Day job: Cybersecurity
From England, now living in Estonia.
Day job: Cybersecurity
From England, now living in Estonia.
I don’t understand. Who is the victim that I am blaming here? I was trying to support FLI by pointing out that, in my experience, when I hear an organisation described as “far-right”, that tells me very little except that it is probably not openly and explicitly Marxist. Perhaps Nya Dagbladet is one of the rare exceptions who actually deserve the label—I don’t know, I never heard of them before this controversy. But I definitely sympathise with FLI’s not immediately giving 100% credence to the accusations.
If there is a gene for “needing less sleep, high behavioural drive, etc”, which seems like it ought to give an evolutionary advantage, and yet only a very small fraction of the population have the gene, there must be a reason for this.
I can think of the following possibilities:
It is a recent mutation.
The selective advantage of needing less sleep is not as great as it seems. (e.g. before artificial lighting was widespread, you couldn’t get much done with your extra hours of wakefulness)
The gene also has some kind of selective disadvantage. (If we are lucky, the disadvantage will be something like “increased nutritional requirements” which is not a big problem in the present day.)
Do you have any idea which of these is the case?
One reason for avoiding talking about “1-to-N” moral progress on a public EA forum is that it is inherently political. I agree with you on essentially all the issues you mentioned in the post, but I also realise that most people in the world and even in developed nations will find at least one of your positions grossly offensive—if not necessarily when stated as above, then certainly after they are taken to their logical conclusions.
Discussing how to achieve concrete goals in “1-to-N” moral progress would almost certainly lead “moral reactionaries” to start attacking the EA community, calling us “fascists” / “communists” / “deniers” / “blasphemers” depending on which kind of immorality they support. This would make life very difficult for other EAs.
Maybe the potential benefits are large enough to exceed the costs, but I don’t even know how we could go about estimating either of these.
A platform that collates and displays data about localities from around the country (and world) in an easily digestible, comparable manner. High-level and granular data that could be provided may include wi-fi quality, acceptance of minority groups, frequency of crime, voting history and tax rate.
https://teleport.org provides a lot of this information. AFAIK it’s funded by a company that sells relocation assistance to tech companies wanting to recruit internationally.
A necessary (but not sufficient) condition is that the people who want to attend meetups can find out when and where they are happening. You might think this is obvious, but my local group requires a login in order to view its “public calendar”.
My experience as a recipient of security consultants’ advice matches what you are saying. The sole result has been paperwork. Admittedly, some of this paperwork has actually been helpful (IT workers are not always very good at writing documentation.) but I still don’t think it was worth the opportunity cost.
The other problem I see is that there’s no modifier here for “actually being correct”. If person A presents a correct mathematical proof for X, and person B presents a mathematical proof for not X that is actually false, do they both get 20 points?
If you check the proofs yourself and you can see that one is obviously wrong and the other is not obviously (to you) wrong then you only give the not-obviously-wrong one 20 points. If you can’t tell which is wrong then they cancel out. If a professor then comes along and says “that proof is wrong, because [reason that you can’t understand], but the other one is OK” then epistemically it boils down to “tenured academic in field − 6 points” for the proof that the professor says is OK.
Thank you for explaining the “Big borderless workspace” concept. This is the first time I have seen a reasonable-looking argument in favour of company policies restricting employees’ actions outside work, something which I had previously seen as a pure cultural-imperialist power grab by oppressive bosses.
Many intergovernmental organizations have a similar recruitment model with limited term contracts for most staff members. (My experience is with EMBL but I don’t think the practice is limited to research-focused organizations.) The explicit aim is that staff members will join (possibly on secondment from national governments), bring their existing knowledge and share it with other staff from other countries, and then return to their home country bringing new experience to improve things there too.
The packages of benefits and perquisites offered by these organizations include some that EA organizations should consider duplicating if they want to encourage “tour of service” style employment.
Relocation assistance not only before starting the job but also after the end of the contract period.
Travel subsidies to encourage continuing links with the home country (and with the seconding organization, if applicable).
Dependents allowance, to compensate for the fact that e.g. if one spouse relocates to a foreign country for work then this lowers the earning potential of the other spouse.
Thanks for writing this! Writing a post on FOSS as an EA intervention has been on my to-do list ever since I noticed about six months ago that nobody had written one yet.
One additional benefit of FOSS that you appear to have missed is that, by offering a competitive alternative to proprietary software (and importantly, an alternative which can never be bought out in a corporate takeover), FOSS helps prevent the vendors selling proprietary software from exploiting their users quite as much as they otherwise would.
I definitely started using FOSS to save money while I was still at school and university, but now I would pay thousands to avoid the pervasive anti-features in all the (now often free-as-in-beer) proprietary ecosystems.
Much of the work in biosecurity is related to handling and processing large amounts of data, so knowledge of how to work with distributed systems is in demand.
Nowadays the amounts have to be extremely large before it is worth the effort of setting up a distributed system. You can fit 1 TB of RAM and several hundred TB of disk space in a commodity 4U server at a price equivalent to a couple of weeks of salary + overhead for someone with the skills to set up a high performance cluster, port your software to work on it, or debug the mysterious errors.
Pedantry: it’s Kristallnacht not Kristelnacht.
One useful resource for gathering such evidence is the EA Polls Facebook group.
I strongly doubt that a poll hosted on Facebook will provide unbiased evidence on those questions.
In addition, it could be particularly convenient to identify malevolent aspiring leaders and show their true colors while they are in the “political cradle”—before they become famous and powerful enough to deflect public criticism.
I agree that this would be useful. However, any organisation which sets out to do this will become an attractive target for anyone who currently holds power and wants to disrupt challengers by claiming that they are malevolent.
In addition, given the state of libel laws in many countries, having a single well-funded organisation making public claims of malevolence is going to end with a huge fraction of those funds being spent on lawyers.
If SBF committed fraud, there’s a distinct possibility that SBF will use altruism as a defence and/or justification for his actions in the coming months.
Sadly, I think his having been the second largest donor to the Biden 2020 campaign fund will be a more effective defence. It certainly worked for the people who lost hundreds of billions of Other People’s Money in 2008.
I would love to see hiring done better at EA organizations, and if there was some kind of “help EA orgs do hiring better” role I would jump at the chance.
This would be great. Changing the human parts of the hiring process would be a lot of work, but if you can just get organizations to use some kind of software that automatically sends out “We received your application” and “Your application was rejected” e-mails then that would be a good start.
Improving state capacity without ensuring the state is aligned to human values is just as bad as working on AI capabilities without ensuring that the AI is aligned to human values. The last few years have drastically reduced my confidence in “state alignment” even in so-called “liberal” democracies.
Some additional relevant historical background: in 1938, and especially before Kristallnacht, it was not at all obvious how bad the Nazi persecution of Jews would subsequently become. The Wannsee Conference, where the Nazi leadership decided to implement the “final solution”, was still four years in the future. The pogroms of 19th-century Russia were still within living memory, and Western democracies still had colonial empires, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and similar abominations. Without accurate statistics, it would have been hard to tell whether the newspaper stories coming out of Germany were any worse.
It would be interesting to hear what gave the organisers of the Kindertransport the foresight to know that this problem was urgent.
Given that the immediate previous heading is “Take seriously the idea that you may be doing harm”, I think we should give the OP the benefit of the doubt that he is aware that fully open borders might cause harms as well as benefits.
That is definitely my reaction to any story with “Far-Right” in the headline.