devansh

The Nat­u­ral State is Goodhart

• devansh 6 Feb 2023 22:16 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 2

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: I No Longer Feel Com­fortable in EA

  There is a pool of donors who make their decisions based on the opinions of EA

  There is a pool of donors who make their decisions based on their own beliefs and the beliefs of individuals they trust, not “EA.” See this post.

[No Longer En­dorsed] The EA Fo­rum should re­move com­mu­nity posts from search-en­g­ine in­dex­ing.

• devansh 12 Dec 2022 18:21 UTC

  44 points

  28 ∶ 8

  on: Reflec­tions on Vox’s “How effec­tive al­tru­ism let SBF hap­pen”

  I think that paragraph is quite misguided. “Becoming much more risk averse” is a great way to stop doing anything at all because it’s passed through eight layers of garbage. On top of this, it’s not like “literally becoming the US federal government” and “not having any accounting or governance at all” are your only two options; this creates a sad false dichotomy. SBF was actively and flagrantly ignoring governance, regulation, and accounting. This is not remotely common for EA orgs.

  Like, for the last couple of decades we’ve been witnesssing over and over again how established, risk-averse institutions fail because they’re unable to compete with new, scrappy, risk-tolerant ones (that is, startups).

  “Good governance” and bureaucracy are, while correlated, emphatically not the same thing. EA turning into a movement that fundamentally values these over just doing good in the world as effectively as possible will be a colossal failure, because bureaucracy is a slippery slope and the Thing That Happens when you emulate the practices that have been used for centuries is that you end up not being able to do anything. I’d be very sad if this was our final legacy.

• devansh 11 Nov 2022 18:18 UTC

  77 points

  11 ∶ 0

  in reply to: effectenator’s comment on: The FTX Fu­ture Fund team has resigned

  To be clear, this is an account that joined from Twitter to post this comment (link).

• devansh 13 Sep 2022 17:42 UTC

  21 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: Democratis­ing risk: a com­mu­nity misled

  His pronouns, listed on his website, are he/​they.

• devansh 2 Sep 2022 17:41 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA is about max­i­miza­tion, and max­i­miza­tion is perilous

  And I’m nervous about what I perceive as dynamics in some circles where people seem to “show off” how little moderation they accept—how self-sacrificing, “weird,” extreme, etc. they’re willing to be in the pursuit of EA goals. I think this dynamic is positive at times and fine in moderation, but I do think it risks spiraling into a problem.

  There seems to be an important trade-off here, where this is a valuable signal that the person “showing off” is aligned with your values and it’s actually pretty useful to know that (especially since current gradients often push in favor of people who are not aligned paying lip service to EA ideas in order to gain money/​status/​power for themselves).

  The balance of how much we should ask or expect of this category of sacrifice seems like one that we should put lots of time as a community into thinking about, especially when we’re trying to grow quickly and are unusually willing to provide resources to people.

• devansh 13 Aug 2022 21:30 UTC

  66 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How to Talk to Lefties in Your In­tro Fellowship

  It seems incredibly important that EA, as a community, maintains extremely high epistemic standards and is a place where we can generally assume that people, while not necessarily having the same worldviews or beliefs as us, can communicate openly and honestly about the reasons for why they’re doing things. A primary reason for this is just the scale and difficulty of the things that we’re doing.

  That’s what makes me quite uncomfortable with saying global health and development work is reparation for harms that imperialist countries have caused poor countries! We should work on aid to poor countries because it’s effective, because we have a chance to use a relatively small-to-us amount of money to save lives and wildly improve the conditions of people in poor countries—not because aid represents reparations from formerly imperial countries to formerly subjugated ones

  I think many people who identify with social justice and leftist ideologies are worth recruiting and retaining. But I care more about our community having good epistemics in general, about being able to notice when we are doing things correctly and when we are not, and conveying our message honestly seems really important for this. This objection is not “leftists have bad epistemics,” like you mentioned at the start of this article—you should increase recruitment and retention but not lower your own epistemic standards as a communicator to do so.

  I think parts of this post are quite good, and I think when you can do low-cost things that don’t lower your epistemic standards (like using social justice focused examples, supporting the increase of diversity in your movement, saying things that you actually believe in order to support your arguments in ways that connect with people). But I think this post at the current moment needs a clear statement of not lowering epistemic standards when doing outreach to be advice that helps overall.

• devansh 6 Aug 2022 10:13 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: [link post] The Case for Longter­mism in The New York Times

  Here’s a non-paywalled link available for the next 14 days.

• devansh 13 Jul 2022 4:04 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What I mean by “fund­ing over­hang” (and why it doesn’t mean money isn’t helpful)

  “It’s worth noting that the scale of the funding overhang isn’t absolute; there are”

  Is this a typo?

• devansh 13 May 2022 20:07 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: “Tech com­pany sin­gu­lar­i­ties”, and steer­ing them to re­duce x-risk

  >>after a tech company singularity, such as if the tech company develops safe AGI

  I think this should be “after AGI”?

• devansh 28 Apr 2022 22:05 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mark Xu’s comment on: ‘Drop­ping out’ isn’t a Plan

  Ah, I see. I guess I kind of buy this, but I don’t think it’s nearly as cut-and-dry as you argue, or something. Not sure how much this generalizes, but to me “staying in school” has been an option that conceals approximately as many major suboptions as “leaving school.” I’d argue that for many people, this is approximately true—that is, people have an idea of where they’d want to work or what they’d want to do given leaving school, but broadly “staying in school” could mean anything from staying on ~exactly the status quo to transferring somewhere in a different country, taking a gap year, etc.

• devansh 28 Apr 2022 20:55 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: ‘Drop­ping out’ isn’t a Plan

  I don’t really see how the world is different whether or not you use the first or the second representation here? “Drop out and go work at a job” seems like a plan at a higher level of abstraction than “drop out and work in {area},” which is itself at a higher level of abstraction than “drop out and work in {area|position},” which is a higher level of abstraction than “drop out and work at ORG1.”

  What’s the bright line between the first and the second?

• devansh 29 Mar 2022 14:44 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ChanaMessinger’s comment on: Go ap­ply for 80K Ad­vis­ing - (Yes, right now)

  Agreed (and only 20% kidding.) Having an 80k post pinned seems wonderful.

• devansh 29 Mar 2022 14:44 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aayush Kucheria’s comment on: Go ap­ply for 80K Ad­vis­ing - (Yes, right now)

  Yep, this is my understanding as well!

• devansh 28 Mar 2022 16:15 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: BrianTan’s comment on: Go ap­ply for 80K Ad­vis­ing - (Yes, right now)

  Ah, good point. Done!

Go ap­ply for 80K Ad­vis­ing - (Yes, right now)

• devansh 17 Mar 2022 14:42 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Austin’s comment on: Le­gal sup­port for EA orgs—use­ful?

  Yeah, this is a good consideration; if something like this ended up happening, it would be wonderful if Tyrone could get two or three lawyers to cover the major EA hubs (US, especially CA, the UK, and maybe the Bahamas) - either in physical location or in knowledge.

• devansh 17 Mar 2022 4:56 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Le­gal sup­port for EA orgs—use­ful?

  FWIW, I am currently running an EA org, and legal help would be generally valuable to me both in the past and in the present. My impression is that scaling an EA law firm would involve a few people at the top being EAs and the rest being perfectly fine as normal, non-aligned lawyers; this would gain a bunch of the benefits of an EA law firm (primarily, I think, a general understanding of what EA’s goals are and a “cost-benefit analysis” type thinking that tries to avoid being overly conservative and is perfectly fine advising its clients to do, e.g., things that are legally grey area but not enforced)

  So I’d say my answer is that this seems, at least to me personally, like a very potentially high-impact thing that would be incredibly helpful to me and other people starting small- and medium-sized organizations who need legal advice and support. This being said, I am probably not in the best position to answer that question (not having a birds’-eye view of the EA ecosystem like some others do) and so I’m very interested in other perspectives on this.

• devansh 14 Mar 2022 19:04 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What’s the op­ti­mal age to learn about EA?

  It seems like this depends very, very heavily upon the actual person. I think the range of “when would it be best for a particular person to learn about EA” could be anywhere from, like, 10 (I imagine Eliezer) all the way up to old age for a small number of people, although the distribution seems like it hits a peak somewhere in the 14-25 range because that’s when people have both critical thinking abilities and the ability to change their mind about important things.

  That being said, if your goal is to get people who are going to make major contributions to the world in the future, it seems to me that that subgroup is pretty heavily correlated with “people who would have been interested in EA in high school, if only they had known about it.” This post seems to agree. Younger than that, and I think only a very very tiny portion of the population can keep up with the ideas (and I have some concerns about trying to influence the minds of, like, the vast majority of 12 year olds); older, and they’ve lost idea-flexibility and are more set in their ways.

  The age group you’re targeting seems fine if slightly young, although the way you describe your specific outreach method pattern-matches to a concerning one in my mind, and I’d potentially encourage you to consider the asymmetric arguments for why the type of outreach you’re currently doing is fine/​not fine. If you can cheaply take steps to target a slightly older audience, that seems good.