Longtermist movement-builder. How can we find and mentor talented people to reduce existential risk?
Interested in community-building, management, entrepreneurship, communication, and AI Alignment.
Formerly a PhD student in clinical psychology @ UPenn, college student at Harvard, and summer research fellow at the Happier Lives Institute.
I’d be excited about posts that argued “I think EAs are overestimating AI x-risk, and here are some aspects of EA culture/decision-making that might be contributing to this.”
I’m less excited about posts that say “X thing going on EA is bad”, where X is a specific decision that EAs made [based on their estimate of AI x-risk]. (Unless the post is explicitly about AI x-risk estimates).
Related: Is that your true rejection?
Thanks for writing this, Eli. I haven’t read WWOTF and was hoping someone would produce an analysis like this (especially comparing The Precipice to WWOTF).
I’ve seen a lot of people posting enthusiastically about WWOTF (often before reading it) and some of the press that it has been getting (e.g., cover of TIME). I’ve felt conflicted about this.
On one hand, it’s great that EA ideas have the opportunity to reach more people.
On the other hand, I had a feeling (mostly based on quotes from newspaper articles summarizing the book) that WWOTF doesn’t feature AI safety and doesn’t have a sense of “hey, a lot of people think that humanity only has a few more decades [or less] to live.”
I hope that EAs concerned about AIS champion resources that accurately reflect their sense of concern, feature AI safety more prominently, and capture the emotion/tone felt by many in the AIS community. (List of Lethalities is a good example here, though it has its own flaws and certainly isn’t optimizing for widespread appeal in the same way that WWOTF seems to be).
Not yet, and I’m to blame. I’ve been focusing on a different project recently, which has demanded my full attention.
Will plan to announce the winners (and make winning entries public, unless authors indicated otherwise) at some point this month.
+1 on questioning/interrogating opinions, even opinions of people who are “influential leaders.”
My hope is that readers don’t come away with “here is the set of opinions I am supposed to believe” but rather “ah here is a set of opinions that help me understand how some EAs are thinking about the world.” Thank you for making this distinction explicit.
Disagree that these are mostly characterizing the Berkeley community (#1 and #2 seem the most Berkeley-specific, though I think they’re shaping EA culture/funding/strategy enough to be considered background claims. I think the rest are not Berkeley-specific).