Re “consider working on foundational AI forecasting questions as an alternative”, what opportunities are available for people who are interested?
Jonathan Yan
Karma: 287
LAION.ai: Petition for Accelerating AI Research
[Question] What does Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse mean for the funding situation of EA?
No comment on whether it’s best to contact through connections, but I think the best person for contacting through connections is Benjamin Todd, who according to this post, speaks basic conversational Chinese, had lived for almost a year in China, and had been doing research into the intersection between effective altruism in China over the year before 2018.
Due to these highly relevant experiences, and his caution about translating EA materials into Chinese, most such efforts were delayed for many years. He has been without doubt the most influential China expert in our community!
A high real rate doesn’t necessarily imply a high nominal rate, it could also come with huge deflation, in which case shorting government debt won’t get you anywhere.
[Question] Is there an “EA alumni” group?
What would you do if you were the only intelligent being in the universe?
I don’t disagree but I also don’t find them evidently true.
For a beginner billionaire of precisely $1b net worth, why is giving away $900m and only spending $100m not the best thing for wellbeing? How to do better?
And why is spending on reputation-boosting donations better than on luxuries? I get that donations to effective charities are better, but other donations can be orders of magnitudes less effective. On the other hand, luxury brands like LV and Hermès have a gross profit margin of around 70%, buying them is essentially a wealth transfer to the brands’ owners, who usually engage in substantial philanthropic activities. Maybe their activities are more effective to offset the cost of goods?
Why does Anthropic have a valuation at all? “Anthropic is a public benefit corporation”, according to its homepage. Is it still allowed then to distribute profits?
What Happened at Alameda Research
I deep-dived into crypto in the latter half of 2020 because I was curious what was going on there. It took me a few months to see but what’s said in the top-level comment were basically all true back then. I started my learning from scratch with an open mind, I would imagine had one looked into SBF activities with due diligence in mind, questionable behavior would be obvious to see.
New to EA Hong Kong but already familiar with EA? Start here!
Here is the link to the book hosted on a Chinese website, with further links to the chapters. I had a poor experience reading on that website but unfortunately I was unable to find a more pleasant one.
EA lets me signal my values to like-minded people, and feel part of an in-group
I felt this, but none of the other points on OP’s list, then I realized that the people I signaled to were not in fact like-minded. So as I am finishing this paragraph, no point on the list applies to me any more.
Illumine Lingao aka Morning Star of Lingao, is a Chinese time travel novel.
In the story, more than 500 people from early-21st-century China intentionally travel back in time to the late Ming dynasty in 1628 AD. Settling in Lingao County on the island of Hainan, the time travelers set out to establish an industrialized society and change the course of history.
The work is crowd-authored by hundreds of netizens and praised for its realistic depictions of how to bootstap an industrial civilization from scratch.
There is a big gap between killing all of us and ending future conscious life (on earth, in our galaxy, entire universe/multiverse?)
“one EA org pays a salary over $1,000,000”—high info content should be on top!
Hi Rebecca,
The point of the example in my original comment is to demonstrate that well-accepted social norms in one culture can be deemed offensive in another.
Your counterargument is that 1) the conclusion is drawn from only one example, and 2) even that example could be due to the person who gave me the feedback misunderstood the situation, ie my example was bad luck and not generally applicable.
In my reply to your counterargument, my claim of this being just one but not the only example is the response to 1). And the China example is the response to 2), that is, even if she were a new EA I just met for the first time, I could still have remarked on her good appearance, a polite and friendly gesture in my local culture, and be correctly deemed offensive by someone from the West. Therefore the main story line in my example still holds and is representative of difficult multi-cultural situations.
Hi Rebecca,
Yes I can confirm that I was the person Constance got the anecdote from. It was also my belief at the conference and at the time I spoke with Constance that participants were monitored for community health, because I understood that community health 1) had an objective of making sure the event is welcoming and considerate, 2) had power to not admit participants to future events, and 3) had staff walking around the venue looking for something. From other commenters I learned that 3) was false (they were looking for trash, not monitoring interactions).
So re information lost, I want to be clear that nothing was lost when it’s relayed to Constance. I wrongly believed monitoring had taken place and told her just that in our chat.
Re your comment about calling someone pretty: it was meant to be an example of how cross-cultural understanding was difficult. It was the first example that came to mind when I wrote my comment, but certainly not the only example. I thought it was a good example to make the point that normal social interactions in one culture could be considered deeply inappropriate or offensive in a different culture.
Coming back to your comment that “a guy just go up to a random girl on the street and complement her looks, yes that’s considered offensive”. I’d like to refer you to this blog post (may not be the best source, I just Googled it) where it is mentioned that “people in China often address women who they don’t know” “beautiful woman” or “beautiful girl” to create connections and make the person being addressed to feel good. So in the example I gave, whether the person was a good friend of mine would not have mattered.
Can someone please explain why we’re still forecasting the weak AGI timeline? I thought “sparks” of AGI as Microsoft claimed GPT-4 achieved should already be more than the level of intelligence implied by “weak”.