Earn-to-give software engineer, historically ~20% income donated. Very excited about AI Safety, GHD, and the weirder parts of animal welfare.
dan.pandori 🔸
Karma: 923
There is a lot already written on this topic that you may want to read.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/i9yRZjszhFf4DmQHx https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/interpersonal-comparisons-of-wellbeing https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/64fEWW2Zn4xK22Qy2/puzzles-for-some https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z4otXYNjWWFHerwdw/against-population-ethics https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BFDojdoTcBuqZyCp3/utilitarianism-with-and-without-expected-utility
And I think Holden’s post is a good summary for why I (and likely many others on the forum) disagree with this post. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem
Thanks for writing this up! I really appreciate effort-posts trying to show the efficacy of proposals, all the more so when the conclusion is negative. Thanks for pushing back against the file-drawer effect.
Trump tweeting remarks is less of a PR crisis than FTX collapsing was. Trump says wild stuff constantly. Are we actually gonna invade Greenland? Probably not.
It is for sure sad that this is likely going to increase the polarization of AI Safety.
But its not a scandal, and FTX very much was.
Thanks for sharing this.
FWIW, I think interested potential grantees can guesstimate these probabilities & the likely feedback themselves. They can just ask their favorite LLM. This has the advantage that the org doesn’t have to support this themselves, where it would give a false sense of confidence to possible grantees.
I wish there were fewer satirical shitposts like this that don’t self-label as AI pseudo-slop. Or if they exist, it would be nice if they said something original rather than ‘have you thought about how AI risk is like X other thing?’ without engaging in more than a surface level analogy.
Because actually self-copying machines ARE scary. Nanoscale fabricators with self-replication are possible (proof, bacteria exist).
If there were an equivalent to the METR graph for ‘proportion of 3D printer value which a 3D printer can generate’, and that was a straight line that implied we got to 99%+ in 4 years, I’d be pretty spooked!
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Says “if you’re explaining you’re losing”. IMO explanations are good. You might be correct that needing to explain is a bad sign for whether you are winning a comms battle. But I would still rather offer people genuine explanations, so we can come to a shared understanding of the truth (exactly like this convo).
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My reading of this is that you’re claiming who says something is more important than what is said. Again, you may be correct here on how to optimally persuade. But I personally want to value good arguments, no matter who makes them.
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Feels like it is straightforwardly asking folks to not engage in debate or disagreements. I don’t really get how we come to a shared understanding of the truth if we don’t offer clear reasons for why we disagree with particular points.
Again, I very much am not saying you are wrong about the implications of ignoring strategic communication norms. You are likely right. I would nonetheless prefer to be in a community that decided to communicate honestly and earnestly, even with people that it disagrees with.
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3 & 5 make sense.
1 / 4 / 6 feel like they might make sense strategically, but I’m proud to be part of a community that often values epistemic humility and correct argumentation above strategic communication.
Ah, I read OP’s profile, and I see that it would be harder for them than average to switch to direct work (so likely less strong advice there).
Major congrats on the 50% donation pledge, that’s awesome to see.
RE AI policy donations: you should strongly consider providing hard money to political campaigns with pro-AI safety candidates. Campaign finance limits give you more leverage than usual as a small to medium donor.
Zach Stein-Perlman and Eric Neyman have some good resources on this.
Depending on your donation size, LongView offers donation advising.
Also, of course, consider pivoting to direct work rather than EtG, since money is likely to be less valuable.
Your overall cause areas & thoughts make a lot of sense to me.
I generally don’t engage with social media (beyond LR/EA forum, and I’m not sure I’d endorse my use of those). Maybe you should use Twitter less?
Or if you’re getting some value out of Twitter, you could consider if there are alternative ways for you to get that value without getting the vitriol.
Yes, of course. Both the following statements can be true.
A slowdown that wasn’t trying to maintain the US lead vs China would be a more impactful slowdown.
Such a slowdown would still constitute a slowdown, and thus be good.
If you are in the lead (the US is) it is possible to slowdown by a degree which maintains the lead, but is nonetheless still a slowdown.
I directionally agree that an even bigger slowdown would be good. But a slowdown which maintains some of the US vs China lead ‘is’ possible.
I would not let perfect be the enemy of the good here.
Agreed. I feel like eigenism has many implications that are pretty morally uncomfortable. For instance, folks seem more closely connected to others of the same gender. Does that mean sexism is morally correct? Seems bad. Same for racism, nationalism, speciesism etc.
I’m aware Hendrycks claims that eigenism doesn’t support racism, but the eigenism paper also suggests that the family dog has ~75% the moral weight as all different-culture strangers combined (table 1 https://eigenism.org/paper.pdf). This is a conclusion which is both actually repugnant, and disagrees with common sense morality.
Anthropic has done many expensive actions to credibly signal that it cares about AI safety.
Refusing to remove the ‘human must be in the kill chain’ and ‘no mass surveillance of US citizens’ clauses from its contract with the US military. This resulted in them being declared a supply chain risk, and Google/OpenAI signed contracts without such restrictions.
They’ve directed hundreds of millions in funding to AI safety causes (the equivalent for OpenAI is ~150 million).
They lobby in favor of AI safety regulation which is widely regarded as positive. This is in contrast to OpenAI, whose lobbying arm has generally opposed AI safety regulation (and has had some AI astro-turfing scandals).
There has been some genuinely impressive mech interp research coming out of Anthropic. I found the J-space work to be incredibly interesting, one of the most meaningful mech interp results I’d ever seen.
They seem generally pretty candid about the risks of AI development, and actively call for a coordinated slowdown of AI development (ex. https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/).
I think folks could reasonably say that they are engaged in race dynamics that makes them net negative. But it also doesn’t seem crazy to look at the actions above, and admire what they’ve done (especially compared to other actors in the space).
Thanks for writing this up. Career transitions are hard.
This does a good job of calling out particular difficulties (ex. legibly explaining career fit) in a way that other ppl can likely learn from.
You should judge others on a curve, and probably yourself as well.
Judging others on a curve means that folks see reward for doing more than what is typical. This is just good reinforcement-learning theory, since it is easy to get both feedback on rewarded & not-rewarded actions.
I started writing this thinking that you should NOT judge yourself on a curve, in contrast. IE, you know much more about your own circumstances, and so pretending you are average throws away info. For example, if I only gave 5% of my income to charity, that would be above average for the US. But my opportunities are amazing, and so 5% would in reality show low effort.
But actually, I was just using the wrong comparison group! I shouldn’t compare myself to a big group of other people. I have a near perfect comparison group in my past self. If I did a better job this week than last week at work, that’s a great sign! If my one-rep max for benchpress has gone down over the last month, that’s a bad sign!
This all feels obvious in retrospect.
There are good strategic reasons to avoid AI art (because people get incensed). As an activist, one of your goals is to influence public perception. For many campaigns, using AI art is going to be net negative for your cause, because they’ll associate your cause with something they dislike.
I don’t agree with the object level reasons to avoid AI art, but that doesn’t change the strategic considerations.
Your comment is an unsolicited request on an unrelated post.
In my opinion this is strongly against forum norms. I suspect the forum’s messaging function blocked you because this seems like spam.
If you want folks to engage in this experiment (which seems possibly interesting!), you should make a standalone post for it.
I admire the hustle and hope you succeed.
But as many others have said, this is a recipe for burnout. If a friend said they intended to do this, I would try quite hard to talk them down.
I think the cringe reason is why I’ll say I’m EA, and then describe it as “quote unquote effective altruism” (if they ask). Which solves the problem decently well, in the same way folks describe themselves as ‘rats’ instead of rationalists.