I understand how it may be weird given how much he trolls them, but he is among the most influential writers on the Right.
burner
Karma: 1,115
That people keep insinuating that Yarvin attended speaks to the issues with this whole discussion
To be clear—the exact problem is that you are proposing excluding specific speakers (Hanania, Hsu, Hanson, the Collinses, etc) - who I find valuable to various degrees, not ideas. If Manifest issued a notice that it was not a venue to discuss IQ or heritability, that seems much more reasonable than excluding these thinkers.
(Why do Hanson and Hanania need to be speakers? They are the foremost advocates of prediction markets on the Right. Their support would be incredibly important in building a cross-party coalition).
As a right-wing person sympathetic to many EA ideals, I’m surprised when I read these posts about how we need to exclude these people to make attendees comfortable. In fact, excluding these people—who I find incredibly smart, reasonable, and valuable—would make me (and I’m sure many of my friends on the Right) extremely uncomfortable.
It seems like you are referring to Richard Hanania—who has been invited twice. I suspect that he was invited because Hanania has been an outspoken advocate of prediction markets. I find it highly doubtful that Hanania has, on net, pushed more people away from Manifest (and prediction markets) than been a draw to them attending.
If you cancel speakers from attending a future Manifest, won’t that also make the conference less attractive and acceptable to a large swathe of people interested in forecasting?
Tl;dr: 8 conservatives went to a conference and were friendly. Some also lived near by, and some also exist but didn’t go.
(1) fetal anesthesia as a cause area intuitively belongs with ‘animal welfare’ rather than ‘global health & development’, even though fetuses are human.
It seems like about half the country disagrees with that intuition?
What are the best summer opportunities for (freshman and sophomore) college students in CS/ML interested in technical alignment or AI policy?
burner’s Quick takes
When I have read grants, most have (unfortunately) fallen closer to: “This idea doesn’t make any sense” than “This idea would be perfect if they just had one more thing”. When a grant falls into the latter, I suspect recipients do often get advice.
I think the problem is that most feedback would be too harsh and fundamental—these are very difficult and emotionally costly conversations to have. It can also make applicants more frustrated and spread low fidelity advice on what the grant maker is looking for. A rejection (hopefully) encourages the applicant to read and network more to form better plans.
I would encourage rejected applicants to speak with accepted ones for better advice.
Most of this seems focused on Alice’s experience and allegations. As I understand it, most parties involved—including Kat—believe Chloe to be basically reliable, or at least much more reliable.
Given all that, I’m surprised that this piece does not do more to engage with what Chloe herself wrote about her experience in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=gvjKdRaRaggRrxFjH
From Ben: “After this, there were further reports of claims of Kat professing her romantic love for Alice, and also precisely opposite reports of Alice professing her romantic love for Kat. I am pretty confused about what happened.”
Could you comment?
throw e/acc on there too
There was a Works in Progress magazine article about this https://worksinprogress.co/issue/markets-in-fact-checking
Thanks, that’s helpful context!
I find it a bit weird—possibly unhelpful—to blend a big picture cause prioritization argument and the promotion of a specific matching campaign.
GiveDirectly, Effective Altruism Australia, EA Aotearoa New Zealand, Every.org, The Life You Can Save
What’s going on with the coauthorship here—multiple organizations wrote this post together? Should this be read as endorsements, or something else?
(1) The topic is often sensationalised by many who talk about it
Many things are sensationalized. This is not good evidence for or against fertility being a problem. Many accuse AIXR of being sensationalized.
(2) some of these people, infer that it could result in humanity going extinct.
I do not think smart fertility advocates believe that populations would slowly dwindle until there was one person left. Obviously that is a silly model. The serious model, described in Ch. 7 of What We Owe the Future, is that economic growth will slow to a crawl, and the time of perils will be extended. You can also see this model in Aschenbrenner 2020.
(3) If it’s a sociological phenomenon, it’s substantially less likely to result in x-risk, because presumably when faced with extinction, future humans would be willing to have more children.
This is why I think “sociological phenomenon” is confusing more than it is enlightening here. Humans make fertility decisions—based on a wide variety of factors which we do not fully understand—and those decisions matter long before we are on the verge of extinction from depopulation. We do have a number of handles to influence these decisions, should we choose to use them.
Ultimately, I do not believe fertility is a risk because AI will accelerate economic growth even as populations decline, but it is frustrating to see people fail to appreciate the key factors here in their model, and instead dismiss the issue as sensationalized.
It seems somewhat irresponsible to title this post “every mention of EA in Going Infinite” if it only includes a handful of the many mentions of EA in Going Infinite. Appreciate you for clarifying!
In the left-wing EA culture. Most of these people have been widely published in magazines, featured on major TV programs, etc.