Division Manager: Forum and Events at CEA. Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok.
TikTok: @benthamite
Ben_West
Karma: 4,365
I think this is one of the best pieces of EA creative writing of all time.
Thanks for suggesting this. Publicly stating that I’m planning to take the week of January 23 off from work to try this. (For context: I’m a manager at the Center for Effective Altruism, and have never done technical AI safety research, though I have done various machine learning things.)
This post introduced the “hinge of history hypothesis” to the broader EA community, and that has been a very valuable contribution. (Although note that the author states that they are mostly summarizing existing work, rather than creating novel insights.)
The definitions are clear, and time has proven that the terms “strong longtermism” and “hinge of history” are valuable when considering a wide variety of questions.
Will has since published an updated article, which he links to in this post, and the topic has received input from others, e.g. this critique from Buck.
If I was going to introduce a new person to this concept today, I think I might instead link them to Holden’s Most Important Century sequence, although Will’s article still seems like the canonical reference for skepticism about us living at the hinge of history.
I think this report is still one of the best and most rigorous investigations into which beings are moral patients. However, in the five years since it’s been published it’s influenced my thinking less than I had expected in 2017 – basically, few of my practical decisions have hinged on whether or not some being merits moral concern. This is somewhat idiosyncratic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s had more of an impact on e.g. those who work on invertebrate welfare.
Good point
This is cool! I’ve added it to the forum sidebar so that it gets more visibility. Let me know if you would like the text to be different – I wasn’t sure what the official name of your project is.
The FTX fellowship is kind of an example of this. I’m not sure exactly how many people have received a fellowship, but my impression is that there a decent number of people going to the Bahamas.
Have you considered a donor lottery? It seems specifically designed to address this problem.
Maybe you are planning to donate enough money that the lottery at its current size would be pointless. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that someone is willing to backstop a larger one time lottery.
I think it would be cool if someone wrote a post about Bob Purifoy. He’s mentioned several times in Command and Control; briefly, he was an engineer and then manager at Sandia National laboratory, who was influential in nuclear security basically by just being extremely stubborn and motivated by safety. He gave a huge number of briefings (I want to say the number was in the thousands, but I can’t find the reference right now) to policymakers, and occasionally stretched the rules to make nuclear weapons technology more secure.
I think it might provide a helpful model for how people can promote safety within large bureaucracies, even if they are not a top executive.
(I thought at one point I had found a eulogy which gave more information about his work, but I can’t find it now. Possibly someone could reach out to Eric Schlosser, the author of command and control, to see if he has more information.)
This is really cool. The format makes it easy to see different conclusions and the cruxes people are relying on to reach those different conclusions. Thanks to you and the reviewers for doing this work, and spending the time to present it in such an easily understandable way!
I think there is a typo in your introductory example:
Should I buy travel insurance for $10? I think there’s about a 1% chance I’ll use it (probability—blue), in which case it will get me a $500 airfare refund (value—red). Since 1% * values = $500, I should not buy it for $10.
“Values” should be $500 and “= $500″ should be “= $5”. (This is fixed in your appendix.)
Yep, this exists!
Thanks Ryan! I am also interested in twitter, but it seems like a pretty different use case. If I choose a random post which is currently on the front page of the Forum, for example, I’m hesitant to suggest “how about you turn your 4,000 word guide about running a workplace group into a twitter thread.” (Whereas a video guide to running a workplace group seems plausibly useful to me.)
I agree with you that sponsoring content creation is potentially useful, and something I would like our new content specialist to consider.
Thanks! That’s helpful
Supporting Video, Audio, and other non-text media on the Forum
Thanks for doing this Nuno! I’m a little confused about the Google analytics data: it’s showing that there were 10,000 users/week for the wiki during Aug 2021-Sept 2021, but there are also 10,000 users/week for the forum total in that same time window. So ~100% of our users were on the wiki? That seems implausible to me.
Edit: I think I see the view you are using (I work at CEA). What you are doing seems like it should work, but I definitely see page views on things that are posts, not wiki articles. Possibly this is looking at all users who saw a wiki article at some point in their journey?
Meta: thanks for turning this into a forum post! It seems like it’s sparked good discussion that wouldn’t have happened if it was solely on Facebook.
This is a really interesting idea, thanks!
Thanks! Could you say anything more about the use case for these tags? E.g. in what circumstance would you want to meet someone online?
The #EffectiveAltruism tag on TikTok is pretty hit or miss, but arguably qualifies as art. Playlists aren’t viewable in the web client, but I have an effective altruism playlist in my profile (@Benthamite) if you use the mobile app.
Various social media meme groups are similar, notably DEAM/OMfCT. See also the meme tag on the EA forum.
Jason Crawford has progress-related poems
Some wedding related poetry/vows here
José Oliveira makes artwork in exchange for donations to AMF and has a large portfolio of such paintings, although the subject matter is usually not EA related.
Secular solstice often has EA-adjacent themes