Long time lurker—infrequent poster
Programmer
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DaneelO
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Looks interesting! Do you plan to release an audio book version of it? I think you can reach a larger audience and more kinds of people that way.
Great post! I love the scout / open mindset you display in this post. It was very interesting to learn more about possible areas of improvement for EA orgs.
I must confess that I do not know enough about international law to know that there was a difference between assurances and guarantees. After reading about it I realize that the latter is stronger than the former so I suppose I was incorrect in using that word, thanks for pointing it out, learnt something new :)
My point however was that Budapest Memorandum was pretty important for nonproliferation since it reduced the amount of nuclear powers a lot, and the actions of Russia proves that it unfortunately was a mistake for Ukraine (and Belarus and Kazakstan) to agree from a self-interested point of view. If they had not agreed the invasion would most likely not have happened and this is something that I am sure many countries and leaders are considering.I suppose your point about security guarantees also points to joining NATO as an important step for security for non-nuclear powers since there I am sure that you get actual security guarantees :D
I hope you are right that the damage caused to Russia will be enough to deter other nations and Russia from acting similarly in the future, I am not so sure considering the fact that Russia so far has shown no signs of giving up. Hopefully it will change once Ukraine start their offensive.
Conditional on Russia losing, is the world a safer place?
I think maybe a bit, in a general “don’t reward conquest” sort of way
I would like to add another reason in favor: Russia broke the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum where they and other states provided security guarantees to post-Soviet states (including Ukraine) to hand over their nuclear weapons. If Russia wins this war it clearly sends a message that one should never get rid of nukes since it increases the risk of an invasion. I mean it has already sent these signals since they invaded, but the message would be even stronger of they get away with the invasion. Clearly states which are not a part of NATO should get nukes if they want to be safe. This is a very bad development for global nuclear security obviously. I actually think that if one takes nuclear security seriously, Budapest Memorandum signatories have not done enough to help Ukraine considering the fact that the invasion is still ongoing over one year after the invasion started and they provided very little help when the war started in 2014.Now I’m not even considering all the other agreements and international laws of wars broken by Russia, which also decrease global cooperation and stability. But obviously if they get away with breaking these it also sends a bad message globally.
That is much harder for me to answer, since I am too young to know that. But I would also assume that he has not been completely isolated from Sweden since the 1980s, considering the fact that he has appeared in Swedish media from time to time and has family in Sweden. So to be nitpicky back, while modeling him as an average Swede today might not be correct, modeling him as an average one (or young one) in the 80s is probably not also correct.
I would also expect him to be a bit more interested in Swedish media than the average person since he has started a news aggregator for English language media, and as I wrote above has appeared in Swedish media from time to time. But maybe I am just projecting how I would think in his situation and he is not interested in the Swedish media landscape at all and only focuses on the American one since that is where he lives and works. Edit: and FLI was thinking of granting money to a Swedish org, so some interest in Swedish media has been shown from FLI at least.
I don’t know — did they? The crux for me is whether Tegmark knew when he wrote his EA Forum comment that Sweden widely funds newspapers regardless of political view. Tegmark lived in Sweden until age 23, so I’d be curious to know whether this is a universally known fact in Sweden, or whether it’s more of a minor/obscure bit of trivia, or something in between.
Of course I cannot comment on what Tegmark knew or did not know. But as a Swede I can try to guess what an average Swede would be expected to think to try to answer this question.
I think they would know what the mediestöd (Swedish Wikipedia) is and that is used to support the press and is independent of the current government in charge, left-wing or right-wing does not matter. Thus whichever parties happen to be in charge are not important, opposite to what he seemed to claim in his first post.
I also think that the average Swede would think that if a publication receives mediestöd, then it cannot be to crazy or extremist. Because giving them money would seem to be againswt common sense. The fact that this is not the case in reality and that some extremist publications have received money is probably not something most people know, since I don’t think the debate and news about this have permeated to most people. But would expect someone who cares about politics or the media to know about it. It is something I know about and I am far from an expert in either politics or media, I am just interested.
Thanks for clarifying. That makes it more nuanced. Then it seems like the statements were true but perhaps misleading.
I would also like to add the things expressed in this comment:
“Sam sleeps on a bean bag” and “Sam drives a Corolla” when I was quite confident that they knew that Sam was living in one of the most expensive and lavish properties in the Bahamas and was definitely not living a very frugal livestyle.
If this is true it would not be hard to fact check since many EAs knew SBF, and I got the impression from the interview that Rob knew SBF too. I don’t know anything about the situation so I don’t know what is true. All I know is that the episode gave me a very good impression of SBF and probably helped him build a good image among EAs.
This is great! Thanks for sharing.
Yeah that makes sense, I think I overinterpreted your comments.
I agree with the point that in general one should expect less from “unsophisticated” investors/parties than from sophisticated ones. I do not disagree with that.
I was disagreeing with “This just isn’t plausible on reasonable priors.” which seemed to mean that you disagreed with Stuart’s comment.
But I also don’t think VC scrutiny is necessarily a high bar in general in the absolute sense, and Stuart has posted some warning signs here in other comments such as the hiring of Friedberg. Then considering how important FTX and SBF was to the EA community it could have been investigated more, i.e. the low VC scrutiny bar could have been surpassed by hiring experts or something similar. To a VC firm this is just another losing bet among many they expect to make. This is why I don’t think the comparison with VC firms is very apt.
I would disagree, there are numerous examples such as Theranos and WeWork which show that sophisticated investors do not necessarily scrutinize potential investments thoroughly. Thus I don’t think assuming they do is a good prior. I think this is actually a reason these problems happen, since everyone else assumes that Respectable Company/Person X has scrutinized it.
I agree. A common trope in EA is that we don’t just give money to any charity because it “feels good”, we want it to be effective so we investigate and analyze deeply before giving. In same vain, if we want to prevent bad things from happening we need to implement well structured institutions and perform due diligence, even if it “feels less good” than trusting without verifying does.
I think this suggests that the EA orgs which had close ties to FTX and SBF should have investigations performed by outside parties. If this is true it makes the situation even worse than it appears at the moment since it could have been prevented by having higher ethical standards.
In case you consider it in the future this could be a good place to start: https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2022/01/podcast-transcription-services-comparison/
All services listed there cost at least $60 per month however.
Edit: and to give some personal feedback on the podcast, I just listened to the episode linked here in the post. Personally I think audio quality is much more important than transcriptions, and I think the audio quality could be improved here.
Makes a lot of sense :D I just didn’t get the joke, which I in hindsight probably should have… :P
edit: I don’t have a sense of humor
“a senior AGI safety person has given me permission to not have a view and not feel embarrassed about it.”For a lack of a better word, this sound cultish to me, why would one need permission “from someone senior” to think or feel anything? If someone said this to me it would be a red flag about the group/community.I think your first suggestion (“I’ve thought about X a fair amount but haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion”) sounds much more reasonable, if OP feels like that reflects their opinion. But I also think that something like “I don’t personally feel convinced by the AGI risk arguments, but many others disagree, I think you should read up on it more and reach your own conclusions”, is much more reasonable than your second suggestion. I think we should welcome different opinions, as long as someone agrees with the main EA principles they are an EA, it should not be about agreeing completely with cause A, B and C.Sorry if I am over-interpreting your suggestion as implying much more than you meant, I am just giving my personal reaction.Disclaimer: long time lurker, first time poster.
Great! I don’t know how I missed that 😅