I’m the Head of EA Funds at the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Previously, I was a co-founder and co-executive director at the London-based Center on Long-Term Risk, a research group and grantmaker focused on preventing s-risks from AI.
My background is in medicine (BMed) and economics (MSc) with a focus on health economics and development economics.
See my LinkedIn.
Update: The LTFF application deadline has been extended through Friday, October 2nd.
Thanks for the critique!
In addition to four videos on his own channel, Robert Miles also published three videos on Computerphile during the last 12 months. He also publishes the Alignment Newsletter podcast. So there’s at least some additional output. There’s probably more I don’t know of.
you could find someone with a similar talent level (explaining fairly basic concepts)
I personally actually think this would be very difficult. Robert Miles’ content seems to have been received positively by the AI safety community, but science communications in general is notoriously difficult, and I’d expect most YouTubers to routinely distort and oversimplify important concepts, such that I’d worry that such content would do more harm than good. In contrast, Robert Miles seems sufficiently nuanced.
(Disclosure: I work at EA Funds.)
Glad to hear you like it!
I shared an update on the basic rights for primates initiative here. (TL;DR: The Swiss supreme court has ruled that the initiative is valid, so the vote will finally happen. The ruling has created a lot of national and international headlines.)
Update: The initiative was initially declared invalid, but our supporters decided to litigate. This Wednesday, the Swiss federal court ruled that the initiative is valid! I.e., the court has confirmed that primates could in principle be holders of basic rights, and the city of Basel will have a ballot vote on whether primates deserve basic rights. This made front page headlines in all major Swiss newspapers. There’s a decent chance of it passing, and if it does, that would make Basel one of the first places in the world where nonhuman animals hold basic rights.
Some media coverage in English:
Some coverage in German:
Fixed, thanks.
The Google Docs commenting feature in particular invites micro-feedback rather than general high-level points. When asking for feedback on a Google Doc, I usually include a template like the following at the beginning (I don’t always use all of it):
Epistemic status: …
Giving feedback on this document
I’d greatly appreciate critical feedback, especially about X. Thanks for taking the time, … Your feedback would be most appreciated about:
Do you think is broadly on the right track? Did I overlook important points? Do you think my line of argument makes sense?
Is the structure and form appropriate? Should it be shorter/longer?
In which areas do you think this document needs the most further work?
Please give feedback by DATE.
Someone recently asked me how to get better at receiving feedback. My response:
I’m not sure I have a lot of very insightful stuff to say, just the “obvious advice”:
Right before receiving the feedback, consciously adopt a constructive mindset. (I usually do something like this: “What comes might hurt, but it won’t be about me as a person in general, just about my behavior, which I can change; I’ll try to breathe and relax if the feedback produces this tightening feeling.”)
If I think that people are being overly negative, I force them to be more constructive by asking questions like “What would you suggest?”, “Interesting. Do you have ideas for how to address this?”, “I agree this is a concern, but I’m not sure how to solve it, do you have a suggestion?”
One thing that usually helps me is asking people whether my work is overall on the right track, and the answer is usually yes, and that makes it easier to take critical feedback. Many people forget to give high-level feedback, but it’s usually quite easy to prompt them to do so.
If something feels threatening, asking others who I know value my contributions for their take usually helps me put things into perspective. E.g., when someone was negative about me, I asked some of my former colleagues whether they think I can do my new job well, and their take was something like “yeah you probably don’t have the type of skill that this person mentions, but I don’t think that skill is key to what you’re trying to do, and this person doesn’t appreciate some of the skills you have, either, so basically they shouldn’t complain as much.”
See also Daniel Kestenholz’s How to Give and Receive Feedback.
These seem like good objections to me, but overall I still find it pretty implausible. A hermit who leads a happy life alone on an island (and has read lots of books about personal identity and otherwise acquired a lot of wisdom) probably wouldn’t want to commit suicide unless the amount of expected suffering in their future was pretty significant.
(I didn’t understand, or disagree with, the fourth point.)
As I said, mainly by assigning more credence to other views.
While I agree that problematic implications do not follow in practice, I still think some views have highly counterintuitive implications. E.g., some suffering-focused views would imply that most happy present-day humans would be better off committing suicide if there’s a small chance that they would experience severe suffering at some point in their lives. This seems a highly implausible and under-appreciated implication (and makes me assign more credence to views that don’t have this implication, such as preference-based and upside-focused views).
Paul Christiano talks about this question in his 80,000 Hours podcast, mainly saying that s-risks seem less tractable than AI alignment (but also expressing some enthusiasm for working on them).
Most suffering-focused EAs I know agree about the facts: there’s a small chance that AI-powered space colonization will create flourishing futures highly optimized for happiness and other forms of moral value, and this small chance of a vast payoff dominates the expected value of the future on many moral views. I think people generally agree that the typical/median future scenario will be much better than the present (for reasons like this one, though there’s much more to say about that), though in absolute terms probably not nearly as good as it could be.
So in my perception, most of the disagreement comes from moral views, not from perceptions of the likelihood or severity of s-risks.
4 For me it seems like people constantly trade happiness for suffering (taking drugs expecting a hangover, eating unhealthy stuff expecting health problems or even just feeling full, finishing that show on Netflix instead of going to sleep… ). Those are reasons for me to believe that most people might not want to compensate suffering through happiness 1:1 , but are also far from expecting 1:10^17 returns or even stating there is no return which potentially could compensate any kind of suffering.
One counterargument that has been raised against this is that people just accept suffering in order to avoid other forms of suffering. E.g., you might feel bored if you don’t take drugs, might have uncomfortable cravings for unhealthy food if you don’t eat it, etc.
I do think this point could be part of an interesting argument, but as it stands, it merely offers an alternative explanation without analyzing carefully which of the two explanations is correct. So on its own, this doesn’t seem to be a strong counterargument yet.
This post itself is a major insight since 2015! :P
I haven’t checked the claims myself, but “follow good leadership practices” seems to be a heavily disputed claim. Some people claim DxE is a cult, see e.g. here.
Now it’s officially on BBC: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200923-the-hinge-of-history-long-termism-and-existential-risk
Although it also says: