I feel like it makes a lot of sense to have a plan like yours but I am unsure about when will be the right time to go trough with it. It would probably be valuable to have some event x that would trigger that plan immediately. I just wonder what that could be. Declaration of war on any NATO state? Putin threatening to use nukes? (Which seems to be happening right now) The metaculus prediction of WW3 before 2050 rising above 30%? (Currently 22%) Any ideas?
constructive
Karma: 560
In Germany at least you can get it at a pharmacy. I’m planning to get some this week.
Formulate AI-super-projects that would be both prestigious and socially beneficial
Artificial Intelligence, Great Power RelationsThere are already some signs of race dynamics between the US and China in developing TAI. Arguably, they are at least partly motivated by concerns of national prestige. If race dynamics speed up, it might be beneficial to present a set of prestigious AI-projects that the US and other countries can adopt. These projects should have the following features:
Be highly visible and impressive for a wide audience
Contribute to safer AI (e.g. through interpretability or alignment playing a great role in the project)
Be socially beneficial (i.e. the benefits should be distributed widely, ideally the technology would be open access after development)
(Idea adopted from Joslyn Barnhart)
Possible downside: Contribute to further speed-up of AI development, possibly leaving less time for alignment research
(However, if done correctly, this project only harvests pre-existing dynamics and leads funds to beneficial projects.)
EA content translation service
Effective Altruism, Movement Building
(Maybe add to #30 - diversity in EA)
EA-related texts are often using academic language needed to convey complex concepts. For non-native speakers reading and understanding those texts takes a lot more time than reading about the same topic in their native language would. Furthermore, today many educated people in important positions, especcially in non-western countries, do not at or only poorly speak English. (This is likely part of the reason that EA currently mainly exists in English speaking countries and almost exclusively consists of people speaking English well.)
To make EA widely known and easy to understand there needs to be a translation service enabling e.g. 80k, important Forum posts or the Precipice to be read in different languages. This would not only make EA easier to understand—and thus spread ideas further—but also likely increase epistemic diversity of the community by making EA more international.
Prevent community drainage due to value drift
Effective Altruism, Movement building
Most Effective Altruists are still young and will have the greates impact with their careers (and spend the greatest amounts of money) in several decades. However, people also change a lot and for some this leads to a decrease of engagement or even full drop-out. Since there is evidence, that drop out rates might be up to 30% throughout the career of higly engaged EAs, this is some serious loss of high impact work and well directed money.
Ways of tackling this problem might include:
Introducing more formal commitment steps when getting into EA
Encouraging people to write down and reflect on their reasons for being part of EA
Creating events especially aimed at strengthening the core community and encouraging friendships
Something that I am still confused about: If you assumed we were in a simulation, would that not destroy your evidence completely? After all, you should not be able to derive any feature of the bottom world from the features of the simulation, including any evidence on whether there are a lot of simulations. Am I missing something or does that mean it is not possible to argue about this usefully because the nature of the evidence changes every time I assume sim/non-sim?
Thanks! Helped me a lot. AI safety it is! Can we do the same thing so I know what org to work at?
I think infinite humans are physically impossible. See this summary: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/the-edges-of-our-universe (since the expansion of the universe is speeding up, it’s impossible to reach parts that are expanding faster that light speed, thus we only have a huge chunk, but not all of the universe we can access)
“the world is not designed for humans”
I think our descendants will unlikely be flesh-and-blood humans but rather digital forms of sentience: https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/
I think the main question here is: What can we do today to make the world better in the future? If you believe AI could make the world a lot worse, or even just lock in the already existing state, it seems really valuable to do work on that not happening. If you additionally believe AI could solve problems such as wild animal suffering or unhappy humans then it seems like an even more area problem to spend your time on.
(I think this might be less clear for biorisk where the main concern really is extinction.)
Wow! So hyped to see more infrastructure in mainland Europe! Hope I can live there one day
[Question] Which texts do we need in non-English languages?
What already exists in German:
Doing Good Better (though sold out atm)
An introduction and some career advice
Practical Ethics (Singer)
What do you think this implies for global priorities? When do you expect nuclear fusion to be competitive in developing countries? Why is this Metaculus forecast so pessimistic?
I think fusion is great, but it will probably take some time to have a real impact.
This is great! Connecting to people close to my city was crucial for my (still short) EA journey. Don’t be afraid to reach out to anyone, almost all EAs I encountered were happy to chat!
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google: Artificial Intelligence ‘is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on...more profound than electricity or fire’.
Seen here
Investment in AI has been steadily going up. It even seems to be growing exponentially. AI might bring about changes as big as the industrial revolution.
Not long and we will have AI the size of our brain.
I’m certainly no expert, but a quick look at AMF says the bednets are treated with Pyrethroid, which is” usually broken apart by sunlight and the atmosphere in one or two days” (Wikipedia) This is let’s me be skeptical of whether incorporating the environmental and health effects really make a big difference. Furthermore, though again this is just my intuition, agricultural farming involves much worse doses of insecticides that contaminate streams and so far we have not observed any large-scale effects of environmental collapse or infertility that would justify questioning the cost-effectiveness of AMF. (I’m not questioning that our use of insecticides very likely leads to the decline of insects and diminishes fertility though, I just think that AMF is a tiny factor in this.)
I currently don’t really see a clear effect on wild animal welfare of meat consumption, could you go into that further?
To me it seems more like the kind of uncertainty to dismiss because it could go both ways.