Holly_Elmore

• Holly_Elmore 8 Sep 2023 23:57 UTC

  267 points

  83 ∶ 13

  on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Zooming out from this particular case, I’m concerned that our community is both (1) extremely encouraging and tolerant of experimentation and poor, undefined boundaries and (2) very quick to point the finger when any experiment goes wrong. If we don’t want to have strict professional norms I think it’s unfair to put all the blame on failed experiments without updating the algorithm that allows people embark on these experiments with community approval.

  To be perfectly clear, I think this community has poor professional boundaries and a poor understanding of why normie boundaries exist. I would like better boundaries all around. I don’t think we get better boundaries by acting like a failure like this is due to character or lack of integrity instead of bad engineering. If you wouldn’t have looked at it before it imploded and thought the engineering was bad, I think that’s the biggest thing that needs to change. I’m concerned that people still think that if you have good enough character (or are smart enough, etc), you don’t need good boundaries and systems.

  What links here?

  • Luzia's comment on Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims by Kat Woods (12 Dec 2023 17:25 UTC; 34 points)

The Case for AI Safety Ad­vo­cacy to the Public

We are in triage ev­ery sec­ond of ev­ery day

• Holly_Elmore 13 Dec 2023 22:05 UTC

  176 points

  43 ∶ 18

  on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  To recap, I thought Ben’s original post was unfair even if he happened to be right about Nonlinear because of how chilling it is for everyone else to know they could be on blast if they try to do anything. It sounded like NL made mistakes, but they sounded like very typical mistakes of EA/​rationalists when they try out new or unusual social arrangements. Since the attitude around me if you don’t like contracts you entered is generally “tough shit, get more agency”, I was surprised at the responses saying Alice and Chloe should have been protected from an arrangement they willing entered (that almost anyone but EAs/​rationalists would have told them was a bad idea). It made me think Ben/​Lightcone had a double standard toward an org they already didn’t like because of Emerson talking about Machiavellian strategies and marketing.

  Idk if Emerson talking about libel was premature. Many have taken it as an obvious escalation, but it seems like he called it exactly right because NL’s reputation is all but destroyed. Maybe if he hadn’t said that Ben would have waited for their response before publishing, and it would have been better. I think it’s naive and irresponsible for Ben/​Lightcone to act like a post like Ben’s was all-in-the-family or something and Emerson was the one getting too real. These forums are NL’s constituency. Damaging their reputation in EA is damaging the main reputation that matters.

  I did think the original post was witch-hunty. Even if it was all true and balanced (just not able to share smoking guns) re:NL, the effect on readers is to communicate that smallish infractions will out you as not good enough or reveal your unacceptable character. I’m starting a new org and it terrified me that my inevitable mistakes would be unacceptable.“No mistakes allowed” seems like the worst norm imaginable for a community like ours. It actually is okay to make mistakes with org structure and employer-employee relationships and try again.

Protest against Meta’s ir­re­versible pro­lifer­a­tion (Sept 29, San Fran­cisco)

The ro­dent birth con­trol landscape

• Holly_Elmore 6 Feb 2023 2:30 UTC

  109 points

  39 ∶ 18

  on: EA, Sex­ual Harass­ment, and Abuse

  These are anonymous quotes from two people I know and vouch for about the TIME piece on gender-based harassment in the EA community:

  Anon 1: I think it’s unfortunate that the women weren’t comfortable with the names of the responsible parties being shared in the article. My understanding is that they were not people strongly associated with EA, some of them had spoken out against EA and had never identified as an EA or had any role in EA, and an article with their names would have given people a very different impression of what happened. I guess I think someone should just spell out who the accused parties are (available from public evidence).

  Anon 2: I want EAs to not be fucking stupid 😭

  “Oh geez this Times reporter says we’re doing really bad things, we must be doing really bad things A LOT, that’s so upsetting!”

  yet somehow “This New York Times reporter says Scott Alexander is racist and bad, but he’s actually not, ugh I hate how the press is awful and lies & spins stuff in this way just to get clicks”

  And yes, this included reports of people, but like I’ve met the first person interviewed in the article and she is hella scary and not someone I would trust to report accurately on this. And I know one of the people being talked about is [redacted] & some of the circumstance beyond that, which is like a known thing that people have considered and taken action on, and like.......… why the fuck are EAs just like “damn this is so sad, we really fucked up guys” without being AT ALL skeptical about the reporting or sources??????

  What links here?

  • Peo­ple Will Some­times Just Lie About You by aella (18 Feb 2023 2:27 UTC; 362 points)

• Holly_Elmore 21 Dec 2023 3:55 UTC

  95 points

  25 ∶ 7

  on: Effec­tive Asper­sions: How the Non­lin­ear In­ves­ti­ga­tion Went Wrong

  You touched on something here that I am coming to see as the key issue: whether there should be a justice system within the EA/​Rationality community and whether Lightcone can self-appoint into the role of community police. In conversations with people from Lightcone re:NL posts, I was told that is wrong to try to guard your reputation because that information belongs to the community to decide. US law on reputation is that you do have a right to protect yourself from lies and misrepresentation. Emerson talking about suing for libel—his right—was seen as defection from the norms which that Lightcone employee thinks should apply to the whole EA/​rationality community. When did Emerson opt into following these norms, being judged by these norms? Did any of us? The Lightcone employees also did not like that Kat made a veiled threat to either Chloe or Alice (can’t remember) that her reputation in EA could be ruined by NL if she kept saying bad things about them. They saw that as bad not just because it was a threat but because it conspired to hide information from the community. From what I understood, that Lightcone employee thought it would have been okay for Kat to talk shit about the former employee—it was trying to keep the employee from talking that was wrong. I see bargaining in private not to talk shit about each other as up to those people, not necessarily doing something wrong by the rest of the community. Again, who else knew that these were the rules for being in this community?
  
  In general, I am not in favor of community justice just like I’m not in favor of campus justice. If someone commits a crime, it should be reported to the police. If individuals want to give a company a bad review, they can do so publicly online or privately to whomever they want. If EAs/​rationalists want to belong to a community that polices itself, there should be an explicit agreement to join this community along with its expectations, and the enforcers should be accountable to the enforced somehow.

• Holly_Elmore 7 Sep 2023 21:09 UTC

  94 points

  25 ∶ 18

  on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Post on everybody who’s living together and dating each other and giving each other grants when?

  Clarification: I’m just kind of surprised to see some of the things in this post portrayed as bad when they are very common in EA orgs, like living together and being open to unconventional and kind of unclear boundaries and pay arrangements and especially conflicts of interest from dating coworkers and bosses. I worry that things we’re all letting slide could be used to discredit anybody if the momentum turns against them.

• Holly_Elmore 7 Feb 2023 19:16 UTC

  91 points

  36 ∶ 3

  on: A per­sonal re­flec­tion on SBF

  I appreciate this post a lot, particularly how you did not take more responsibility than was merited and how you admitted thinking it wasn’t a red flag that SBF skirted regulations bc the regulations were probably bad. I appreciated how you noticed hindsight bias and rewritten history creeping in, and I appreciate how you don’t claim that more ideal actions from you would have changed the course of history but nonetheless care about your small failures here.
  
  Do you think EA’s self-reflection about this is at all productive, considering most people had even less information than you? My (very, very emotional) reaction to this has been that most of the angst about how we somehow should have known or had a different moral philosophy (or decision theory) is a delusional attempt to feel in control. I’m just curious to hear in your words if you think there’s any value to the reaction of the broader community (people who knew as much or less about SBF before ¹¹⁄₂₂ than you).

Biol­ogy pro­ject in search of first au­thor: imag­ing the brain of pop­u­lar farmed in­sect Black Soldier Fly

I want an ethnog­ra­phy of EA

• Holly_Elmore 11 Nov 2022 20:31 UTC

  81 points

  42 ∶ 2

  in reply to: sphor’s comment on: The FTX Fu­ture Fund team has resigned

  To the extent that Kerry’s allegation involves his own judgment of Sam’s actions as bad or shady, I think it matters that there’s reason not to trust Kerry’s judgment or possibly motives in sharing the information. However we should definitely try to find out what actually happened and determine whether it was truly predictive of worse behavior down the line.

Erad­i­cat­ing ro­den­ti­cides from U.S. pest man­age­ment is less prac­ti­cal than we thought

Fund­ing AI Safety poli­ti­cal ad­vo­cacy in the US: In­di­vi­d­ual donors and small dona­tions may be es­pe­cially helpful

Scrupu­los­ity: my EAGxBos­ton 2019 light­ning talk

Cru­cial con­sid­er­a­tions in the field of Wild An­i­mal Welfare (WAW)

Virtue sig­nal­ing is some­times the best or the only met­ric we have

• Holly_Elmore 27 Aug 2023 10:11 UTC

  60 points

  20 ∶ 4

  on: Eliezer Yud­kowsky Is Fre­quently, Con­fi­dently, Egre­giously Wrong

  I like the general point about recognizing Eliezer’s flaws and breaking through lazy dogmas that have been allowed to take hold just because he said them. I think it’s important for readers to know that Eliezer is arrogant, in case that doesn’t come across in his writing, but I don’t think these examples make the case that he’s frequently or egregiously wrong. Just sometimes wrong.

  I am annoyed by the effect of that one Facebook post on the entire rationalist community’s opinions of animals, but I can’t put all the blame on Eliezer for that. He wrote one comment on the Forum that he shared to facebook, and in it he admitted that eating animals is a sin his society lets him get away with and that he wouldn’t eat animals if he felt he could get adequate nutrition otherwise. He’s not making strong claims about animal consciousness— just giving his take. I think he’s rationalizing in places, and I think a lot of people were grateful for the excuse not to give matter any more thought, but I don’t think it’s fair to act like he goes around parading this view when he doesn’t. The only text we have is that decade-old comment.

  Seems like a low blow to say his strength isn’t in forming true beliefs, the thing he wrote the Sequences about, when most of your complaints are about him being arrogant or not respecting expertise, not being probably wrong especially often.

Op­ti­miz­ing seed:pol­len ra­tio to spread ideas