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Charles He
Karma: 2,590
FTX.com has probably collapsed
What you said seems valid. However, unfortunately, it seems low EV to talk a lot about this subject. Maybe the new EA comms and senior people are paying attention to the issues, and for a number of reasons that seems best in this situation. If that’s not adequate, it seems valid to push or ask them about it.
There are writing issues and I’m not sure the net value of the post is positive.
But your view seems ungenerous, ideas in paragraphs like this seem relevant:
This isn’t a snide jab at Will MacAskill. He in fact recognized this problem before most and has made the wise choice of not being the CEO of the CEA for a decade now even though he could have kept the job forever if he wanted.
This is a general problem in EA of many academics having to repeatedly learn they have little to no comparative advantage, if not a comparative disadvantage, in people and operations management.
Some of the individuals about who there is the greatest concern that may end up in a personality cult, information silo, or echo chamber, like Holden, are putting in significant effort to avoid becoming out of touch with reality and minimizing any negative, outsized impact of their own biases.
Yet it’s not apparent if Musk makes any similar efforts. So, what, if any, are the reasons specific to Musk as a personality causing him to be so inconsistent in the ways effective altruists should care about most?
Wait!
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work, this unjoined me.
My statement which discussed “competency” was wrong as written. It was noise without information. Additionally, my original claim did not involve people primarily being in EA-related organizations.
Sorry for the distraction. Thank you for your informative post.
Both the vibes and possibly the reality of tech layoffs/demand for SWE is falling, at least on Hacker news.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463908
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025223
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083279
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32312303
This seems useful to flag (might be big enough that it seems like an opportunity for the various orgs that are looking for SWE and other talent, even after considering fit/alignment/lemons).
I don’t know anything about AI or machine learning. I’m not an EA or longtermist, I just an opportunist/chancer who heard EA has a lot of money so I added AI to my profile.
I don’t agree with your post:
I think it’s unlikely that any practical implementation would provide security, for example, hostile agents could gain access ways by compromising one individual or other pretty prosaic ways, e.g. see Five Eyes. This can be stopped by some very elaborate Signal style service, but that has substantial drawbacks.
Even for limited implementations, the nature of research and collaboration makes locking this down extremely costly and impractical.
Generally, models of AI safety are the design of systems that are resistant from a mathematical/mechanism design sort of way, it’s irrelevant how much the AI understands it or even how intelligent they are (interpretability: I can always see what you are thinking/ELK: I can always obtain your plans after I breed a genius-level cervidae in Berkeley).
(Taking the post at face value) this is surprising this has so few upvotes .
From this post at least, the OP seems to have a lot of competency (besides getting funding/using resources/networking from EA) and that is rarer these days.
For the object level content of the prize/activity itself, this seems useful and could bring in outside resources (not just money) into EA.
(To the degree, and on the very substantial assumption that this internet content is valuable and important) this would be useful tag for a hostile AI.
Yes! Thank you!
It’s still there!
This is association is harmful for my EA forum experience. Pls fix senpai.
This week, someone correctly used “race condition” in a reply.
Maybe what you might mean is that information that might be very valuable in the future for more niche, local tasks? A problem is that you want to make these accessible, even if you don’t need them right now.
Random thoughts:
I make “cookbooks” for tasks that are complex/intricate, but I don’t need to remember the details for (e.g. plan complex activities, international travel, computer reinstall, Python/dev /AWS/proxmark3 environments) that give context/steps/tips. This helps a huge amount.
These cookbooks are in their own archive, as part of a system like “Getting things done”.
Another class of things are like learning new keyboard shortcuts. This is different because it’s valuable now, and increasing in value the more I learn, but there’s a slow learning curve.
I try to put them in an accessible tab/note/archive so I can consult/learn from them later.
Dark mode is too stronk, especially on mobile phones.
The background is too dark (
it’s literally black)and the the text is too close to white.Notes:
This is most painful on mobile phones, where screen brightness is sort of set for consumption of media, not for productivity and long reading.
For dark color schemas that are moderate, very successful implementations of dark mode are in Apple iPhone “Reader mode” and Apollo:
Here is a good suggested setting (from Apple reader):
Adding flavors of dark mode seems good.
Solving this by brightening the background somewhat, will help with the issue that many graphs/graphics are white and really pop out of a black background.
You might want to clarify what this highlighted text is saying:
Check your Ghost blog link style settings for dark mode, links hard to see:
I think Ryan Carey has a valid point. Current issues are valid and need to be respected.
However, I want to raise the thought: Maybe posting decisions should be mainly guided by its impact on posts in the long term future.
If you consider this diagram, it’s clear that, as an EA blogger put it: “out of a staggering number of [posts that] will ever exist, our [posts] will be among the first.”
If the forum moderator runs an event that decreases forum quality for 1 month, I think this is a small price to pay for the chance this increases long term posting quality/quantity.
Could you explain why? I don’t see why it should, really.
Well, in one sense that is shallow, what would an agnostic person + (some other religion mean)?
Maybe more deeper (?): it seems like some religions like Buddhism, which accepts other practices, would be understood to accept other practices. So it’s not clear if a Buddhist who selected multiple options had different beliefs, or was just very being very comprehensive and communicative like a good EA.
I think one consideration is that they want to make the surveys comparable year to year, and if people can select many categories, that would be make it difficult.
For adding multiple options, I think there’s another sense of challenge, where if someone could select different political identities or religions, that would make the result difficult to interpret. It seems sort of “mainstream” for better or worse, that there is one category for some of the things you mentioned.
Zooming out, it seems that instead of seeing things like single/multiple as sort of a didactic/right or wrong choice or trying to impose a viewpoint, these seem to be design decisions, that is sort of inherently imperfect in some sense, and part of some bigger vision or something.
I think this has an article here. It seems pretty mainstream: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3661434/remote-bricking-of-ukrainian-tractors-raises-agriculture-security-concerns.html
Note the Ukraine element/symbols.
So I guess tractors are one part of the “right to repair” movement. For tractors, I think there’s some aspect of it being associated with the halo and respect for farmers in the US, as opposed to food supply security.
My, uh, not confident guess, is that it seems implausible that this is a structural problem that affects food supply (like, in the sense that there is some structural pressure/absorbing state where the worlds tractors tend to have software that is vulnerable to being locked out.)
It would be great to know if the above is wrong, especially if there actually is some kind of structural thing about electronics that tend to brick products.
Honestly both posts are very well written, short and have a lot of content.