Maybe I should’ve clarified that I was more talking about the community health team than event organizers. I don’t think the community health team should be excluding people based on vibes. I think they should mediate conflicts, and announce their decisions in some cases, but the blacklist should not generally be used as a tool to “resolve” conflicts unless there are additional circumstances beyond just the disagreement itself.
Ebenezer Dukakis
Karma: 1,345
See also Google Trends.
Supposedly, people on X generally don’t click links. My guess would be that even fewer are searching on Google/Wikipedia. So I don’t expect these metrics to be super reliable. They might more closely track “fraction of users engaging deeply” than “size of PR crisis”.
If you’re explaining, you’re losing: Every rebuttal repeats the accusation to people who haven’t heard it yet. Answer the accusation once, link to it, and stop explaining. This is the “illusory truth” effect (information is true when it’s repeated).
Is that actually true of X’s reply mechanism to a significant degree? My impression was that replies on X are mostly just seen by people who tap on the original post. Replies wouldn’t necessarily have the effect of amplifying the original post?
Certainly writing Community Notes would not present much risk I presume??
her participation at our event is recommended against, lest she gather supporters for her case
This seems fairly dubious to me, as grounds to exclude someone. I thought exclusions were supposed to be for someone who was potentially dangerous to others.
If Laura’s case is bad, hopefully potential supporters will be able to suss that out. If Laura’s case is good, it’s good that there’s a safeguard by which she can gather supporters.
The idea of trying to “keep the peace” in this kind of hamfisted way seems likely to create more problems than it solves.
Apparently AI is not even a winning issue for Democrats right now:
https://x.com/DKThomp/status/2099871668411805768
So I don’t see how doubling down on Democratic Party partisanship gets us anywhere.
Remember that in the US, Independents are much more common than either Democrats or Republicans.
The Trump stuff may all be true. Nonetheless, getting Trump impeached would basically need to be a bipartisan effort.
We might be able to win with Democrats + Independents. But the way to win the Independents, in my mind, is to make arguments which could, at least in theory, persuade Republicans.
It seems like either this works and is easy (in which case CG should be able to do it) or hard (in which case SFF is net negative and should stop—if this were true I’d like to know it so I could stop supporting them). I still can’t figure out the world-model in which SFF exists and is net positive, CG is begging for more grantmakers, and all these organizations still aren’t fully funded.
To be fair, CG’s grant to OpenAI looks fairly terrible with the benefit of hindsight. That does seem to suggest that AI grantmaking should be done with care, or something of that nature. But I would say that problem would be better fixed through public reflection on what went wrong with the OpenAI grant, as opposed to just trying to monopolize more talent. It would really suck if CG is monopolizing talent for an organization that is fundamentally broken at a structural incentives level, e.g. excessive focus on prestige-maxxing.
Whose job is it to identify EA questions which could benefit from better forecasts?
Consider two different hypotheses:
-
Forecasting is only helpful for AI
-
Forecasting is helpful outside of AI, but AI has captured much more forecasting interest than other cause areas
How much time are non-AI org leaders spending trying to think up decision-relevant forecasts related to their cause areas?
-
If leaders are not spending any time trying to think up such forecasts, maybe there is low-hanging fruit here. Maybe EA has latent forecasting capability which can be tapped to improve organizational decision-making. Or maybe such forecasting capability will free up in a few years if AI turns out to be a nothingburger.
-
If leaders have spent a lot of time trying to think up useful forecasts, and failed, maybe forecasting really is fairly useless outside of AI.
If I was leading a non-AI EA organization, and I had a forecast I really wanted to see the result of, who would I even talk to? Which forecasting organizations are actively soliciting ideas for EA-related forecast questions?
It seems to me that a lot of what EA does is implicit forecasting in some sense, e.g. if you give someone a grant, it’s an implicit forecast about the probability that they will be able to accomplish something with that grant. EA is often critiqued for neglecting “systemic change”. If you want to do systemic change, being able to forecast the effects of various systemic changes is really useful. If you take any action, there’s an implicit forecast that it will lead to a good outcome and not backfire somehow. Wouldn’t it be better to make this forecast explicit? All else equal, wouldn’t it be good to get some perspective from people outside of the organization, who are perhaps forecasting in their free time as a replacement for watching TV or other downtime activities?
-
Of course it is socially acceptable to disagree with “traumatized” people in EA.
Well you previously wrote:
I think writing such quoted passages in passive response to a disclosure of sexual assault is cruel and disgusting in my personal opinion
Insofar as others share this opinion of yours, it won’t be socially acceptable to express those particular disagreements.
Assuming we are talking about the Any Community That Tolerates Trauma Junkies Is Unsafe For Everyone Else post, it’s not something I would’ve predicted in advance would be considered “cruel and disgusting”. So it remains the case that I personally have some uncertainty regarding what opinions will be considered “cruel and disgusting”, to the point where it seems a bit safer socially to just avoid expressing much of any disagreement at all.
I think you have a good point that if a person behaves in a traumatized way, that’s evidence they are an assault victim. On the other hand, it’s also possible to go too far in the opposite direction, where it becomes socially unacceptable to disagree with the traumatized person in any way, and we have policies set by traumatized people who aren’t thinking clearly.
I’m not claiming that EA is at this point necessarily. But I do believe this possibility is part of what motivates skepticism towards trauma victims. I expect with some creative thinking it is possible to come up with a compromise which achieves both of the important objectives here.
or you’re disagreeing with their ‘highly rationalist proof’, which they will claim proves their point
I’m confused, if a ‘proof’ is bad, shouldn’t it be possible to explain the flaw? It sounds like you are describing a person who is not arguing in good faith, which does not seem particularly “rational”.
It seems to me that EA has still not updated enough from SBF, and is too willing to trust other EAs and assume they are good actors. Maybe EAs need to offer each other less benefit of the doubt, and reduce incestuous hiring practices which deprioritize work experience from outside the EA community. Having some more “outsider” type employees could help address groupthink where everyone updates based on everyone else apparently believing that a particular response is appropriate.
Furthermore I suspect that the “we are all on the same team” mentality can also exacerbate groupthink, e.g. in this particular case it might’ve been helpful if a particular person was explicitly chosen to be Fran’s advocate, to reduce the burden on her and steelman the case that specific actions are necessary. More generally it seems like the community could potentially use a dedicated survivor advocate, who interviews survivors and lobbies for specific changes. Even now it seems like there still hasn’t been a compassionate and effective “root cause” post-mortem of this incident.
It also decreases conversion rate, which could make it harder to raise money?
FWIW I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone not to boycott ChatGPT. Decreasing OpenAI’s revenue is good for the world.
I suppose if you’re using a free account and blocking ads, you are adding costs without adding revenue. The important thing is to boycott acts which put money in OpenAI’s pocket, which is not necessarily the same thing as boycotting all of their offerings.
It occurs to me that a person could create a nonprofit competitor to ChatGPT, which makes use of open models and donates excess revenue to AI alignment research. That way you can pay for a chatbot without contributing to AI advancement.
(I think the US example is perhaps a bit more complicated. It’s not just very wealthy, it’s also highly unequal and offers much weaker safety nets than most other liberal democracies. So the bitter politics may have more to do with material insecurity than with post-scarcity boredom.)
As I linked in my comment, ideologues in the US tend to be rather wealthy:
Progressive Activists have strong ideological views, high levels of engagement with political issues, and the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status. Their own circumstances are secure. They feel safer than any group, which perhaps frees them to devote more attention to larger issues of social justice in their society.
https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/#progressive-activists
The Devoted Conservatives are the counterpart to the Progressive Activists, but at the other end of the spectrum. They are one of the highest-income groups, and they feel happier and more secure than most other Americans.
https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/#devoted-conservatives
I worry that American ideologues have got all the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy satisfied, and they are now pursuing self-actualization through partisanship.
Furthermore there appear to be a number of “urban legends” which float around the internet about the United States which are not true, or at least not as obviously true as you’ve been lead to believe. One blogger claims:
Common measures of poverty in the U.S. do not factor in taxes and transfers. The very things implemented to address the issue. We already “won” the “war on poverty” in absolute terms to reduce suffering—as measured by consumption. The same stunt is often done for inequality. If you don’t move the goalposts and count existing policy interventions, we’re already largely post-scarcity and highly egalitarian—to the extent the U.S. is more progressive and redistributive than any European country. Which is why poverty became positively correlated with obesity about the same time that bottom line dropped below 5% in the 1990s.
One possibility I worry about is that as scarcity recedes, people will be relatively less motivated to play positive-sum cooperation games. With material goods less of a bottleneck, there’s less motivation to cooperate in order to accumulate more of them. Such positive-sum games could be replaced by zero-sum petty status games or political hobbyism, like you see on social media for example. The US is an interesting case study, as a very wealthy country with bitter, Manichean politics—there may be a connection.
If this theory is true, the influence of fanaticism could increase in the future as global economic growth progresses. Economic growth is probably helpful in the short term, to show people that positive-sum games are possible and worth playing. But the “hedonic treadmill” or diminishing marginal returns could dominate in the longer term. Sort of like how coffee stops working as well if you drink 4 cups every day.
The best approach might be to create and popularize more institutions which harmlessly dissipate human tribal instincts, e.g. sports fandom.
I’m typically a non-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy (probably fairly extreme by EA standards; I support US withdrawal from NATO). But it seems to me that the evaluation of a given foreign policy depends largely on what baseline you use for comparison purposes. If North Korea is used as the baseline for what communism can do to a country, modern Indonesia seems preferable by comparison.
Critics of US foreign policy typically use a high implicit baseline which allows them to blame the US no matter what the US does.
Consider a country with a bad government or some other political disaster of some sort.
-
If the US opposes the country’s government, the US is to blame because it is “destabilizing” the country. (“The US destabilized Iraq.”)
-
If the US collaborates with the country’s government, the US is to blame because it is “propping up” an odious regime. (“The US propped up Suharto.”)
-
If the US does nothing, the US is “complicit” through its inaction. (“The US is complicit in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”)
I suspect that this little trifecta is leading to increasing nihilism in US foreign policy circles.
-
Seems to me that if you do it right, there’s a self-correcting element to emphasizing rationality. If an idea is wrong, it ought to be possible to refute it through rational argument. And if you aren’t able to refute it—why are you so certain that it’s a bad idea?
Seems to me that a lot of EA experience could actually be a negative, if it worsens organizational groupthink.
Number one is, we hire for capability and learning ability before we hire for expertise. We actually would rather hire smart, curious people than people who are deep, deep experts in one area or another… somebody who’s been doing the same thing forever will typically just replicate what they’ve seen before. You need a mix, but we skew heavily towards people who are kind of open to new ideas and creative.
Google VP of people operations in 2013
In general EA orgs seem really overconfident to me about the quality of their candidate evaluation metrics. How many of these metrics have proven external validity? Seems kinda pointless to put a ton of effort into optimizing a metric, if you don’t even know if it corresponds to what you actually want...
I find myself wondering if EAs have been doing the same thing forever and they typically just replicate what they’ve seen before 😁
Thinking aloud here. I don’t think you necessarily have to respond by quoting the person. You can just provide a frame or facts which counter or inoculate against whatever critiques are currently widespread. E.g. if someone accuses you of a crime, you can mention that you were someplace else at the time the crime was committed, without directly repeating the criminal accusation. However, your X replies might fill with accusation talk in that case.