Aaron Gertler(Aaron L. Gertler)

• Aaron Gertler 21 Jan 2021 10:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: sanjush’s comment on: Hilary Greaves: The col­lec­tivist cri­tique of the EA movement

  I agree that there are relatively few people in EA looking at anything I’d consider “the impact of collective action,” but I also think this makes sense given the reality of EA’s size and influence. We are a few thousand people (perhaps 10,000) spread across multiple continents. Working on advice for individuals (or even your nearest government) seems much more likely to bear fruit than figuring out which actions are most promising for large groups of people to take together.

  I would be interested to see more work on questions like “what are the best predictors of a viral Change.org petition?”, where there’s a chance of leveraging large groups who aren’t connected to EA at all.

  The work that a few EA-aligned people are doing to attempt to influence a parliamentary vote (using a relatively novel approach) may be of some interest to you, as well as this successful ballot initiative which involved some degree of public advocacy.

• Aaron Gertler 21 Jan 2021 10:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla’s comment on: vaidehi_agar­walla’s Shortform

  I don’t think the Forum is likely to serve as a good “group discussion platform” at any point in the near future. This isn’t about culture so much as form; we don’t have Slack’s “infinite continuous thread about one topic” feature, which is also present on Facebook and Discord, and that seems like the natural form for an ongoing discussion to take. You can configure many bits of the Forum to feel more discussion-like (e.g. setting all the comment threads you see to be “newest first”), but it feels like a round peg/​square hole situation.

  On the other hand, Slack seems reasonable for this!

• Aaron Gertler 21 Jan 2021 10:11 UTC

  3 points

  on: Me­gapro­ject Management

  Thanks for sharing this! I have a few large projects on the horizon, and while none of them are within five orders of magnitude of the examples mentioned here, I feel like I can still identify some snags to watch out for (in particular, doing more research to ensure the end results won’t be “underutilized”).

• Aaron Gertler 20 Jan 2021 20:16 UTC

  3 points

  on: End­ing a news habit

  I’ve used a lot of different tools to separate from websites I want to spend less time on. One recent “tool” that’s been especially helpful was actually a blog post: 7 Months Without Junk Media.

  Excerpts:

  For the last 7 months I have disconnected from news, social media, videogames, forums, web surfing, and streaming video.

  The positive effects are cumulative. I feel like I have more time. I am more creative. I even feel less conformist. I invent new ideas instead of parroting the news story of the day. This effect is especially cumulative. I get more sensitive to how media brainwashes me as the months of abstinence accumulate.

  [...]

  Are you afraid that by abstaining from news you might miss out on important events?

  No. In the last 7 months, exactly two important newsworthy events happened: COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. I did not miss out on either of them [...] If anything, ignoring the news has focused my attention on the local action it is within my power to do, such as volunteering for a local neighborhood watch.

  I read this post once per week. It hasn’t stopped me from using “junk media” completely (that was never my goal), but it has led to my spending less time on Twitter and games, and more time on books. (At least, those things have happened, and I think the post is partly responsible.)

Global Pri­ori­ties In­sti­tute: Re­search Agenda

• Aaron Gertler 20 Jan 2021 20:01 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ends vs. Means: To what ex­tent should we be will­ing to sac­ri­fice nu­ance and epistemic hu­mil­ity when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with peo­ple out­side EA?

  This is a good question with no clear answer. Overall, I tend to be more of a pro-marketing person than what I perceive as the EA average.

  However, I think there are a few good reasons to lean in the direction of “keeping more nuance and epistemic humility” that we might underappreciate (given the more obvious benefits of the other approach):

  1. Many of the world’s most successful/​thoughtful people will be unusually attracted to movements that are more nuanced and humble. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dustin Moskovitz were drawn to GiveWell partly because they weren’t as “salesy” as other charities (though I don’t know the details of this interaction, so maybe I’m wrong). People with a lot of resources or potential are constantly being approached by people who want to sell them on a new idea; a non-salesy EA could be very appealing in this context.

  2. If some groups within EA try to be more salesy, it could spark internal competition. Right now, I think EA does a pretty good job of being a neutral community, where someone who wants to contribute will get questions like “what are you interested in?”, rather than lots of pitches on particular organizations/​causes. If marketing becomes more prevalent, we might lose some of that collaborative atmosphere.

  3. Nuance and humility are also marketable! One type of pitch for EA that I think is undervalued: We are the social movement that values honesty more than any other movement. Political parties lie. Populist movements lie. We don’t lie, even if the truth isn’t exciting.

  4. EA doesn’t actually need giant walls of statistics to market itself. As you noted, the Singer/​Lindauer argument doesn’t discuss statistics or prioritization. But it still does a good job of making one of the central arguments of EA, in a way that can be extended to many other causes. Even if this particular empathetic approach wouldn’t work as well for longtermist orgs, pretty much every EA org is driven by a simple moral intuition that can be approached in a simple way, as Singer/​Lindauer did with “what if it were your child?”

• Aaron Gertler 20 Jan 2021 4:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: Sie­beRozen­dal’s Shortform

  Aww yes, people writing about their life and career experiences! Posts of this type seem to have some of the best ratio of “how useful people find this” to “how hard it is to write”—you share things you know better than anyone else, and other people can frequently draw lessons from them.

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 22:22 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: The ten most-viewed posts of 2020

  Rather than chasing down a bunch of stats to put into a comment, the best step for us seems to be putting up a “statistics” page that we occasionally update. I’m planning to add something like this in the next ~2 months.

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 20:23 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: florian-z’s comment on: Pri­vacy as a Blind Spot: Are There Long Term Harms in Us­ing Face­book, Google, Slack etc.?

  If you came to believe that the risk of data loss through admin error on a self-hosted system were lower than the breach-risk at Google, would that change your view on the convenience-security trade-off?

  I don’t think it’s about total likelihood of an event, but expected impact of said event. And because I have very weak priors about the likelihood of either event, getting any new information would probably change my view about the trade-off in some way.

  But changing my view on the trade-off looks more like “I now think EA funders should be open to spending $X per year on this rather than $Y” or “I now think groups with risk profile X should now be willing to switch even if their activity drops 10%”, rather than coming to believe something more sweeping and conclusive about the entire topic.

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 20:19 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”

  I don’t disagree with elements of this stance—this kind of career advice is probably strongly positive-EV to share in some form with the average medical student.

  But I think there’s a strong argument for at least trying to frame advice carefully if you have a good idea of how someone will react to different frames. And messages like “tell people X even if they don’t like hearing it” can obscure the importance of framing. I think that what advice sounds like to people can often be decisive in how they react, even if the most important thing is actually giving the good advice.

Hilary Greaves: The col­lec­tivist cri­tique of the EA movement

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 12:38 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Manuel_Allgaier’s comment on: Seek­ing part-time con­trac­tor for Face­book group support

  The nice thing about having someone working on the biggest group is that it’s a good “test case” for that person (or other such people) playing a similar role in smaller groups. Lots of new content = easier to see whether the work makes an impact.

  Other notes on this position:

  • By “less activity”, we don’t necessarily mean “not enough posts”—but we think that the average post could get more useful comments than it now does, that the average question could get a more thorough answer, etc. Perhaps the listing should have read “less high-quality activity” or something like that.

  • People who are just starting out in EA are more likely to come through the main FB group than any other space. A major part of this role is being a “friendly face” for newcomers and giving them a good first impression of EA as a community of helpful people. This doesn’t work as well unless the contractor is working where new people tend to gather.

  In general, I agree that cause-specific groups offer a better and more focused experience general groups on Facebook, but I also think that “Effective Altruism” is the right place to start this new experiment in paid moderation.

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 12:33 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Manuel_Allgaier’s comment on: Pri­vacy as a Blind Spot: Are There Long Term Harms in Us­ing Face­book, Google, Slack etc.?

  It might make sense! I’ll try to keep that in mind.

  Pros: Easier to discuss and vote for separate points

  Cons: Lots of separate replies and replies-to-replies means lots of notification and a variety of different threads to track; there’s a risk that I’m too lazy to split up comments like this

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 8:16 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”

  I don’t know of a practical scenario where either of those turned out to be bad advice

  (I don’t mean to pick too hard on this point, which is generally pointing at something true, but a counterexample sprang immediately to mind when I read it.)

  I know one medical student who wound up perceiving EA somewhat negatively after reading 80K’s early writing on the perils of being a doctor. This person is still fairly value-aligned and makes EA donations, but I saw them engage with the community much less than I’d have otherwise expected, because they thought they would face judgment for their career path and choices. (Even without being an EA specialist, this person is smart and capable and could have made substantial community contributions.)

  This person would almost certainly have had greater impact in EA-aligned operations or research, but they’d also dreamed of becoming a doctor since early childhood, and their relationship with their family was somewhat contingent on their following through on those dreams. (A combination of “Mom and Dad would be heartbroken if I chose a different career with no status in their community” and “I want to have a high-paying job so I can provide financial support to my family later”).

  Hence the strong reaction to the idea of a movement where being a doctor was a slightly odd, suspicious thing to do (at least, that was their takeaway from the 80K piece, and I found the impression hard to shake).

  This kind of story may be unusual, but I consider it to be one practical example of a time when the advice “don’t become a doctor” led to a bad result—though it’s arguable whether this makes it “bad advice” even in that one case.

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 7:37 UTC

  17 points

  on: Pri­vacy as a Blind Spot: Are There Long Term Harms in Us­ing Face­book, Google, Slack etc.?

  I upvoted the post because I thought these were worthwhile ideas to bring forward, and because I love the use of Elicit predictions. I also appreciate the attention paid to the idea that different groups/​orgs will have different security needs.

  However, I think some of the arguments in favor of “tech company platforms” are considerably stronger than the author does—and that platform-switching has higher costs than the author may believe.

  I’ll share the examples I have time to give:

  I agree that the ease of use of the interface does matter on the margin, but way less than the central motivating factors. I. e. what is motivating people to be involved in the first place and how valuable/​engaging the content is.

  I think it’s very easy to undervalue convenience. (Bryan Caplan gives examples of this, though his overarching point isn’t really related to this post.)

  I’ve heard many people tell me that their Forum participation sharply increased or decreased because we added a convenient new feature or ran into a bug that affected their work in a relatively minor way. Loading times can have dramatic effects on how people use websites. And while I haven’t seen statistics on this, I’d guess that communities often shed lots of members when they migrate between platforms; building a new app and interface into your existing routine/​habits isn’t always trivial.

  Good content is almost certainly the most important thing, but that doesn’t mean convenience isn’t also important, or that we can decide it doesn’t matter very much because it’s not the central motivating factor in how people participate online.

  To convince me that this is a severe problem, I would need to become convinced that the makeup of the EA Community changes drastically in the next years, and at the same time not enough financial resources become available to pay for professional sysadmins or at least smaller IT companies who offer managed hosting of open-source software solutions at reasonable prices.

  EA might have a lot of technical people, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to having lots of people who are willing to volunteer as sysadmins, will do the job reliably, and will transfer necessary information to a new person if they have to step down. (Google may be more vulnerable to breaches, but it seems much less likely than a small private server to lose data because someone makes a technical error or loses a key password—though I don’t have much confidence in this assertion, since I’m not a very technical person.)

  As you said, we don’t just have to use volunteers—many EA orgs are well-funded, enough to pay for this kind of service themselves. But others already have to scrimp and save to run their core programs.

  And it’s really nice that our current systems can be run by nontechnical people—it’s one less barrier to starting a new group or project, even if you could track down a volunteer sysadmin given time.

  As you say in your post, different organizations will have different requirements in this space. Many orgs probably should be taking secure communication more seriously. But maintenance time and funding are going to be real limiting factors for many orgs (especially smaller ones), and I think that’s a serious consideration.

  To convince me that I am overvaluing this, I would need to see that the increased community growth through using more widespread software services with marginally better user interface/​experience largely outweighs the expected long term harm to the movement through adversaries gaining access to our internal information.

  This seems like another way of saying that you have a strong prior in favor of valuing extra marginal security more than the convenience we’d lose in order to achieve that. That’s perfectly valid—but I don’t think anyone’s likely to soon be in a position (capability + willingness to spend time) to get good numbers on the expected difference in community growth in two hypothetical worlds. So you’ll have a hard time finding arguments that are capable of meeting a standard that would convince you.

  In cases like this, I like to ask myself whether there are more modest/​achievable types of evidence that could shift my position. One useful resource for gathering such evidence is the EA Polls Facebook group. You could consider asking questions like:

  • Would you switch to using (secure platform) for (EA purpose) if we decided to stop using (current platform)?

  • How do you think your participation in EA community discussion would change if all the (current platform) EA groups were migrated to (secure platform)?

  • How much would you pay per year to eliminate any chance of the data you’ve provided to EA orgs being revealed in a data breach?

  Questions like these can help you build better estimates of “increased community growth”, without forcing you to put an entire model together all at once.

• Aaron Gertler 19 Jan 2021 6:00 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Should pretty much all con­tent that’s EA-rele­vant and/​or cre­ated by EAs be (link)posted to the Fo­rum?

  A few notes on “deciding how much to crosspost”:

  • A single crosspost with a bit of context from the author—e.g. a few sentences each of summary/​highlights, commentary, and action items/​takeaways—seems better to me than three or four crossposts with no context at all. In my view, the best Forum content tends to give busy people a quick way to decide whether to read further.

  • “Written by someone connected to EA” is a decent filter, but quality/​”special” relevance seem like better filters.

  • In some ways, non-EA academics could be better to crosspost—they’re less likely to post their own work, and they’re more likely to be “discovered” by people who hadn’t seen their work before because it was outside the community. (That said, the greater likelihood that an EA-involved person participates in discussion still makes that feature seem net-positive to me.)

  • If people are sharing too much interesting information on the Forum, and the site becomes cluttered, that’s our team’s responsibility to handle—not a problem caused by the crossposter.

    • We might eventually try to push for higher standards if crossposts overwhelm the Forum, but I think we’re pretty far from that point right now.

    • Absent these “higher standards”, we have other ways to mitigate a potential flood of crossposts; for example, we could add a way for people to filter out crossposts from their feed (using a “crosspost” tag is the simple version of this, but linkposts are distinct from regular posts in our code, so there are probably other ways it could be built).

• Aaron Gertler 18 Jan 2021 7:25 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Should pretty much all con­tent that’s EA-rele­vant and/​or cre­ated by EAs be (link)posted to the Fo­rum?

  I meant “quite EA-relevant and well-written”. I don’t especially care whether the content is written by community members, though I suppose that’s slightly preferable (as community members are much more likely to respond to comments on their work).

  an article on nuclear risk from a non-EA academic

  Heck yeah.

  a well-written blog post by an EA that’s about philosophy or politics but not in a way that makes connections to EA focus areas very clear

  Depends on the post. Sometimes, connections to EA become clear if you delve deep enough into a topic, or if a bunch of people with EA-related specialties read it and consider how it might apply to their work. But if there really is no clear connection at all, I’d label the post as “Personal Blog” so that people can more easily choose whether to see it on their homepage.

• Aaron Gertler 18 Jan 2021 7:20 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: evhub’s comment on: Should pretty much all con­tent that’s EA-rele­vant and/​or cre­ated by EAs be (link)posted to the Fo­rum?

  Instinctively, I wish that discussion on these posts could all happen on the Alignment Forum, but since who can join is limited, having discussion here as well could be nice.

  I don’t know whether every single post should be posted here, but it would be nice to at least have occasional posts summarizing the best recent AF content. This might look like just crossposting every new issue of the Alignment Newsletter, which is something I may start doing soon.

• Aaron Gertler 18 Jan 2021 7:02 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: boondoggle’s comment on: Open and Wel­come Thread: Jan­uary 2021

  Hello, Aaron! My name is also Aaron, and I help to run the Forum.

  Computer science is an excellent starting point as a college major; it feeds into many other fields and gives you an easy way to take part in a huge number of projects if you decide to do that.

  80k hours also writes that potential AI safety researchers should have “strong technical abilities (at the level of a top 10 cs or math phd program globally)”, which seems really scary and difficult.

  I wouldn’t worry about this sort of thing at the outset. You’re at the top of your class, you’re studying linear algebra, and you’ve been doing math for fun—those are all good signs. If you look at the profiles of the people who are actually doing AI safety work, I think you’ll find quite a few whose educational backgrounds don’t match this profile.

  I’ve read that AI alignment is clearly an urgent global issue that’s very talent constrained, but AI itself is a super competitive field which which has way more supply than demand [...] I’m not sure if I’m willing to commit that much of my life to enter such a competitive field.

  Some competitive fields are very risky to pursue, because the skills you train in the process aren’t very lucrative outside of the competitive slots. Professional sports and orchestral music are two examples of risky paths like this.

  However, if you don’t get a position in AI safety, the skills you learned along the way will have been very lucrative. You might be slightly hindered if you’ve been spending time on obscure safety-related topics rather than something more commercial, but you’ll also have a network of contacts in the EA and AI safety communities (which are pretty well-connected in these areas).

  There are also a bunch of ways to “test” your skills in this area before you start applying to full-time jobs; for example, some organizations in the field have events and workshops aimed at students and other non-experts, and there are places like this forum and LessWrong where you can publish ideas and get feedback from people who work at AI safety orgs.

  So I don’t think you have to worry about committing too much of your life in this way, as long as you spend at least some of your time learning skills that will make you a solid candidate for industry jobs. (This doesn’t mean that AI safety is necessarily the best thing for you to do out of every possible path you could pursue—I just don’t think you should be wary of it for this reason.)

  I’m also wondering how much experience one needs in order to effectively contribute within AI safety; this article seems to suggest that with enough dedication, someone who comes from a competitive role in industry and doesn’t have a PhD can still impact the field in a positive way.

  You didn’t include a link to a specific article, but this sounds correct to me. AI safety is a very young field and there’s a lot of work to be done; this means there should be good opportunities to make progress without having to spend many years developing expertise beforehand.

  In addition, I’m super passionate about US elections analysis; I love reading stuff like the NYT Upshot/​Nate Cohn/​Dave Wasserman and learning about voting patterns and elections forecasting and demography; I was wondering if there is anybody in EA who shares similar interests, and whether there is any EA-related paths that relate to voting/​elections/​democracy in the US.

  There’s definitely some of this in EA! You might be interested in:

  • The Center for Election Science, which fights for plurality voting in the U.S. and has received a lot of grant funding from EA-aligned donors. It’s led by Aaron Hamlin, who is deeply passionate about improving our voting system (and is one of my personal favorite Aarons).

  • Rethink Priorities’ work on ballot initiatives (no need to read this whole thing, it’s just an example of EA people going deep on election-related work)

  • This post on electoral reform

  • The Open Model Project—this isn’t really an “EA” project, but one of their team members, Peter Hurford, is a longtime member of the community. If you want to do polling-related work, he could be a good person to talk to.

  Finally, I’m also applying to college this year, and I was wondering if there are any specific universities which have strong EA communities. I’ve applied to most of the UCs, ASU, U of A, and Cal Poly so I’m specifically wondering about those.

  You can find a fairly comprehensive list of EA groups here.

  Of the schools you listed: UC Berkeley has a sizable EA community and is located in one of the world capitals of EA (the other is Oxford, UK). UC San Diego has a moderately active group; I also live within walking distance of the school, so drop me a note if you end up there :-)

  Not sure about the rest of your list.

  I’m honestly really worried for what the future holds for our world and excited for how I might be able to do something about it.

  This seems like the ideal way to be thinking as a high-school senior. There are reasons to worry, but you’re in a good position to make a really big impact. College will be busy, and you’ll be exposed to lots of new ideas, but I hope you stay interested and involved with EA! Maybe I’ll see you at a conference in a year or two.

• Aaron Gertler 18 Jan 2021 6:34 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla’s comment on: CEA up­date: Q4 2020

  The Wiki would take the form of a bunch of tags, but a tag can be of any length and use all Forum formatting, so the articles should be flexible.

  Many initial tags/​articles will have long descriptions, but many others won’t. When Pablo finishes uploading the first batch of long descriptions, we’ll do a lot of advocacy on the Forum for people to start treating the tags as a Wiki and making lots of updated. This might involve prizes or something like that, but I don’t expect the launch to happen for a couple of months, so I don’t have details to share yet.