James-Hartree-Law

Karma: 70

James-Hartree-Law 17 Apr 2026 20:14 UTC
1 point
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on: [Research Request] “Prestige Tax”: Quantifying Epistemic Silence in AI Safety Teams
Please forward this to anyone working in a junior rule in AI safety/governance orgs.

James-Hartree-Law 11 Apr 2026 22:44 UTC
2 points
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on: New Space for Philosophy of Technology (call for writers)
Direct call for articles on the following:
[visit better-argument.com/writers for details]
Economics & Political Economy
- What happens when everyone says it’s a bubble?
- How is AI-driven job replacement economically sustainable if displaced workers are also the consumers?
- Is “productivity” still a coherent measure of economic value in an AI-mediated economy?
- Are we moving toward an economy of ownership (compute, data, models) rather than labor?
- What replaces advertising if persuasion becomes too powerful?
Technology, Platforms & Incentives
- What would a social platform look like that is both economically viable and aligned with human flourishing?
- What would it mean to design a platform that optimizes for wisdom rather than engagement?
- What institutional structures could support slow thinking in fast media environments?
- Is virality fundamentally at odds with truth?
Education & Knowledge
- Should education train memory, judgment, or tool use—and in what proportions?
- What becomes of the university if it no longer has a monopoly on knowledge transmission?
- What replaces peer review when production becomes cheap and constant?
- Can there still be a canon in an age of infinite content?
Work, Identity & Intellectual Life
- What does authorship mean when content is co-produced with machines?
- Is there a future for generalists, or only coordinators of machines?
- What does intellectual honesty look like when assistance is invisible and universal?
- Does the concept of vocation survive technological displacement?
Governance & Power
- What forms of governance are appropriate for technologies that evolve faster than law?
- Can states regulate systems that are globally distributed and privately owned?
- Should highly capable AI systems be treated as infrastructure, firms, or something else?
- Is centralized control of AI development stabilizing or dangerous?
Ethics & Human Meaning
- How should we understand dignity in a post-work society?
- Is it wrong to replace human relationships with artificial ones?
- What ethical frameworks are robust to rapid, discontinuous change?
- When do historical analogies clarify, and when do they mislead?
Culture & Society
- What forms of culture emerge when audiences can generate exactly what they want?

James-Hartree-Law 28 Jul 2025 22:45 UTC
7 points
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on: 6 years of building an EA-aligned career from an LMIC
Thankyou for your post! Would you please detail more about how you landed your first role?

James-Hartree-Law 25 Jul 2025 18:03 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Luke Moore 🔸’s comment on: Primers for charity evaluation?
Thankyou! Can you suggest anyone that I could talk to at GWCC who works on evaluating evaluators? I would imagine someone like this would have a lot to say about the best methodologies.

James-Hartree-Law 25 Jul 2025 18:01 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: Primers for charity evaluation?
I’m very interested to learn more about testing. This would be especially important when I am at the stage of reaching churches and Christian businesses to offer auditing based on charity evaluations. First I need to develop a framework for evals.
This is a helpful insight about effectiveness vs. cause prioritisation. Especially in Christian circles (anecdotally) there’s a high amount of resistance to drop an existing effort for a more important one.

James-Hartree-Law 31 Jan 2025 1:58 UTC
1 point
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on: Fellowships and internships
Hi, the link to fellowships is currently broken. Can you please fix it?

James-Hartree-Law 18 Jan 2025 18:50 UTC
1 point
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on: Moral mountaineering
This intersects with a common criticism against EAs: that utilitarianism doesn’t work and is very silly, because of such problems like eating tuna fish to prevent tunas eating other things. Although maybe this just points out that utilitarian value calculations are just extremely hard, not wrongheaded.

James-Hartree-Law 17 Jan 2025 20:52 UTC
12 points
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on: Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
I would describe myself as a conservative EA.
I think I got to a conservative political compass because of cause prioritisation. I felt that Liberal political groups were focused on personal identity considerations at the expense of more important goals. An example would be diversity hiring over talent hiring (which might be an overblown, optical concern that doesn’t really exist as much as I think it does.)
My feeling is that dividing up identity groups based on what makes one similar (similar gender identity or sexual orientation) is the wrong way of understanding community. Rather community is predicated on the need for diversity (builder, baker, candlestick makers make community. Not straight men.) I am an EA because of my similarities with EAs, but I am a member of my local community first and foremost. That is the community I need to exist, local community is more important than identity based communities like EA. [I really welcome red-teaming on this!]
I think EA’s have the mental strength to handle diverse political views well. What makes it difficult for conservatives and liberals to have conversations is an unwillingness to view others complexly, and being unwilling to assume good intent. We are EA’s because we care about doing good well. We already assume a certain amount of good intention in interaction with other EA’s. We could signal this to conservative folks. Liberals do not have a monopoly on moral feelings.
That said, a real conservative/liberal divide is the size of one’s circle of moral concern. EA’s have very broad ones, conservatives have very local ones. But this also seems like a general problem with EA, that it can think too large, too broad, too un-local. I’m pretty unsure about that.

James-Hartree-Law 15 Jan 2025 16:47 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 2
on: How big of a problem is abortion?
I don’t understand what is the thought connecting the death of a chicken and the possible death of a baby (if it is not a fetus). The premise of your account, I thought, is that a fetus is possibly a human life. If it is a human life, then a genocide is happening every year. If it is true that a fetus is a human life, then why is it a relevant comparison that drastically more broiler chickens get killed yearly? On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made? As an aside, I was very interested to learn that “broiler” is a species of chicken. Broil: “to cook (meat or fish) by exposure to direct, intense radiant heat.”