that this exists—I was worried about the lack of fiscal sponsors/ops-support orgs available in the EA ecosystem post-FTX crash.
Sorry if this is a dumb question but: why are two of the three people working on this project (Sparkwell) also working on a different but very similar project (ImpactOps)? (e.g. why would someone approach one org over another?). Thanks
Thanks for sharing this!
Yeah, I tried to contact the Good Store to invite them to the conference next week, but I wasn’t able to get in touch. I’m really excited for the possibility of Profit for Good businesses to share a message together of a world where profits help charities instead of enriching random investors. Building a global brand around businesses where charities benefit is likely much more cost effective than many businesses building all the trust and awareness individually.
Is it also the case that some of Mr Beast’s businesses are PFGs as well?