Thank you, seems like an awesome 3 days. Would you be able to share a little more on the participants’ motivation, either their own or how you motivated them? I am trying to encourage a local group to try similar short but somewhat intense sprints as a low stakes attempt to increase familiarity and confidence with different topics, or at least encourage interest and breadth of knowledge. What worked well for you?
helmetedhornbill
Karma: 94
I’m really greatful you’ve wrote this detailed and specific focus.
I too have worried about the perception of EA from AI Ethics Researchers, may of whom are well established and reputable scientists who sincerely care about what many EAs care about, a safe AI. I’ve felt it’s a shame more respectful common language hasn’t been found there. I think some of what is missing is a reflection on communication. I’ve seen pretty nasty spirited tweets from EAs in response to TG and folks in her research network. Of course caution should be applied when reasoning from small numbers but if there is anything done on a group or bigger community level, like adversarial collaborations, discussion panels I have missed it, though I’d be interested in learning what’s been done. It just looks at face value like a misuse of resources to not be collaborating with them or trying to find more common ground if the ultimate values are similar.
Sounds really exciting. Could you give more detail on what kind of projects or work is eligible or likely to be successful for funding? It wasn’t clear to me from the website.
If you listen to Marty Seligman’s early talks, when positive psychology starts to become a more well defined field, his view of wellbeing is going beyond ‘the basics’ of everyday life. He’s even used numbers to say, ok if the aim of therapy is to bring a depressed person from −5 to −3 or 0, the goal of positive psychology is to take you from +3 to +5. Some wellbeing theories inherit this general thinking, and many of the basic physiological needs like having food or shelter or being safe are things seen for a requirement to be at a normal baseline. With the exception of social relations and some of the emotions work, you’re more likely to see most physiological needs in the clinical literature and some with folks who work on resilience.
Really great and clear write-up.
For feedback: I wouldn’t say this isn’t a meta-analysis in the technical sense and it doesn’t seem like a systematic synthesis either. I think it’s a great intro to some prominent ideas with a more descriptive slant overall, though the places where you do evaluate evidence (e.g. Maslow re: lack of empirical evidence) are where the highest value would come for a reader who doesn’t know the literature. I think if you were to frame this differently and draw out a little more why we should care about wellbeing, you’d get more punch.
In the EA space, you may want to reach out to Happier Lives: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/key-ideas/
For flourishing, I think you’re missing some of the context with Barbara Fredrickson’s work, particularly broaden and build theory, which many people view as a major early contributor to this field .
Other important theories that come to mind withing positive psych or wellbeing:
Flow—notably the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Grit—Angela Duckworth (although some folks think grit is basicaly conscientiousness repackaged)
Beyond PERMA, there are now a lot more mini-theories dealing with disposition, attitudes, character, gratitude. Sonja Lyubomirsky comes to mind with her theories on happiness. I guess it depends what you want to capture.
And more broadly for anyone wanting to read more into this literature, I think there are good recommendations for reading in these syllabi:
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/resources/course-syllabi-teachers
that’s really helpful, thank you!