Currently pursuing a PhD at the “Mathematics for Our Future Climate” CDT at Reading University.
Previously MSc in applied mathematics/theoretical ML.
Not really active here—racism, Rationality and weirdness in the movement are so bad they made me give up on it.
Yeah I’m not sure what’s with the downvotes.
This is outright the best April Fool’s post we’ve had this year. Shame it didn’t get more views. Seriously, I laughed out loud multiple times.
(I’m Jewish, my grandma was a Holocaust survivor and her father and most of her extended family were killed by the Nazis. My grandfather managed to flee before the war started but some of his family were also killed.)
Thank god we have the April Fool’s tag to protect us from Poe’s law though.
How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
The only parts I’d let AI write are those where I’m unsure if my phrasing is really natural in English and I ask for a better one.
If I’m not the one writing the post, I don’t see why anyone should bother reading it.
Doesn’t really even have to be “AGI” for this, strictly speaking.
Extinction perhaps not, but I think eternal autocracy is definitely possible.
Elon Musk has already used this power to do actions which will potentially kill millions (by funding the Trump campaign enough to get to close down USAID). I think that should worry us, and the chance of people amassing even more power should worry us even more.
Re: helping people in our communities
I’d respond that’s it’s not an either/or situation. I do donate to help the local community (for different senses of “local”), but there too:
I try to understand what is more effective within that space—e.g. EA Israel did a project at some point of trying to quantify the impact of charities operating within Israel, and they have a donation portal for the recommended charities.
I remember that all the people who are currently suffering keep existing even if I don’t see them in my neighbourhood. And my money, even personally, can have an impact there in the order of magnitude of saving a child’s life.
What do you think their counterfactual is? I don’t think any of what they’ve been doing is really transferable.
Not trying to answer on the author’s behalf, but it seems relatively clear to me that differential development is possible here: so far most advancements in science seem to have come from biological applications like AlphaFold that are distinct from the LLMs that have created most problems both in the eyes of “doomers” and in the eyes of people warning about current non-extinction dangers. Therefore the development of beneficial tools can in theory be accelerated while the development of LLMs is slowed down.
Small note: I don’t know if it’s my own English at fault, but I interpreted “7x below the WHO threshold” as meaning “7 times worse than the threshold” and only understood the actual meaning as I looked at the actual numbers later. Might be worth wording it differently.
Great result I think!
Mentioned many real dangers, gave a pretty realistic outlook, and was approachable and funny without making it all look ridiculous.
Well, you can now see that you don’t know who upvoted your comment (but it was me).
I’m not sure if admins know or not.
I’d argue that this doesn’t measure the harms I was talking about.
Still, I like that you replied to a 3 year old comment with actual data.
Sorry for being this blunt, but EA is about using evidence and reason to identify the most effective ways to help others. I can’t possibly see how operating on a vague guess is on par with that.
This criticism is independent of the fact that I still claim a “negative life” is not a concept we should incorporate into moral theories, and that we definitely shouldn’t aim to just cull all animals whose lives we somehow think are negative.
Strongly up voted.
Compare with this quote from MacAskill’s “What We Owe the Future chapter 7”, showing exactly the problem you describe:
If scientists with Einstein-level research abilities were cloned and trained from an early age, or if human beings were genetically engineered to have greater research abilities, this could compensate for having fewer people overall and thereby sustain technological progress.
estimate the cropland- and pasture-years per $ for the interventions they fund.
What would they do with such an estimate? I don’t think anyone, you included, knows with any more than very slim confidence, if it’s good or bad for soil animals to turn wild land into cropland or vice versa.
The title is really confusing and I didn’t understand it. Maybe try “Recommended interventions for X when considering Y” or something instead of an explicit bottom line?
I largely agree with you but I want to point to a small issue with terminology: what does “supporting Palestine” mean here?
I think it’s both vague (do you mean a current entity? A future state? Something else? And what does supporting it mean?) and unnecessary (in my view strongly objecting to what Israel’s doing in Gaza and in the West Bank is consistent with most political views other than those who for some reason put extremely low value on the lives of Palestinians compared to Israelis).
Really cool! I hope it becomes available in the UK soon.
Meanwhile in Israel, Solve is a company offering a whole egg substitute for baking, for 130 ILS for ~50 small eggs (currently ~42 USD, although the war makes the conversion somewhat unrepresentative). I’ve not used it but I’ve heard good things from a gourmet chef. They also sell a “meringue powder”, called Mery Mix by an Italian company, Lapet, at 65 ILS per 1kg(!). Not sure how this converts to eggs.