pre-doc at Data Innovation & AI Lab
previously worked in options HFT and tried building a social media startup
founder of Northwestern EA club
Charlie_Guthmann
Karma: 1,236
The all else equal logic is true but its basically fully internalized by normal people ++ to the point where I’d say you should be actively pushing the other way. Literally every kid I want to college with just brain off did like consulting after school largely to preserve option value/career capital (not to necc deploy it for impact later but still). People are extremely risk averse from the POV of a social planner. I’m not saying for any given subset of work you shouldn’t think hard about career capital but if you go job agnostic with this mindset it’s highly constraining. Like i’m pretty sure if I was the social planner god I’d be telling way more smart people to “send it”.
Also re tractability: yes and no. I think early in your career you don’t need to even think that hard about “success” unless you are in an extremely technical / research type thing. Like most jobs if you are consistent, responsible, decent, and good at networking you are gonna get most of the career capital juice there. Yes of course doing something really successfully at 23 is a huge boost but you aren’t going to be heavily punished for not having that. Once you are a couple years into your career, I think the onus to “own” some real successes goes up.
Something else that I didn’t see brought up is how an IPO will effect difficultly of pausing.
Thanks for the kind words!
Responding to point 4, I think your response is extremely fair and basically correct, it’s a bit unfair for me to criticize EA for not being something that it obviously isn’t. But I think my response to that is very relevant to you, which is that you should be thinking about what you want EA to be. Should EA be a library, that doesn’t weigh in or put it’s resources behind specific interventions? Or on the other end, it could be extremely “active”. I think right now it’s somewhere in the middle, which isn’t necc bad but always confusing to me. Like you could say “look EA isn’t going to get political that’s out of scope” but isn’t choosing who speaks at EAG political? isn’t giving resources for fellowships that are at minimum utilitarian adjacent political? Why is the line teaching people applied utilitarianism and not directly being an activist organization?
Not saying it should be one or the other but hope people keep thinking about this stuff.
Recap of my last month of AI street interviews
I’m biking and Amtraking to Berkeley to join the plzdontkillme house july 1st. I’m gonna try to interview people along the way about ai/technology/practical philosophy.
You can follow me on insta https://www.instagram.com/charlie.guthmann/ or youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmTkQjHjs2cVgca3eC5vHcQ
Bear with me as I’m learning how to use social media and do content creation.
Here is the video I made a month ago (with the help of Diego, who is the linked channel), if you want to get a sense of what I’m trying to do. Advice welcome!
thanks, just donated.
ok and sorry to bother but you still think it’s high ev to donate (3 days since the last person said it still seemed useful).
can you explain (or do you have a link to someone who has already explained) the logic behind AMPA donation? I’m guessing it’s just that they are completely on our side for this specific issue because animal welfare and small farmers are aligned here but I’m concerned I’m gonna give money to the “american meat producers” and they will spend some of it lobbying SOB but keep most of it in escrow and then spend it lobbying against e.g. plant based meat next year?
Relating to the Bernie news today, I don’t think capitalism is compatible with believing in the singularity and some combo of humanism/utilitarianism. I have been a neolib for a long time before now fwiw. If you ran the zoo would you give the biggest banana to the sexiest gorilla?
I’m in the “killing/eating animals is (mostly) fine but torturing them/giving them intensely negative lives is not” camp. To me giving farm animals reasonable lives would basically be total victory (in this small slice of the total animal suffering).
I think the idea of “ending meat eating” without PBM seems very impossible in the medium term (10-30 years) (and maybe impossible with PBM), but forcing the government to regulate farms (adding as much utility as possible, with an allowed +30-50% price increase, effectively a tax on suffering) seems totally possible to me. Maybe not quite yet because we are too poor but at some point pretty soon (like potentially when the elasticity of meat starts approaching 0). I think the parsimonious answer is that people do in fact have compassion for farm animals. Just not as much as for dogs and they gain more from their suffering. I’d expect if we double US GDP in the next ~15 years even without a lot of other culture changes (ignoring that ai will rule the world for sec.) it will be much more politically palatable to ban (or tax) animal torture of all mammals at least.
I’m sure ACE and others have thought much more about this and have actual psychological evidence, for my part I guess I just feel a little bit optimistic that humanity can fix this soonish.
Broadly in agreement but I don’t think the examples are actually the pure version of what he is saying. It sounds like he is classifying goods based on the ratio of private benefit/social effect ish, so yes things with a very high private benefit and plausibly low externalities are definitely good but I feel less confident than him we could say that about refrigerators for instance.
OpenAI is claiming a legitimate breakthrough on a “prominent open question”. I don’t know exactly how to phrase this, but I’m well past the point where i’m interested in arguing whether or not we are on the precipice of some insane stuff. Yes there are still reasonable disputes about exact timelines, foom, economic impacts, diffusion curves, etc. I’m not saying the world is gonna end in 2029. But if you are legitimately arguing anything approximating stochastic parrots, or that this is just a hype train, I’m going to immediately assume you have motivated reasoning or need to think harder.
I disagree, Yarrow seems to be quite solider mindset on this issue for a while and it’s annoying. I don’t believe they are coming from a place of good faith (obv not confident).
Agreed, and honestly I think it’s ok to be a little rude if people seem to be acting in bad faith.
It’s pretty easy to argue with the claim that solving cancer or aging is good.
“Science advances one funeral at a time.” replace science with culture if you want.
I think the truth is the only way you can ensure technology is good is if you live in a non chaotic world, like a total dictatorship. We live in a chaotic world. Without a well defined, very high % enforceable social contract, you are simply guessing what might happen.
There’s reasonably little written about why longtermists should change their prioritisation in this direction. The notable exception is this paper by Will MacAskill.
Well let me stop you right there.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/8ooZtgeWbsAxxP9bd
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/wmqLbtMMraAv5Gyqn
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CxMusuX8E5hiTXEWX/fruit-picking-as-an-existential-risk
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQeTaqrjveSiSMYo/a-proposed-hierarchy-of-longtermist-concepts
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wqmY98m3yNs6TiKeL/parfit-singer-aliens
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLi3MbMCTtCv9ttyz/formalizing-extinction-risk-reduction-vs-longtermism
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WebLP36BYDbMAKoa5/the-future-might-not-be-so-great
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WebLP36BYDbMAKoa5/the-future-might-not-be-so-great?commentId=cJdqyAAzwrL74x2mG
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GsjmufaebreiaivF7/what-is-the-likelihood-that-civilizational-collapse-would
This isn’t a comprehensive list, just some stuff off the top of my head.
Personally, I’ve spent a long time thinking about this and as far as I can tell, it’s incredibly uncertain if (e)x(tinction)-risk reduction is positive EV (x-risk reduction is almost tautologically positive to the point of uselessness). In general I think the community got weirdly one shotted by astronomical waste-like arguments which are interesting thought experiments but don’t really come close to solving cluelessness.
Automated Forum Profiles (beta)
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/48mypEepqBqWibKtJ/?commentId=WQfiqqSpsjYBGqtKC
I wrote a related parable in response to a similar-ish post a while ago if people like fiction.
Just was watching Dwarkesh/David Reich podcast, fascinating stuff. Looking back at how I was taught taxonomy and anthropological history I find it frustrating. Note that I don’t know much about (evolutionary) biology or genetics or the frontier of what genetic-history research so this is my layman attempt to explain why it’s generally been puzzling for me how i have had this explained by other people who probably don’t understand either, not trying to propose that I understand something david reich doesn’t.
My main gripe is that we are taught evolutionary history mostly from the lens of evolutionary trees. But evolutionary history probably looks like a graph/stochastic process/markov chain, and only at very specific underlying parameters/ level of abstraction is well modeled by a tree. The reason we use trees is because that is the most sensible simple abstraction in some ways, if you are thinking about, “how did we get here?”. But it’s not a great way to think about “what happened/was happening”. I had chatgpt try to make the difference below (don’t look too into the details, it did some hallucinating, just the general vibe).
Taking plausible parameters here to me would be thinking mixture isn’t extremely likely over short time spans because of distance/etc but quite likely and almost certain over hundreds/thousands of years. So what did the near east look like genetically 60k years ago? It could easily look like below.
It seems totally possible that for long periods of hominid history genetics were well modeled by pretty smooth stochastic graphs with generally corresponding smooth genetics across geography (obviously with tons of exceptions or less true when you zoom in, e.g. bell beaker/corded culture), and yet when you look at our specific lineage it doesn’t quite look like that (due to extinction, gene selection, or some other reason). I don’t have a clear enough vision to say much more, but I think there are some interesting implications about what we mean when we say, this group or that group went extinct.
https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2082965101083320543?s=46
Claude did some hacking.
(Separately, was there some memo I missed—ea forum seems to have ceded all ai discussion to less wrong except second order ipo donation stuff?)