Elityre

• ElityreOct 22, 2018, 10:05 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Dou­ble Crux prompts for Effec­tive Altruists

  I strongly agree that more EAs doing independent thinking really important, and I’m very interested in interventions that push in that direction. In my capacity as a CFAR instructor and curriculum developer, figuring out ways to do this is close to my main goal.

  I think many individual EAs should be challenged to generate less confused models on these topics, and from there between models is when deliberation like double crux should start.

  Strongly agree.

  I don’t think in the span of only a couple minutes either side of a double crux game will generate an excellent but controversial hypothesis worth challenging.

  I think this misses the point a little. People at EAG have some implicit model that they’re operating from, even if it isn’t well-considered. The point of the exercise in this context is not to get all the way to the correct belief, but rather to engage with what one thinks and what would cause them to change their mind.

  This Double Crux is part of the de-confusion and model building process.

Dou­ble Crux prompts for Effec­tive Altruists

• ElityreOct 8, 2018, 4:36 PM

  6 points

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  in reply to: beah’s comment on: A Re­search Frame­work to Im­prove Real-World Giv­ing Behavior

  I’m not sure how much having a “watered down” version of EA ideas in the zeitgeist helps because, I don’t have a clear sense of how effective most charities are.

  If the difference between the median charity and the most impactful charity is 4 orders of magnitude ($1 to the most impactful charities does as much good as $1000 to the the median charity), then even a 100x improvement from the median charity is not very impactful. It’s still only 1% as good a donating to the best charity. If that were the case, it’s probably more efficient to just aim to get more people to adopt the whole EA mindset.

  On the other hand, if the variation is much smaller, it might be the case that a 100x improvement get’s you to about half of the impact per dollar of the best charities.

  Which world we’re living in matters a lot for whether we should invest in this strategy.

  That said, promotion of EA principles, like cost effectiveness and EV estimates, separate from the EA brand, seem almost universally good, and extend far beyond people’s choice of charities.

• ElityreOct 8, 2018, 3:09 PM

  13 points

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  in reply to: Elityre’s comment on: Bot­tle­necks and Solu­tions for the X-Risk Ecosystem

  It seems to me that in many cases the specific skills that are needed are both extremely rare and not well captured by the standard categories.

  For instance, Paul Christiano seems to me to be an enormous asset to solving the core problems of AI safety. If “we didn’t have a Paul” I would be willing to trade huge amounts of EA resources to have him working on AI safety, and I would similarly trade huge resources to get another Paul-equivalent working on the problem.

  But it doesn’t seem like Paul’s skillset is one that I can easily select for. He’s knowledgeable about ML, but there are many people with ML knowledge (about 100 new ML PhDs each year). That isn’t the thing that distinguishes him.

  Nevertheless, Paul has some qualities, above and beyond his technical familiarity, that allow him to do original and insightful thinking about AI safety. I don’t understand what those qualities are, or know how to assess them, but they seem to me to be much more critical than having object level knowledge.

  I have close to no idea how to recruit more people that can do the sort of work that Paul can do. (I wish I did. As I said, I would give up way more than my left arm to get more Pauls).

  But, I’m afraid there’s a tendency here to goodhart on the easily measurable virtues, like technical skill or credentials.

• ElityreOct 8, 2018, 2:57 PM

  12 points

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  on: Bot­tle­necks and Solu­tions for the X-Risk Ecosystem

  In the short term, senior hires are most likely to come from finding and onboarding people who already have the required skills, experience, credentials and intrinsic motivation to reduce x-risks.

  Can you be more specific about the the required skills and experience are?

  Skimming the report, you say “All senior hires require exceptionally good judgement and decision-making.” Can you be more specific about what that means and how it can be assessed?

• ElityreOct 8, 2018, 2:18 PM

  8 points

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  on: Lev­er­age Re­search: re­view­ing the ba­sic facts

  Intellectual contributions to the rationality community: including CFAR’s class on goal factoring

  Just a note. I think this might be a bit missleading. Geoff, and other members of Leverage research taught a version of goal factoring at some early CFAR workshops. And Leverage did develop a version of goal factoring inspired by CT. But my understanding is that CFAR staff independently developed goal factoring (starting from an attempt to teach applied consequentialism), and this is an instance of parallel development.

  [I work for CFAR, though I had not yet joined the EA or rationality community in those early days. I am reporting what other longstanding CFAR staff told me.]