This article has a lot of downvoting (net karma of 39 from 28)
This does not seem to be an unusual amount of downvoting to me. The net karma is even higher than the number of votes!
As a more general point, I think people should worry less about downvotes on posts with a high net karma.
As for existential risk from AI takeover, I don’t think having a self-sustaining civilization on Mars would help much.
If an AI has completed takeover on earth and killed all humans on earth, taking over Mars too does not sound that hard, especially since the human civilization is likely quite fragile. (There might be some edge cases, where you solve the AI control problem well enough to guarantee that all advanced AIs leave Mars alone, but not well enough for AI to leave Australia alone, but I think scenarios like these are extremely unlikely).
For other existential risks, it might be in principle useful, but practically very difficult. Building a self-sustaining city on Mars will take a lot of time and resources. On the scale of centuries, it seems like a viable option though.
At the same time though I don’t think you mean to endorse 1).
I have read or skimmed some of his posts and my sense is that he does endorse 1). But at the same time he says
critics seem to frequently conflate my arguments with other, simpler positions that can be more easily dismissed.
so maybe this is one of these cases and I should be more careful.
A recent comment says that restriction has been lifted and the website will be updated next week: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aBkALPSXBRjnjWLnP/announcing-the-q1-2025-long-term-future-fund-grant-round?commentId=FFFMBth8v7WBqYFzP
the AI won’t ever have more [...] capabilities to hack and destroy infrastructure than Russia, China or the US itself.
Having better hacking capability than China seems like a low bar for super-human AGI. The AGI would need to be better at writing and understanding code than a small group of talented humans, and have access to some servers. This sounds easy if you accept the premise of smarter-than-human AGI.
Merely listing EA under “Memetics adjacence” does not support the claim “is also an avowed effective altruist.”
it’s the arguments you least agree with that you should extend the most charity to
I strongly disagree with flat earthers, but I don’t think that I should extend a lot of charity to arguments for a flat earth.
Also, on a quick skim, I could not find where this is argued for in the linked “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”
Caveat: I consider these minor issues, I hope I don’t come across as too accusatory.
Interesting, why’s that? :)
It seems that the reason for cross-posting was that you personally found it interesting. If you use the EA forum team account, it sounds a bit like an “official” endorsement, and makes the Forum Team less neutral.
Even if you use another account name (eg “selected linkposts”) that is run by the Forum Team, I think there should be some explanation how those linkposts are selected, otherwise it seems like arbitrarily privileging some stuff over other stuff.
A “LinkpostBot” account would be good if the cross-posting is automated (e.g. every ACX article who mentions Effective Altruism).
I also personally feel kinda weird getting karma for just linking to someone else’s work
I think its fine to gain Karma by virtue of linkposting and being an active forum member, I will not be bothered by it and I think you should not worry about that (although i can understand that it might feel uncomfortable to you). Other people are also allowed to link-post.
Personally when I see a linkpost, I generally assume that the author here is also the original author
I think starting the title with [linkpost] fixes that issue.
I think its best to post this under your own account.
there are so many projects which continuously replicate what others have done before; projects with very similar messages, but mostly separate communities, infrastructures and identities.
Some examples would be useful.
have you seen someone that is not top 10 attendee in an EA organization?
Julia Wise, who works at CEA, studied at Bryn Mawr College.
(Another comment of yours makes me think by “top 10 attendee” you mean “has attended a top 10 university”.)
the child is adding an expected value of $27,275 per year in social surplus.
It would take $133,333 per year to raise a child to adulthood for it to not be worthwhile
I think the comparison of “social surplus” to effective donations is mistaken here. A social surplus of $27,275 (in the US) does not save 5 lives, but an effective donation of that size might.
There used to be such a system: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YhPWq784eRDr5999P/announcing-the-ea-donation-swap-system It got shut down 7 months ago (see the comments on that post).
Some (or all?) Lightspeed grants are part of SFF: https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2023-h2-recommendations
One outstanding question is at what point AI capabilities are too close to loss of control. We propose to delegate this question to the AI Safety Institutes set up in the U.K., U.S., China, and other countries.
I consider it clickbait if you write “There Is a Solution”, but then say that there are these AI safety institutes that will figure out the crucial details of the solution some time in the future.
edit: the issue raised in this comment has been fixed
In my opinion you have not really argued why it is neglected. As a starting point, they seem to spend roughly $35 million per year: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840. $14 million of those are for salaries, so I would be surprised if new features are strongly bottlenecked by money and talent.
I am just guessing on these issues, but my suspicion as for why some features such as “live location sharing” and “display past encrypted messages from the group chat you were not a member of but only just now joined” are not (yet) implemented because they do not fit well into Signal’s approach to security/privacy.
Could you provide examples of political discussions on the EA Forum that appear to have negatively impacted the forum’s environment or impaired its ability to achieve its objectives?
As far as I remember, the political discussions have been quite civilized on the EA Forum. But I think this is because of the policies and culture the EA Forum has. If political discussions were a lot more frequent, the culture and discussion styles could get worse. For example, it might attract EA-adjacent people or even outsiders to fight their political battles on the EA Forum. Maybe this can be solved by hiring additional moderators though.
Also, politics can get a lot of attention that would be better spend elsewhere. For example this post about Trump generated 60 comments, and I am not sure if it was worth it.
Could you expand a bit on how this would look like? How are they being “shunted”, what kind of roles are low-level roles? (E.g. your claim could be that the average male EA CS-student is much less likely to hear “You should change from AI safety to community-building” than female EA CS-students.)
I think the comment already addresses that here: