I’m an AI Program Officer at Longview Philanthropy, though all views I express here are my own.
Before Longview I was a researcher at Open Philanthropy and a Charity Entrepreneurship incubatee.
Ben Stewart
Karma: 1,941
Thanks for this. Post-hoc theorizing:
‘doing good better’ calls to mind comparisons to the reader’s typical ideas about doing good. It implicitly criticizes those examples, which is a negative experience for the reader and could cause defensiveness.
‘Do the most good’ makes the reader attempt to imagine what that could be, which is a positive and interesting question, and doesn’t immediately challenge the reader’s typical ideas about doing good.
It wouldn’t have been obvious to me before the fact whether the above stuff wouldn’t be outweighed by worries about reactions to ‘the most good’ or what have you, so I appreciate you gathering empirical evidence here.
“Given leadership literature is rife with stories of rejected individuals going on to become great leaders”
The selection effect can be very misleading here — in that literature you usually don’t hear from all the individuals who were selected and failed, nor those who were rejected correctly and would have failed, and so on. Lots of advice from the start-up/business sector is super sus for this exact reason.
I would wait for METR’s actual evaluation — ’30 hours’ is just based on claims of continued effort, not actual successful performance on carefully measured tasks.
I think it’s possible to gain the efficiency of using LLM assistance without sacrificing style/tone — it just requires taste and more careful prompting/context, which seems worth it for a job ad. Maybe it works for their intended audience, but puts me off.
What can I read to understand the current and near-term state of drone warfare, especially (semi-)autonomous systems?
I’m looking for an overview of the developments in recent years, and what near-term systems are looking like. I’ve been enjoying Paul Scharre’s ‘Army of None’, but given it was published in 2018 it’s well behind the curve. Thanks!
I don’t know. My guess is that they give very slim odds to the Trump admin caring about carbon neutrality, and think that the benefit of including a mention in their submission to be close to zero (other than demonstrating resolve in their principles to others).
On the minus side, such a mention risks a reaction with significant cost to their AI safety/security asks. So overall, I can see them thinking that including a mention does not make sense for their strategy. I’m not endorsing that calculus, just conjecturing.
Object-level aside, I suspect they’re aware their audience is the hypersensitive-to-appearances Trump admin, and framing things accordingly. Even basic, common sense points regarding climate change could have a significant cost to the doc’s reception.
One might distinguish de jure openness (“We let everyone in!”) with de facto (“We attract X subgroups, and repel Y!”). The homogeneity and narrowness of the recent conference might suggest the former approach has not been successful at intellectual openness.
The point wasn’t to motivate intuitions on the broader issue, but demonstrate that exclusionary beliefs could be a coherent concept. I agree your version is better for motivating broader intuitions
Thanks. Given Alice has committed no crime, and everything else about her is ‘normal’, I think organizers would need to point to her belief to justify uninviting or banning her. That would suggest that an individual’s beliefs can (in at least one case) justify restricting their participation, on the basis of how that belief concerns other (prospective) attendees.
Yes I’m not saying anyone was—this is a thought experiment to see if exclusionary beliefs can be a coherent concept. We can stipulate that Alice has this sincere belief, but no history of such attacks (she’s never met a Bob), and hasn’t made any specific threats against Bob. It’s just a belief - a subjective attitude about the world. If Bob does not attend due to knowing about Alice’s belief, is that reasonable in your view?
As a light thought experiment, what if Alice’s belief X was “People called Bob are secret evil aliens who I should always try to physically attack and maim if I get the opportunity” ?
Bob would understandably be put off by this belief, and have a pretty valid reason to not attend an event if he knew someone who believed it were present. Does it seem reasonable that Bob would ask that Alice (or people who hold the attack-secret-alien-Bobs belief) not be invited as speakers? Is that a heckler’s veto, and contrary to free expression and intellectual enquiry? Is Bob’s decision not to attend just a matter of his own feelings?
If answers to the above questions are ‘no’, it suggests it’s possible for a belief to be an ‘exclusionary belief’, on your terms.
That’s reasonable. My point is that it’s much less clear and open to contestation that Hanania’s article says the opposite of what the headline is, but given the example is ~retracted anyway my point is not important
He says wokeness is in the “top 5-10, depending how you count”. That doesn’t seem to be ‘nowhere near’?
Ah okay, I understand better now, thanks. There could be better examples given OP and EA have legitimate controversy, such that I wouldn’t find that phrasing objectionable, but I take your point
Yeah that was a bit strong, sorry late here. I’m conflating reacting to Hanania et al. vs reacting to Manifest, which I shouldn’t do. Thanks for pointing to the note—what do you think of the ‘controversy’ being ‘in EA’ vs ‘in public’?
Could you point me to where he does so? I only see mentions of genocide in the title (which he does not contradict), and in the context of liberals’ relative hatred. And where he says “Emotionally, I don’t identify with the tribe of ‘people who don’t commit genocide.’”
My claim is that the article did not drive the objections and disagreements at hand, and is instead a contingent trigger of discussion. The voluminous and intense debate in this and other threads are indicative that stridently opposing views on this have been in place for some time. So ‘controversial’ within EA seems not driven by the article. Public controversy may indeed be driven by the article—I doubt the public had any knowledge or interest in Manifest (and I don’t know if this article has had any traction outside of these circles). The exception may this New York Times article, which did not focus on any controversy and had a very mild note about Hanania: “Richard Hanania, the conservative commentator, signed copies of his book on wokeness.”
So I think I implied something I didn’t intend here. I thought you were saying that the article’s slant drove the current criticism—that I strongly deny. But if you were saying that the article’s slant drove public controversy (if there is some), then I agree that my personal beliefs don’t matter much. I agree with the comments in the rest of the thread that focusing on ‘public controversy’ isn’t capturing the substance of the critique—i.e. that Manifest’s decisions are and have been bad not in terms of PR, but bad for its own epistemics, the forecasting community, EA, and basic human decency.
I would hold a tighter grip on your horses. The article does not contravene the headline. Hanania talks at length about how much he hates wokeness.[1] He doesn’t mention his views on genocide. He notes that some issues are more important than being anti-woke (as an example, he mentions anti-aging research). So in sum, this article suggests:
he hates wokeness vehemently
he thinks some issues are more important than wokeness.
It seems entirely consistent with the article that Hanania hates wokeness more than genocide, and a straightforward reading of the headline and context would support this. We don’t know whether Hanania puts genocide as one of the ‘5-10’ more important issues.
So we have mildly positive, at best neutral evidence on how Hanania rates genocide compared to wokeness. ‘Thinks is worse’ could mean different things. One reading is that ‘worse = rates as a more important problem’ (on which we should be unsure). Another reading is ‘worse = hates more’ (on which we have positive evidence). Either reading is reasonable.- ^
E.g. “I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it.”
I thought this was great! Seems like a very accessible way to spread this info.
Two minor notes—when you perch you get a little stuck where you can’t move or unperch, I only got free by clicking socialize. And in the caged scenario, I shared the space with 2 other chickens, not 5-10 like the info says. Making the surroundings of the cage depicting other chickens would be more intense too, rather than the existing pattern.
If you were you or others were going to extend it, I’d imagine gamifying it might be interesting. Eg you gain points by performing the natural behaviors, and points allow you to unlock the more elaborate natural behaviors. And then having some mechanic where you have to choose the deleterious behaviors (attacking other chickens, pulling own feathers). Maybe some stress bar that increases as a function of the space you have. Performing natural behaviors brings the stress down, and this is manageable in the kinder scenarios. But in cages, the stress is increasing rapidly and the natural behaviors aren’t available, so you’re forced to do the deleterious ones.)
The main benefit of doing this gamification would be to increase the chance people get interested, or that some streamer gives it a go.
Nice work!