I am a lawyer and policy researcher interested in improving the governance of artificial intelligence. I currently work as Director of Research at the Institute for Law & AI. I previously worked in various legal and policy roles at OpenAI.
I am also a Research Affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI and a VP at the OāKeefe Family Foundation.
My research focuses on the law, policy, and governance of advanced artificial intelligence.
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People sometimes worry that the decrease in companies going public (arguably due to greater securities regulations) will drive down the expected return for public investors as compared to private ones. But it seems like public investors can still get decent exposure to private markets through publicly traded private equity and BDCs.
Maybe an actionable takeaway is to overweight those companies in oneās portfolio, to account for the private returns you donāt have access to.
Great discussion of Econ Aversion from Julia Wise here: https://āājuliawise.net/āāeconomics-not-as-bad-as-i-thought/āā
Iām beginning to think that we should generally taboo āfree speechā when discussing all speech regulation decisions by non-governmental actors. In my experience, people mean very different things by this, ranging from āintellectual openness should weigh heavily in private speech regulationā to āprivate speech regulators should mirror First Amendment principles.ā These have very different implications and possible justifications.
Ah right. I was misremembering the plot. The conversation happened in the US, but the system was built by the USSR :-)
In Dr. Strangelove (1964), the USSR builds a Doomsday Machine to function as a credible deterrent to a nuclear first strike against them, but keeps it secret. Dr. Strangelove famously remarks:
The whole point of the doomsday machine is lostā¦ if you keep it a secret! Why didnāt you tell the world, eh?!
Ah, thanks for correcting me. I wasnāt aware of that provenance.
I suppose what I really meant was āsomething close to 9, in utilitarian terms, feels pretty compelling to me.ā :-)
(9) is more straightforward utilitarian than virtue ethics: most kids can become self-perpetuating utility creators upon reaching adulthood, and indeed go on to create geometrically more self-perpetuating utility creators!
Agreed, though, that this does not acknowledge that raising kids takes a lot of work, and that for many people there are far cheaper ways to create utility.
(Also worth noting that lawyers take client confidentiality very seriously)
There are law firms in the DC area that specialize in whistleblower protection. These are often used for cases where there is some financial reward to the whistleblower, which may not be relevant here (though I certainly am not an expert!!). However, I would suspect that they may have the general expertise, discretion, connections, and playbook to handle something like this. It may be a good place to start. Google keywords would be something like āDC government whistleblower law firm.ā
Thanks a ton for doing this, John! Very much looking forward to the rest of the sequence :-)
I do think this would be quite valuable. I get asked to provide legal advice to orgs, and am usually not in a position to do so. It would be great to have someone able to do this.
I generally see my own vegetarianism as a utilitarian virtue that Iāve cultivated. It feels mostly costless to me now; in fact I feel better doing it than not. I think we should generally try to cultivate such virtues that align with impactful action, but also agree that going veg*n may not be equally effective on the margin for everyone (for a variety of reasons). Still, Iād feel most proud of being in a movement where people didnāt simply accept the psychological costs of some altruistic action, but tried to align their personal utility function more with the universeās (which is what I mean by āutilitarian virtueā).
(This is not to say that you personally are āsimply acceptingā this; I know you to be a very deliberate and thoughtful person. I am just uncomfortable with community members consistently resolving this question on first-order considerations of the psychological pleasure of veg*nism without considering the second-order question of whether the first-order is malleable.)
(Also agree with some of the other comments complicating the CEA of veg*nism on wild animal welfare grounds)
Congrats, Aaron, and thank you for your innumerable contributions to the Forum and broader community
Last year, when Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Prize, I spent about $175 to give away copies of Poor Economics to any Facebook friend that wanted one. I was inspired by posts like this one.
This year, I heard about Legal Impact For Chickens, and their model of change made a lot of sense to me. I was able to donate $20,000 (about 1ā3 marginal FTE), which the President said tipped their funding situation to the point where they could start hiring.
Couldnāt you argue that youāre actually moving towards the ātrueā global market portfolio, which would include many non-publicly-traded assets? (Similar for real estate: seems plausible that people should overweight REITs in their portfolios.)
Not sure this is true if the risk is also higher.