Daniel_Eth

Karma: 2,575

Daniel_Eth 25 Oct 2023 8:04 UTC
120 points
30 ∶ 2
on: Lying is Cowardice, not Strategy
I feel like this post is doing something I really don’t like, which I’d categorize as something like “instead of trying to persuade with arguments, using rhetorical tricks to define terms in such a way that the other side is stuck defending a loaded concept and has an unjustified uphill battle.”

For instance:
let us be clear: hiding your beliefs, in ways that predictably leads people to believe false things, is lying. This is the case regardless of your intentions, and regardless of how it feels.
I mean, no, that’s just not how the term is usually used. It’s misleading to hide your beliefs in that way, and you could argue it’s dishonest, but it’s not generally what people would call a “lie” (or if they did, they’d use the phrase “lie by omission”). One could argue that lies by omission are no less bad than lies by commission, but I think this is at least nonobvious, and also a view that I’m pretty sure most people don’t hold. You could have written this post with words like “mislead” or “act coyly about true beliefs” instead of “lie”, and I think that would have made this post substantially better.
I also feel like the piece weirdly implies that it’s dishonest to advocate for a policy that you think is second best. Like, this just doesn’t follow – someone could, for instance, want a $20/hr minimum wage, and advocate for a $15/hr minimum wage based on the idea that it’s more politically feasible, and this isn’t remotely dishonest unless they’re being dishonest about their preference for $20/hr in other communications. You say:
many AI Safety people being much more vocal about their endorsement of RSPs than their private belief that in a saner world, all AGI progress should stop right now.
but this simply isn’t contradictory – you could think a perfect society would pause but that RSPs are still good and make more sense to advocate for given the political reality of our society.

Daniel_Eth 10 Dec 2023 13:15 UTC
108 points
55 ∶ 0
on: I spent a lot of time and money on one dog. Do I need help?
My personal view is that being an EA implies spending some significant portion of your efforts being (or aspiring to be) particularly effective in your altruism, but it doesn’t by any means demand you spend all your efforts doing so. I’d seriously worry about the movement if there was some expectation that EAs devote themselves completely to EA projects and neglect things like self-care and personal connections (even if there was an exception for self-care & connections insofar as they help one be more effective in their altruism).
It sounds like you developed a personal connection with this particular dog rather quickly, and while this might be unusual, I wouldn’t consider it a fault. At the same time, while I don’t see a problem with EAs engaging in that sort of partiality with those they connect with, I would worry a bit if you were making the case that this sort of behavior was in itself an act of effective altruism, as I think prioritization, impartiality, and good epistemics are really important to exhibit when engaged in EA projects. (Incidentally, this is one further reason I’d worry if there was an expectation that EAs devote themselves completely to EA projects – I think this would lead to more backwards rationalizations about why various acts people want to do are actually EA projects when they’re not, and this would hurt epistemics and so on.) But you don’t really seem to be doing that.

Daniel_Eth 30 Mar 2023 9:56 UTC
44 points
12 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers’s comment on: Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Clarification for anyone who’s reading this comment outside of having read the article – the article calls for governments to adopt clear policies involving potential preemptive military strikes in certain circumstances (specifically, against a hypothetical “rogue datacenter”, as these datacenters could be used to build AGI), but it is not calling for any specific military strike right now.

Daniel_Eth 17 Jul 2020 13:55 UTC
38 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Objections to Value-Alignment between Effective Altruists
I think there’s some interesting points here! A few reactions:
• I don’t think advocates of traditional diversity are primarily concerned with cognitive diversity. I think the reasoning is more (if altruistic) to combat discrimination/bigotry or (if self-interested) good PR/a larger pool of applicants to choose from.
• I think in some of the areas that EAs have homogeneity it’s bad (eg it’s bad that we lack traditional diversity, it’s bad that we lack so much geographic diversity, it’s bad that we have so much homogeneity of mannerisms, it’s bad that certain intellectual traditions like neoliberalism or the Pinkerian progress narrative are overwhelmingly fashionable in EA, etc), but I’d actually push back against the claim that it’s bad that we have such a strong consequentialist bent (this just seems to go so hand-in-hand with EA—one doesn’t have to be a consequentialist to want to improve the external world as much as possible, but I’d imagine there’s a strong tendency for that) or that we lack representation of certain political leanings (eg I wouldn’t want people in the alt-right in EA).
• If people don’t feel comfortable going against the grain and voicing opposition, I’d agree that’s bad because we’d lack ability to self-correct (though fwiw my personal impression is that EA is far better on this metric than almost all other subcultures or movements).
• It’s not clear to me that hierarchy/centralization is bad—there are certain times when I think we err too much on this side, but then I think others where we err too much the other way. If we had significantly less centralization, I’d have legitimate concerns about coordination, info-hazards, branding, and evaluating quality of approaches/organizations.
• I agree that some of the discussion about intelligence is somewhat cringe, but it seems to me that we’ve gotten better on that metric over time, not worse.
• Agree that the fandom culture is… not a good feature of EA
• There probably are some feedback loops here as you mention, but there are other mechanisms going the other direction. It’s not clear to me that the situation is getting worse and we’re headed for “locking in” unfortunate dynamics, and if anything I think we’ve actually mostly improved on these factors over time (and, crucially, my inside view is that we’ve improved our course-correction ability over time).

Daniel_Eth 13 Mar 2022 2:18 UTC
35 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: A new media outlet focused on philanthropy
FWIW, I found the interview with SBF to be quite fair, and imho it presented Sam in a neutral-to-positive light (though perhaps a bit quirky). Teddy’s more recent reporting/tweets about Sam also strike me as both fair and neutral to positive.

Daniel_Eth 30 Aug 2023 4:35 UTC
32 points
14 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now
[Speaking in my personal capacity, not on behalf of the LTFF] I am also strongly in favor of there being an AI safety specific fund, but this is mostly unrelated to recent negative press for longtermism. My reasons for support are (primarily): a) people who aren’t EAs (and might not even know about longtermism) are starting to care a lot more about AI safety, and many of them might donate to such a fund; and b) EAs (who may or may not be longtermists) may prioritize AI safety over other longtermist causes (eg biosafety), so an AI safety specific fund may fit better with their preferences.

Daniel_Eth 6 Aug 2022 5:59 UTC
32 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: [link post] The Case for Longtermism in The New York Times
Hmm, I don’t read it that way. My read of this passage is: the risk of WWIII by 2070 might be as high as somewhat over 20% (but that estimate is probably picked from the higher end of serious estimates), WWIII may or may not lead to all-out nuclear war, all-out nuclear war has some unknown chance of leading to the collapse of civilization, and if that happened then there would also be some further unknown chance of never recovering. So all-in-all, I’d read this as Will thinking that X-risk from nuclear war in the next 50 years was well below 20%.
I also don’t think NYT readers have particularly clear prejudices about nuclear war (they probably have larger prejudices about things like overpopulation), so this would be a weird place to make a concession, in my mind.

Daniel_Eth 13 Jul 2022 23:47 UTC
31 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Passing Up Pay
My personal view is that targeted small-dollar political donations (which large donors cannot simply fill, due to campaign finance laws) are likely to be vastly higher value on the margin than corresponding-sized (equivalent size plus tax savings) non-political donations to organizations that large donors can fill, insofar as such targeted political opportunities arise. So if I was in the situation you’re describing, I’d accept the higher salary with the intention of donating to such political opportunities when they arose. Of course, this logic is specific to a particular kind of donation opportunity, and won’t generalize to most areas that EAs currently donate to.

Daniel_Eth 26 Aug 2023 22:56 UTC
30 points
16 ∶ 3
on: How much do EAGs cost (and why)?
We’re still working out the details, but we also expect to raise default ticket prices. That is, instead of people paying $200 for a ticket that costs us $1500, they’ll be paying maybe $500 for a ticket that costs us $1000.
I’m concerned this change will contribute to making EA more insular by raising the costs of becoming engaged with the community. $200 instead of free means people only go if they’re serious, but $500 feels like a real chunk of money, and may be particularly hard to justify for people who aren’t already highly engaged.
One possible remedy here would be to also give discounted tickets to first-timers.

Daniel_Eth 31 Mar 2023 0:07 UTC
29 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: David Mathers’s comment on: Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky
This goes considerably beyond ‘international treaties with teeth are plausibly necessary here’… Eliezer is proposing attacks on any countries that are building AI-above-a-certain-level, whether or not they sign up to the treaty.
Is this actually inconsistent? If a country doesn’t sign up for the Biological Weapons Convention, and then acts in flagrant disregard of it, would they not be expected to be faced with retaliatory action from signatories, including, depending on specifics, plausibly up to military force? My sense was that people who pushed for the introduction and enforcement of the BWC would have imaged such a plausible response as within bounds.
I also think “with teeth” kind of obscures by abstraction here (since it doesn’t necessarily sound like it means war/violence, but that’s what’s being proposed.)
I don’t think what Eliezer is proposing would necessarily mean war/violence either – conditional on a world actually getting to the point were major countries are agreeing to such a treaty, I find it plausible that smaller countries would simply acquiesce in shutting down rogue datacenters. If they didn’t, before military force was used, diplomacy would be used. Then probably economic sanctions would be used. Eliezer is saying that governments should be willing to escalate to using military force if necessary, but I don’t think it’s obvious that in such a world military force would be necessary.

Daniel_Eth 9 Nov 2021 10:34 UTC
29 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Daniel_Eth’s Shortform
Should there be an “EA Donation Index Fund” that allows people to simply “donate the market” (similar to how index funds like the S&P500 allow for simply buying the market)? This fund could allocate donations to EA orgs in proportion to the total donations that those funds receive (from EA sources?) over the year (it would perhaps make sense for there to be a few such funds – such as one for EA as a whole, one for longtermism, one for global health and development, etc).

I see a few potential benefits:
• People who want to donate effectively (and especially if wanting to diversify donations) but don’t have the knowledge/expertise/time/etc, and for whatever reason don’t necessarily trust EA funds to donate appropriately on their behalf, could do so. I expect there may be many people holding back from donating now for lack of a sense of how to donate best (including from people on the periphery of EA), so this might increase donations. I further expect the quality of donations would increase from those not as knowledgable, if they simply donated the market.
• Could be lower overhead and more scalable compared to other funds.
• Aesthetically, I’d imagine this sort of setup might appeal to finance people, and finance people have a lot of money, so it may widen to pool of donors to EA.
• Index fund donations would effectively be matching donations – if, for instance, half of all EA donations were through an EA index fund, then that would mean direct donations to specific charities would be matched by moving money from the index fund towards the specific charity as well (of course, at the expense of other charities in the fund) – this would arguably provide greater incentive for direct donors to donate more (at least insofar as they thought they knew more than/had better values than the market, but that would be their revealed preference from choosing to be direct donors instead of just donating to the index fund).

Daniel_Eth 21 Feb 2018 0:23 UTC
29 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Why I prioritize moral circle expansion over artificial intelligence alignment
I thought this piece was good. I agree that MCE work is likely quite high impact—perhaps around the same level as X-risk work—and that it has been generally ignored by EAs. I also agree that it would be good for there to be more MCE work going forward. Here’s my 2 cents:

You seem to be saying that AIA is a technical problem and MCE is a social problem. While I think there is something to this, I think there are very important technical and social sides to both of these. Much of the work related to AIA so far has been about raising awareness about the problem (eg the book Superintelligence), and this is more a social solution than a technical one. Also, avoiding a technological race for AGI seems important for AIA, and this also is more a social problem than a technical one.

For MCE, the 2 best things I can imagine (that I think are plausible) are both technical in nature. First, I expect clean meat will lead to the moral circle expanding more to animals. I really don’t see any vegan social movement succeeding in ending factory farming anywhere near as much as I expect clean meat to. Second, I’d imagine that a mature science of consciousness would increase MCE significantly. Many people don’t think animals are conscious, and almost no one thinks anything besides animals can be conscious. How would we even know if an AI was conscious, and if so, if it was experiencing joy or suffering? The only way would be if we develop theories of consciousness that we have high confidence in. But right now we’re very limited in studying consciousness, because our tools at interfacing with the brain are crude. Advanced neurotechnologies could change that—they could allow us to potentially test hypotheses about consciousness. Again, developing these technologies would be a technical problem.

Of course, these are just the first ideas that come into my mind, and there very well may be social solutions that could do more than the technical solutions I mentioned, but I don’t think we should rule out the potential role of technical solutions, either.

Daniel_Eth 26 Oct 2023 9:04 UTC
28 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: alexherwix’s comment on: Lying is Cowardice, not Strategy
My problem with the post wasn’t that it used subpar prose or “could be written better”, it’s that it uses rhetorical techniques that make actual exchange of ideas and truth-seeking harder. This isn’t about “argument style points”, it’s about cultivating norms in the community that make it easier for us to converge on truth, even on hard topics.
The reason I didn’t personally engage with the object level is I didn’t feel like I had anything particularly valuable to say on the topic. I didn’t avoid saying my object-level views (if he had written a similar post with a style I didn’t take issue with, I wouldn’t have responded at all), and I don’t want other people in the community to avoid engaging with the ideas either.

Daniel_Eth 16 Sep 2023 3:55 UTC
28 points
10 ∶ 3
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: James Herbert’s Shortform
My guess is this is mostly just a product of success, and insofar as the political system increasingly takes AI X-risk seriously, we should expect to see stuff like this from time to time. If the tables were flipped and Sunak was instead pooh-poohing AI X-risk and saying things like “the safest path forward for AI is accelerating progress as fast as we can – slowing down would be Luddism” then I wouldn’t be surprised to see articles saying “How Silicon Valley accelerationists are shaping Rishi Sunak’s AI plans”. Doesn’t mean we should ignore the negative pieces, and there very well may be things we can do to decrease it at the margin, but ultimately, I’d be surprised if there was a way around it. I also think it’s notable how much press there is that agrees with AI X-risk concerns; it’s not like there’s a consensus in the media that it should be dismissed.

Daniel_Eth 6 Nov 2021 2:11 UTC
26 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: There’s a role for small EA donors in campaign finance
DSCC’s goals are just to elect democrats – they don’t consider, for instance, how different democrats differ on EA criteria such as biosecurity. Donating to particularly aligned candidates (especially in primaries) is probably higher value than donating to existing (non-EA) funds.

Daniel_Eth 4 Aug 2023 1:11 UTC
24 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: JJ Hepburn’s comment on: Alignment Grantmaking is Funding-Limited Right Now [crosspost]
FWIW, the LTFF is considering spinning off a fund focused on AI alignment (though no promises at this point in time).

Daniel_Eth 21 Jun 2021 4:12 UTC
23 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 2018-2019 Long Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?
“There is a part of me which finds the outcome (a 30 to 40% success rate) intuitively disappointing”

Not only do I somewhat disagree with this conclusion, but I don’t think this is the right way to frame it. If we discard the “Very little information” group, then there’s basically a three-way tie between “surprisingly successful”, “unsurprisingly successful”, and “surprisingly unsuccessful”. If a similar amount of grants are surprisingly successful and surprisingly unsuccessful, the main takeaway to me is good calibration about how successful funded grants are likely to be.

Daniel_Eth 15 Nov 2023 2:28 UTC
21 points
8 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ofer’s comment on: Naive application of the ITN framework on a situation like the one in Gaza might lead us wrong
Note to Israelis who may be reading this: I did not upvote/downvote this post and I do not intent to vote on such posts going forward. I think you should do the same.
You’re free to vote (or refrain from voting) how you want, but the suggestion to others feels illiberal to me in a way that I think is problematic. Would you also suggest that any Palestinians reading this post refrain from voting on it? (Or, going a step further, would you suggest Kenyan EAs refrain from voting on posts about GiveDirectly?) Personally, I think both Israeli EAs and Palestinian EAs should feel comfortable voting on posts like this, and I’d worry about the norms in the community if we tell people not to vote/otherwise voice their perspective based on demographics (even more so if these suggestions are asymmetrical instead of universal).

Daniel_Eth 8 Aug 2023 0:58 UTC
21 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Best Use of 2 Minutes this Month (U.S.)
FYI, Manifold now has a market on the likelihood of the act becoming law:

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Daniel_Eth 8 Mar 2023 23:22 UTC
20 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Suggestion: A workable romantic non-escalation policy for EA community builders
I feel like the power differential between community builders and new members decreases over time as the new member “graduates” from being a new member and becomes a longer-term members, so perhaps the policy could apply for the first few months of the member’s involvement?