I just posted on the Facebook wall of another effective altruist:
Hey, I really appreciate everything you do for the effective altruism community! Happy birthday!
We would all greatly benefit from expressing our gratitude like this to each other more often.
I’ve had a half-finished draft post about how effective altruists shouldn’t be so hostile to newcomers to EA from outside the English-speaking world (e.g., primarily the United States and Commonwealth countries). In addition to English not being a first language, especially for younger people or students who don’t have as much experience, there are the problems of mastering the technical language for a particular field, as well as the jargon unique to EA. That can be hard for even many native English speakers.
LessWrong and the rationality community are distinct from EA, and even AI safety has grown much bigger than the rationality community. There shouldn’t be any default expectation posters on the EA Forum will conform to the communication style of rationalists. If rationalists expect that because they consider their communication norms superior, the least they should do is make more effort to educate or others how to get up to speed, like with style guides, etc. Some rationalists have done that, though rationalists at large aren’t entitled to expect others will do all the work by themselves without help to write just like they do.
I read almost all of the comments on the original EA Forum post linking to the Time article in question. If I recall correctly,Will made a quick comment that he would respond to these kinds of details when he would be at liberty to do so. (Edit: he made that point even more clearly in this shortform post he wrote a few months ago. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TeBBvwQH7KFwLT7w5/william_macaskill-s-shortform?commentId=ACDPftuESqkJP9RxP)
I assume he will address these concerns you’ve mentioned here at the same time he provides a fuller retrospective on the FTX collapse and its fallout.
Upvoted. Thanks for clarifying. The conclusion to your above post was ambiguous to me, though I now understand.
The rest of us can help by telling others Will MacAskill is seeking to divest himself of this reputation whenever we see or hear someone talking about him as if he still wants to be that person (not that he ever did, as evidenced by his above statement, a sentiment I’ve seen him express before in years past).
Please send me links to posts with those arguments you’ve made, as I’ve not read them, though my guess would be that you haven’t convinced anyone because some of the greatest successes in EA started out so small. I remember the same kind of skepticism being widely expressed some projects like that.
Rethink Priorities comes to mind as one major example. The best example is Charity Entrepreneurship. It was not only one of those projects with potential scalability that was doubted. It keeps incubating successful non-profit EA startups for across almost every EA-affiliated cause. CE’s cumulative track record might the best empirical argument against the broad applicability to the EA movement of your own position here.
How my perspective has changed on this during the last few years is to advise others not to give much weight to a single point of feedback. Especially for those who’ve told me only one or two people have discouraged them from be(com)ing a researcher, I tell them not to stop trying in spite of that. That’s even when the person giving the discouraging feedback is in a position of relative power or prestige.
The last year seems to have proven that the power or prestige someone has gained in EA is a poor proxy for how much weight their judgment should be given on any, single EA-relsted topic. If Will MacAskill and many of his closest peers are doubting how they’ve conceived of EA for years in the wake of the FTX collapse, I expect most individual effective altruists confident enough to judge another’s entire career trajectory are themselves likely overconfident.
Another example is AI safety. I’ve talked to dozens of aspiring AI safety researchers who’ve felt very discouraged An illusory consensus thrust upon them that their work was essentially worthless because it didn’t superficially resemble the work being done by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute or whatever other approach was in vogue at the time. For years, I suspected that was bullshit.
Some of the brightest effective altruists I’ve met were being inundated by personal criticism harsher than any even Eliezer Yudkowsky would give. I told those depressed, novice AIS researchers to ignore those dozens of jerks who concluded the way to give constructive criticism, like they presumed Eliezer would, was to emulate a sociopath. These people were just playing a game of ‘follow the leader’ not even the “leaders” would condone. I distrusted their hot takes based on clout and vibes about who was competent and who wasn’t
Meanwhile, increasingly over the last year or two, more and more of the AIS field, including some of its most reputed luminaires, have come out of the woodwork more and more to say, essentially, “lol, turns out we didn’t know what we were doing with alignment the whole time, we’re definitely probably all gonna die soon, unless we can convince Sam Altman to hit the off switch at OpenAI.” I feel vindicated in my skepticism of the quality of the judgement of many of our peers.
Okay, that’s awesome. I appreciate it. I’d like to see more inspirational or personal posts like this on the EA Forum in the future, actually, so this kind of post personally speaks to me as well.
The age of dankness in effective altruism is upon us. It’s unstoppable. I don’t mean this as the go-to administrator of the Dank EA Memes Facebook group, or as one of the more reputed online memelords/shitposters in the EA movement.
I don’t just mean that as someone other effective altruists turn to for answers in the face of the onslaught of dank memes becoming a primary vector/medium shaping public perception of EA, both within and outside of the effective altruism community itself, for better or worse. I emphasize this as the go-to person other effective altruists turn to as potentially capable of using my influence to reign in the excessive or adverse impact of dank memes on EA. I don’t have that capability.
I can’t reign in dank memes in EA or do whatever anyone else might want me to do. They’re beyond me or any other mods/admins of the Dank EA Memes Facebook group.
The trend is unstoppable. It’s inevitable. The future of EA is dank.
To emphasize just how final this reality is, here is a very incomplete list of leaders in EA who I’m aware have embraced this uncanny reality
Dustin Moskowitz
Holden Karnofsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Ben West
Robert Wiblin
Kudos to Rob and Eliezer as early adopters of this trend.
For years now, much ink has been spilled about the promise and peril of the portents, for effective altruism, of dank memes. Many have singled me out as the person best suited to speak to this controversy. I’ve heard, listened, and taken all such sentiments to heart. This is the year I’ve opted to finally to complete a full-spectrum analysis of the role of dank memes as a primary form of outreach and community-building.
This won’t be a set of shitposts on other social media websites. This will be a sober evaluation of dank EA memes, composed of at least one post, if not a series of multiple posts, on the EA Forum. They may be so serious that few, if any, memes will be featured at all. It is time for the dank EA memes to come home.
I don’t understand this post. It seems like based on the title that these are individuals who may have died of covid or related complications but that’s not clarified. Most of the people listed were ageing, so it’s easy to imagine might have them may have incidentally died during the pandemic for other reasons.
Most of these people are ones who effective altruists would find inspiring figures, though a few of them appear to just be your favourite musicians. I’m guessing overall they’re people you personally find inspiring who died during the pandemic, for reasons that may or may not be related to covid.
I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with making a post like that on the EA Forum. It’s just not clear to me which of those things this post is about. (I tend to miss social subtleties often obvious to most others, so please pardon me if this post seems strange.)
In hindsight, the number of weirdness points we have can be increased. This is especially true if some of the supporters of causes at one point considered weird later become very wealthy and patronize that niche, unusual cause to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, as much as the size of the pool of weirdness points is theoretically unlimited, it’s still hard to practically increase the number of available weirdness points at an arbitrary rate. It’s still very possible to spend one’s weirdness points too quickly, and hurt one’s reputation in the process, so the reservoir of weirdness points should still be spent wisely.
Several people we thought deeply shared our values have been charged with conducting one of the biggest financial frauds in history (one of whom has pled guilty).
Update July 2023
As of now, two other former executives at FTX and/or Alameda Research have plead guilty. The 3 who have plead guilty are the 3 former execs who are known as the most complicit in SBF’s alleged crimes. That the 3 of them have plead guilty, while SBF is still denying all charges, seems like it will be one of the most interesting parts of his upcoming trial.
In terms of Elon Musk specifically, I feel like it affirms what most of already thought of his relationship with AI safety (AIS). Even among billionaire technologists conscious of AIS and who achieved fame and fortune in Silicon Valley, Musk is an ambitious and exceptionally impactful personality. This of course extends to all his business ventures, philanthropy and political influence.
Regardless of whether it’s ultimately positive or negative, I expect the impact of xAI, including for AIS, will be significant. What the quality of the impact will be strikes me as ambivalent. I.e., it’s not a simple question of whether it will be positive or negative.
I expect xAI, at least at this early stage, will be perceived as having some mildly positive influence on AIS. There are of course already some more pessimistic predictions. I expect within a couple years the pessimistic predictions may be vindicated as apparently negative impacts on AIS will outweigh whatever positive impacts xAI may have. The kind of position I’m summarizing here seems well-reflected in this post on Astral Codex Ten that Scott Alexander posted last week about why he expects xAI’s alignment plan will fail. I’ve not learned much about xAI yet, though my own model for having an ambivalent but somewhat pessimistic expectation for the company is based on:
The fact that the same trajectory has been one every other AGI research lab has followed during the last several years. Nobody denies some parts of their research agendas will be fruitful for AI safety/alignment. That’s especially true during the first couple years. It’s just that such initial, cautious optimism is dashed. Each company eventually succumbs to an AI capabilities arms race that outpaces the progress being made on alignment research.
This is in spite of the fact that the key actors behind the companies, like head researchers, and initial financial backers (including Elon Musk previously at OpenAI), publicly set an intention of avoiding that foreseeable pitfall. That hasn’t stopped any of them from falling into that trap. I’ve seen a lot of people say that of OpenAI, Anthropic AI, and Google DeepMind. I’m not aware of any reason why xAI may be likely to buck the trend.
A perception that across the vast array of Elon Musk’s endeavors, (again, e.g., his business ventures, philanthropy, and activism), his impact has been volatile. I.e., he has had a complicated, high-variance impact that has been beneficial for the world in some ways, but harmful in others. This is more of my personal opinion, though it dovetails with what many others have thought about Musk’s impact on AIS.
On one hand, other than maybe Dustin Moskowitz, Elon Musk is arguably the one philanthropist who has done the most to make the field of AI safety what it is today. In the months around the landmark publication of books about AI safety by Nick Bostrom and Stuart Russell about a decade ago, Elon Musk was a major, early backer of both the Future of Life Institute and OpenAI. His public support and advocacy of AI safety as shaped by the philosophies of effective altruism and longtermism may have been just as important.
On the other hand, OpenAI may have never been founded without his support. I remember there were misgivings about OpenAI even as it was being founded, now thought of as vindicated by a common perception that OpenAI is the biggest failure in the history of AI safety. I can’t think of a strong reason why Musk founding xAI will be an exception that will buck the trend of most of his past endeavors having quite an unpredictable trajectory and mixed track record.
I haven’t watched a recording of the debate yet and I intend to, though I feel like I’m familiar enough with arguments on both sides that I may not learn much. This review was informative. It helped me notice that understanding the nature of public dialogue and understanding of AGI risk may be the greatest learning value from the debate.
I agree with all the lessons you’ve drawn from this debate and laid out at the end of this post. I’ve got other reactions lengthy enough I may make them into their own top-level posts, though here’s some quicker feedback.
In Bengio and Tegmark were always respectful and polite, even when Tegmark challenged Mitchell. This may have further increased LeCun’s credibility, since there were no attacks on him and he didn’t attack anyone himself. [...] It seems like a good idea to have a mix of differing opinions on your side, even somewhat extreme (though grounded in rationality) positions – these will strengthen the more moderate stances. In this specific case, a combination of Bengio and e.g. Yudkowsky may have been more effective.
I’d distinguish here between how extreme the real positions someone takes are, and how extreme their rhetoric is. For example, even if Yudkowsky were to take more moderate positions, I expect he’d still come across as an extremist based on the rhetoric he often invokes.
While my impression is that Yudkowsky is not as hyperbolic in direct conversations, like on podcasts, his reputation as among the more disrespectful and impolite proponents of AGI risk persists. I expect he’d conduct himself in a debate like this much the way Mitchell conducted herself, except in the opposite direction.
To be fair, there are probably some more bombastic than Yudkowsky. Yet I’d trust neither them nor him to do better in a debate like this.
I’m writing up some other responses in reaction to this post, though I’ve noticed a frustrating theme across my different takes. There are better and worse arguments against the legitimacy of AGI risk as a concern, though it’s maddening that LeCunn and Mitchell mostly stuck to making the worse arguments.
Do you intend to build on this by writing about the roles played by those other dynamics you mentioned but didn’t write about in this post?
tl;dr Dustin Moskowitz taking further his use of dank memes to make himself and EA more relatable, by becoming a notorious edgelord, like Elon Musk, or Biden, in the form of Dark Brandon, was something I thought could potentially be a good idea. I’ve since concluded it’s unnecessary, especially given a downside risk like how doing so might inadvertently cause a toxic cult of personality around an unwitting Dustin.
Sometimes I use shortform posts as a notepad for unrefined thoughts that I might refine later. I posted the last couple on mobile which maybe has a default tag of ‘frontpage’ that I didn’t notice. Those shortform posts wound up on the frontpage by mistake, so it’s fair that they were downvoted.
Anyway, what I mean is:
All kinds of people will hate any given billionaire for umpteen reasons. Most of them don’t mitigate it but Elon Musk does by being relatable. A lot of that is by turning his personal brand into one, big, dank meme.
Elon Musk did so in the vein of Donald Trump, by roughly channeling another pop culture aesthetic you may also be familiar with, Big Dick Energy.
Seeing how both Trump and Sanders boosted their popularity by becoming more relatable and leaning into memes as part of their personal brands, juxtaposed with how unrelatable Hillary Clinton was, with her best attempt at a meme being the still cringe “Pokemon Go. To. The. Polls,” Biden has successfully maintained some relatability through the meme of Dark Brandon.
Dustin Moskowitz has become more relatable to the EA community at large through his increased willingness in the last year or two to engage with us directly, and through dank memes. I think this is genuine and has had a positive impact.
EA is sometimes stigmatized as out of touch, elitist and unrelatable. This is in spite of the fact it focuses on activities that, say, the median American may respect: trying to end factory farming and global poverty without overly guilt-tripping average individuals about it; supporting more political stability in a not-so-partisan way; or reigning in out-of-control industries that threaten civilizational destruction.
Like how Biden has wanted to stabilize the economy, defend democracy, and tackle climate change, he’s still demonized as a woke corporate communist dictator. Dark Brandon succeeds as a meme by ironically mocking the idea that Biden is a force of evil when he comes across as the biggest old fogey ever. Likewise, effective altruists are sometimes similarly demonized.
My tentative conclusion was that, if Dustin Moskowitz were to channel the Dark Brandon aesthetic as Elon Musk has been able to channel Trump’s meme aesthetic, could negative stereotypes about EA be turned on their head to humanize the community and make it more relatable.
I’ve concluded the answer is no for multiple reasons, such as the brand of EA not being as bad as feared in the wake of the FTX collapse, and there not being a need of a big, billionaire personality to fill the shoes left behind by SBF, especially because Dustin and the rest of us want to avoid at all costs the risk of him mistakenly falling ass-backwards into a personality cult around himself.
I’ve known Kat Woods for as long as Eric Chisholm has. I first met Eric several years before either of us first got involved in the EA or rationality communities. I had a phone call with him a few hours ago letting him know that this screencap was up on this forum. He was displeased you didn’t let him know yourself that you started this thread.
He is extremely busy for the rest of the month. He isn’t on the EA Forum either. Otherwise, I don’t speak for Eric. I’ve also made my own reply in the comment thread Eric started on Eliezer’s Facebook post. I’m assuming you’ll see the rest of that comment thread on Facebook too.
You can send me a private message to talk or ask me about whatever, or not, as you please. I don’t know who you are.
For anyone else curious, here is a Google Doc I’ve started writing up about the origins of the EA and rationality groups in Vancouver.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8MPC5j2aZrVX_ugBSHy8-N9HSHWiulR5GHJBfKhQe8/edit?usp=sharing