james_aung

• james_aung 13 Jul 2020 19:26 UTC

  1 point

  on: New mem­ber—es­sen­tial read­ing and un­writ­ten rules?

  I like the book sug­ges­tions in this com­ment in an­other EA fo­rum post https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​mdTZk­tighWHBPdwd3/​​what-book-s-would-you-want-a-gifted-teenager-to-come-across?com­men­tId=dN5dALs­mJcroTY8zH

• james_aung 13 Jul 2020 19:18 UTC

  11 points

  on: New mem­ber—es­sen­tial read­ing and un­writ­ten rules?

  Wel­come to the com­mu­nity! And con­grat­u­la­tions on your achieve­ments so far!

  It could be worth learn­ing study skills so that you can do bet­ter in your de­gree and/​or get your course­work done in less time, free­ing up your time to learn other things, ex­plore EA, or just have fun.

  I was sur­prised when com­ing to uni­ver­sity how much peo­ple study skills differed, and I don’t think it’s un­rea­son­able to say that you can free up weeks (months?) of your time and save your­self a lot of stress through good study skills.

  I’d recom­mend the cousera course called learn­ing how to learn. https://​​www.coursera.org/​​learn/​​learn­ing-how-to-learn

  Beyond this, uni­ver­sity is a great time to try new things, try out new lifestyles and habits, and do self im­prove­ment. Go­ing through the things in this list would get you off to a fly­ing start, I reckon https://​​80000hours.org/​​ca­reer-guide/​​how-to-be-suc­cess­ful/​​ I’d also just recom­mend try­ing out new so­cieties and clubs that are available at your uni­ver­sity, in case you find some­thing in­ter­est­ing and use­ful or fun.

The Mo­ral Value of In­for­ma­tion—ed­ited transcript

• james_aung 29 Jun 2020 11:18 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: meerpirat’s comment on: Differ­en­tial tech­nolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment—sum­marised introduction

  In­deed. Although there is an up­per limit still, since there surely is some limit to how much value we can ex­tract from a re­source and there are only a finite num­ber of atoms in the uni­verse.

• james_aung 25 Jun 2020 17:05 UTC

  4 points

  on: Differ­en­tial tech­nolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment—sum­marised introduction

  Un­for­tu­nately I have wrist pain which I’m try­ing to avoid get­ting RSI with. If you’d like to con­tribute to this, I think it would be cool to add a read­ing list, per­haps draw­ing on the top read­ings from MichaelA’s col­lec­tion. It would also be cool if some­one could get a PDF of Su­per­in­tel­li­gence Chap­ter 14 and host it on Google Drive so that we can link to it.

• james_aung 25 Jun 2020 11:11 UTC

  1 point

  on: AI Gover­nance Read­ing Group Guide

  Do you have a tem­plate of the shared doc­u­ment that you used? Or was it a quite un­struc­tured blank doc­u­ment?

• james_aung 25 Jun 2020 10:58 UTC

  14 points

  on: Differ­en­tial tech­nolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment—sum­marised introduction

  I wrote this up be­cause I wanted a sin­gle re­source I could send to peo­ple that ex­plained differ­en­tial tech­nolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment.

  I made it quite quickly in about 1 hour, so I’m sure it’s quite lack­ing and would ap­pre­ci­ate any com­ments and sug­ges­tions peo­ple may have to im­prove it. You can also com­ment on a GDoc ver­sion of this here: https://​​docs.google.com/​​doc­u­ment/​​d/​​1HcLcu-WObHO8y45yEMICfmqNpeugb­mUX9HdRfeu7foM/​​edit?usp=sharing

Differ­en­tial tech­nolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment

• james_aung 21 Aug 2019 12:43 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Ask Me Any­thing!

  I en­joy read­ing Phil’s blog here: https://​​philip­tram­mell.com/​​blog/​​

• james_aung 5 Aug 2018 20:53 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford’s comment on: Prob­lems with EA rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness and how to solve it

  Just wanted to say that I’d be re­ally ex­cited to read more of your thoughts on this. As men­tioned above, I think many con­sid­er­a­tions and counter-con­sid­er­a­tions against x-risk work de­serve more at­ten­tion and ex­po­sure in the com­mu­nity.

  I en­courage you to write up your thoughts in the near-term rather than far fu­ture! :P

• james_aung 3 May 2018 16:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: Heuris­tics from Run­ning Har­vard and Oxford EA Groups

  I think that makes sense and I agree with you. We also have run the sort of things you de­scribe in Oxford.

  Maybe don’t teach can be un­der­stood as ‘pre­fer us­ing re­sources as a way of con­vey­ing ideas, rather than you teach­ing’.

  I agree that we should aim to ‘out­reach’, in ‘(on-topic) in­tro­duc­tory’ EA talks, and don’t dis­agree here.

• james_aung 3 May 2018 16:46 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Yannick_Muehlhaeuser’s comment on: Heuris­tics from Run­ning Har­vard and Oxford EA Groups

  Hi!

  I think there are easy ways to make it not weird. Some tips:

  1) Emailing from an offi­cial email ac­count, rather than a per­sonal one, if you’ve never met the per­son be­fore.

  2) Men­tion ex­plic­itly that this is ‘some­thing you do’ and that, for new­com­ers, you’d like to wel­come them into the com­mu­nity. This makes it less strange that you’re reach­ing out to them per­son­ally.

  3) Men­tion ex­plic­itly that you’ll be talk­ing about EA, and not other stuff.

  4) It’s use­ful to meet peo­ple in real life at an event first and say hello and in­tro­duce your­self there.

  5) Don’t feel like you have an agenda or any­thing; keep it in­for­mal. Treat it as if you were get­ting to know a friend bet­ter and have an en­joy­able time.

  6) Ab­solutely don’t pres­sure peo­ple, just reach out and offer to meet up if they’d find it useful

• james_aung 25 Apr 2018 16:00 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: JoshP’s comment on: Heuris­tics from Run­ning Har­vard and Oxford EA Groups

  Thanks for the com­ment JoshP!

  I’ve spo­ken a lot with the Cam­bridge lot about this. I guess the cruxes of my dis­agree­ment with their ap­proach are:

  1) I think their com­mit­tee model se­lects more for will­ing­ness to do me­nial tasks for the pres­tige of be­ing in the com­mit­tee, rather than ac­tual en­thu­si­asm for effec­tive al­tru­ism. So some­thing like what you de­scribed hap­pens where “a sec­tion be­come more high-fidelity later, and it ends up not mak­ing that much differ­ence”, as peo­ple who aren’t ac­tu­ally in­ter­ested drop out. But it comes at the cost of more en­gaged peo­ple spend­ing time on man­age­ment.

  2) From my un­der­stand­ing, Cam­bridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of be­ing able to ‘lock in’ peo­ple to en­gage with EA for 1 year and cre­ate a norm of com­mit­tee at­tend­ing events. But my model of some­one who ends up be­ing very en­gaged in EA is that ex­cite­ment about the con­tent drives most of the mo­ti­va­tion, rather than ex­ter­nal com­mit­ment de­vices. So I sup­pose roles only play a limited role in com­mit­ting peo­ple to en­gage, but comes at the cost of peo­ple spend­ing X hours on ad­min, when they could have spent X hours on learn­ing more about EA.

  It’s worth not­ing that I think Cam­bridge have re­cently been think­ing hard about this, and also I ex­pect their mod­els for how their com­mit­tee pro­vides value to be much more nu­anced than I pre­sent. Nev­er­the­less, I think (1) and (2) cap­ture use­ful points of dis­agree­ment I’ve had with them in the past.

• james_aung 25 Apr 2018 15:50 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Heuris­tics from Run­ning Har­vard and Oxford EA Groups

  Hey! Thanks for the com­ment.

  I think it cap­tures a few differ­ent no­tions. I’ll try and spell out a few salient ones

  1) Pushes back against the idea that an out­reach talk needs to cover all as­pects of EA. e.g. I think some in­tro EA 45min talks end up be­ing re­ally un­satis­fac­tory as they only have time to skim across loads of differ­ent con­cepts and cause ar­eas lightly. In­stead I think it could be OK and even bet­ter to do out­reach talks that don’t in­tro­duce all of EA but do demon­strate a cool and in­ter­est­ing facet of EA episte­mol­ogy. e.g. I could imag­ine a talk on differ­en­tial vs ab­solute tech­nolog­i­cal progress as be­ing a way to at­tract new peo­ple.

  2) Pushes back against run­ning in­tro­duc­tory dis­cus­sion groups. Some­times it feels like you need to guide some­one through the ba­sics, but I’ve found that of­ten you can just lend peo­ple books or send them ar­ti­cles and they’ll be able to pick up the same stuff with­out it tak­ing up your time.

  3) Reframes par­tic­u­lar com­mu­nity niches, such as a tech­ni­cal AI safety pa­per read­ing group, as also a po­ten­tial en­try-point into the broader com­mu­nity. e.g. Peo­ple find out about the AI group since they study com­puter sci­ence and find it in­ter­est­ing and then get in­tro­duced to EA.

Heuris­tics from Run­ning Har­vard and Oxford EA Groups