It’s very likely a sociological phenomena, and so behaviour change could occur if/when time occurs
This is extremely vague and hard to parse.
burner
Karma: 1,115
Chapter 7 of What We Owe the Future has some discussion along these lines. I hope that most EAs are not prioritizing this issue not because it’s not important, but because short to medium AI timelines present a more urgent problem.
Yes, instead they should take a play money low liquidity prediction market at face value
There’s something darkly funny about the idea that one would need to “be a shark,” “move fast and break things,” threaten and coerce employees,” “”crush enemies”...
All to… publish a podcast of already written articles? Do some career coaching?
I certainly don’t think it suggests he’s a bad actor, but it seems reasonable to consider it improper conduct with a small organization of people living and working together—even if Alice and Chloe don’t see it as an issue. I don’t have a strong view one way or the other, but it seemed worth flagging in the context of your claim .
Thanks—more sympathetic to the ask in that case, though I don’t think you were obliged to wait.
Within the community tab ‘New and Upvoted’ seems to still be the same posts, month after month. Perhaps new should gain more weight, given the current posting frequency and upvoting?
The article alleges he was dating an employee who seems to have been a subborniate, which someone might claim is improper conduct.
They also said that in the past day or so (upon becoming aware of the contents of the post), they asked Ben to delay his publication of this post by one week so that they could gather their evidence and show it to Ben before he publishes it (to avoid having him publish false information). However, he refused to do so.
This is really weird to me. These allegations have been circling for over a year, and presumably Nonlinear has known about this piece for months now. Why do they still need to get their evidence together? And even if they do—just due to extraneous circumstances—why do they feel so entitled to the piece being held for a week, when they have had ample time to collect their side of the story.
Edited, thank you!
I’m very disappointed in the author for writing a non-rigorous, slanderous accusation of an organization that does a whole lot of good
What are you accusing of being slanderous?
Influencing the creation of Professor Quirrel in HPMOR and being influenced by Professor Quirrel in HPMOR both seem to correlate with being a bad actor in EA—a potential red flag to watch out for.
they’ll be paying maybe $500 for a ticket that costs us $1000.
There may be room for more effective price discrimination here. When one buys a ticket to EAG from a corporation that is not price sensitive, ideally they would pay (at least) the complete cost of their admission. I recall their being tiers beyond “full price”—to sponsor other attendees—but this would not be a legitimate corporate expense. Could there be an easy way for corporate attendees to pay the full price?
IMO there’s a difference between evaluating arguments to the best of your ability and just deferring to the consensus around you.
Of course. I just think evaluating and deferring can look quite similar (and a mix of the two is usually taking place).
OP seems to believe students are deferring because of other frustrations. As many have quoted: “If after Arete, someone without background in AI decides that AI safety is the most important issue, then something likely has gone wrong”.
I’ve attended Arete seminars at Ivy League universities and seen what looked liked fairly sophisticated evaluation to me.
but I am very concerned with just how little cause prioritization seems to be happening at my university group
I’ve heard this critique in different places and never really understood it. Presumably undergraduates who have only recently heard of the empirical and philosophical work related to cause prioritization are not in the best position to do original work on it. Instead they should review arguments others have made and judge them, as you do in the Arete Fellowship. It’s not surprising to me that most people converge on the most popular position within the broader movement.
Capitalism is good, actually.
Establishing a Justice, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity (JEID) committee.
Why was this valuable?
Dwarkesh Patel recently asked Holden about this:
Dwarkesh PatelAre you talking about OpenAI? Yeah. Many people on Twitter might have asked if you were investing in OpenAI.
Holden Karnofsky
I mean, you can look up our $30 million grant to OpenAI. I think it was back in 2016–– we wrote about some of the thinking behind it. Part of that grant was getting a board seat for Open Philanthropy for a few years so that we could help with their governance at a crucial early time in their development. I think some people believe that OpenAI has been net negative for the world because of the fact that they have contributed a lot to AI advancing and to AI being sort of hyped, and they think that gives us less time to prepare for it. However, I do think that all else being equal, AI advancing faster gives us less time to prepare. It is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s the only consideration. I think OpenAI has done a number of good things too, and has set some important precedents. I think it’s probably much more interested in a lot of the issues I’m talking about and risks from advanced AI than like the company that I would guess would exist if they didn’t, would be doing similar things.
I don’t really accept that the idea that OpenAI is a negative force. I think it’s highly debatable. We could talk about it all day. If you look at our specific grant, it’s even a completely different thing because a lot of that was not just about boosting them, but about getting to be part of their early decision making. I think that was something that there were benefits and was important. My overall view is that I don’t look back on that grant as one of the better grants we’ve made, not one of the worse ones. But certainly we’ve done a lot of things that have had, you know, that have not worked out. I think there are some times shortly when we’ve done things that have consequences we didn’t intend. No philanthropist can be free of that. What we can try and do is be responsible, seriously do our homework to try to understand things beforehand, see the risks that we’re able to see, and think about how to minimize them.
This is textbook Gell-Mann amnesia
This misunderstands the fertility problem. Most fertility advocates focus on the fertility gap—the gap between how many children people want to have and actually have (which is fewer than they want). It’s also not that richer people (within countries) want to have less kids. We’re seeing U shaped fertiliy trends, where the rich have more children than the middle class.
This implies it is not a “sociological phenomenon” (except in a trivial sense) and is instead a complex mix of social, cultural and economic factors that we do not yet totally understand.
It’s extremely dubious whether these are a factor at all. See Ritchie here, for example.
But the crux of of my disagreement was your phrasing:
I’m still not sure what that means, but if your general point is that we can’t influence behavioral changes through interventions (economic, education, etc) that is obviously incorrect.