(I ask because I think burnout is a serious problem and its seriousness is probably generally under-appreciated in this community)
HenryStanley
Karma: 1,566
It’s bizarre isn’t it
Very much hoping the board makes public some of the reasons behind the decision.
This is wonderful.
I’d love to see a writeup of what happened in 2018 if you’re willing to share.
One thing I hadn’t realised is that Ilya Sutskever signed this open letter as well (and he’s on the board!).
An open letter from 500 of ~700 OpenAI employees to the board, calling on them to resign (also on The Verge).
Suggests there’s an enormous amount of bad feeling about the decision internally. It also seems like a bad sign that the board was unwilling to provide any ‘written evidence’ of wrongdoing, though maybe something will appear in the coming days.
But all told it looks pretty bad for EA. Seems like there’s an enormous backlash online—initially against OpenAI for firing everyone’s favourite AI CEO, and now against “EA” “woke” “decelerationist” types.[1][2]
It’s also seemed to trigger a flurry of tweets from Nick Cammarata, saying that EAs are overwhelmingly self-flagellating and self-destructive and that EA caused him and his friends enormous harm. I think his claims are flatly wrong (though they may be true for him and his friends), and some of the replies seem to agree, but it has 500K views as I publish.
Seems like the whole episode (combined with at least one prominent EA seemingly saying it’s emblematic dreadful and toxic) has the potential to cause a lot of reputational damage, especially if the board chooses not to clarify its actions (although it’s possibly too late for that).
I don’t understand the strategy of creating a lower risk business in order to fund a higher risk business though: if you are aligned with your investors (and if your goal is “make money” then you probably are aligned), then it seems strictly better to use their money instead of your own?
Second-time founders (at least in my experience, and in the UK/Europe) have a much easier time getting funding for their businesses. Certainly as a first-time founder our experience of getting funding has been like pulling teeth, despite decent traction and ARR. With greater access to capital I’d expect a higher chance of building a very large company. So in essence, the goal of one’s first venture might be to just get to some form of exit to provide the cachet for then starting the next thing, rather than going for as big an exit as possible.
Generally speaking, should tech people start startups and EtG?
For those that have done so: would you advise going for broke and trying to make those startups as big as possible? Or optimise for something more sustainable that can be exited to generate cash, and then start something else higher-risk?
Since you offered: 0.015% tretinoin + niacinamide 4% + urea 5% moisturiser at night, SPF50 in the morning. What else should I be doing?
“There’s no life bad enough for us to try to actively extinguish it when the subject itself can’t express a will for that”
Agreed that this seems nonsensical on its face.
Downvoting because you’ve already posted this exact comment several times in this thread. Just post it once and link to it.
Also—the whole point of getting a licence is to test that you can drive to a specific standard. Not just “my friends taught me how to drive so it’s fine”. The fact that the penalties for driving without a licence are small doesn’t make it good behaviour.
David Pearce on the seriousness of suffering, paradise engineering, and negative utilitarianism.
Thanks!
I set up a DAF with Founders Pledge (which is available to all Pledgers subject to a minimum £10,000 initial deposit) - it’s a screenshot from their internal granting tool.
Giving gladly, giving publicly
What do you think about having more of an EA presence at Vegan Camp Out more generally? I was there and was surprised not to see any of the big names I’m familiar with in the animal welfare movement.
I guess I don’t even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she’s… just some random person, right?
From some online digging: she’s listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She’s never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing something about her relevance in this whole thing?
This is awesome, thank you so much for writing it. Incidentally I wrote a piece on treating restless legs syndrome (RLS), step 1 of which is “fix iron deficiency”: https://henryaj.substack.com/p/how-to-treat-restless-legs-syndrome
“What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood.”—This is just not a useful thing to mention in an apology about racism, or at least, not in this way
I actually think this was quite reasonable. He’s a bioethicist, after all – ‘eugenics’ has a bunch of different meanings in that field and it’s important to distinguish between them
The figure of 85% of Americans having their wisdom teeth removed isn’t very informative as (IIRC) most Americans have them removed by default, even if there’s no impaction.
In the UK, the NHS only removes them if they’re causing problems (although in practice I found they were quite reluctant even in this case). That would provide a more useful base rate.
Citation needed on this—I’m not sure what net-bad unicorns you’re thinking of (and I’d be interested to know), but I think at the outset they probably mostly looked like not-making-the-world-worse ideas and by the time they’re getting to unicorn status the original incubator has very little influence over what they do.
Perhaps, although as the post says you don’t need to found a unicorn to have a very promising exit and give a large amount to charity. I’m one of the people who became a software engineer back when 80K recommended it as a promising career path. I think more of us should start EtG startups—and suspect there are many like me who don’t feel themselves a good fit for direct work (or just like tech) and would make good founders.