Jonny Spicer

• Jonny Spicer 23 Feb 2022 12:43 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Open Thread: Novem­ber 2021

  Hi, I’m Jonny, a software engineer based in London. I’ve recently come across EA and am looking to re-align my career along a higher impact path, most likely focusing on AI risk, however I’ve still not fully bought into longtermism just yet so am hedging by also considering working on climate change or global health. I look forward to using this forum to try and answer some of my questions and clarify my own thinking.

• Jonny Spicer 8 Apr 2022 17:05 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Open Thread: Novem­ber 2021

  I’ve taken a few concrete steps:

  • Applied for 80k career advising, which fortunately I got accepted for. My call is at the end of the month

  • Learned the absolute basics of the problem and some of the attempts in progress to try and solve it, by doing things like listening to the 80k podcasts with Chris Olah/​Brian Christian, watching Rob Miles’ videos etc

  • Clarified in my own mind that AI alignment is the most pressing problem, largely thanks to posts like Neel Nanda’s excellent Simplify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk” and Scott Alexander’s “Long-Termism” vs “Existential Risk” (I’d not spent much time considering philosophy before engaging with EA and haven’t had enough time to work out whether or not I have the beliefs required in order to subscribe to longtermism. Fortunately those two posts showed me I probably don’t need to make a decision about that yet and can focus on alignment knowing that it’s likely the highest impact cause I can work on).

  • Began cold-emailing AI safety folks to see if I can get them to give me any advice

  • Signed up to some newsletters, joined the AI alignment Slack group

  I plan on taking a few more concrete steps:

  • Continuing to reach out to people working on AI safety who might be able to offer me practical advice on what skills to prioritise in order to get into the field and what options I might have available.

  • In a similar vein to the above, try to find a mentor, who can help me both focus my technical skills as well as maximise my impact

  • Getting in contact with the folks at AI Safety Support

  • Complete the deep learning for coders fast.ai course

  My first goal is to ascertain whether or not I’d be a good fit for this kind of work, but given that my prior is that software engineers are likely to be a good fit for working on AI alignment and I’m a good fit for a software engineer, I am confident this will turn out to be the case. If that turns out to be true, there are a few career next steps that I think seem promising:

  • Applying for relevant internships. A lot of these seem aimed at current students, but I’m hoping I can find some that would be suitable for me.

  • Getting an interim job that primarily uses python and ideally ML so I can upskill in those (at the moment my skills are more generic backend API development focused), even if the job isn’t focused on safety.

  • Apply for a grant to self-study for 3-6 months, ideally under the guidance of a mentor, with a view to building a portfolio that would enable me to get a job somewhere like Deepmind.

  • Applying for research associate positions focused on AI alignment.

  I appreciate there’s little context to my current situation which might be relevant here, but nonetheless any feedback on these would be greatly appreciated!

• Jonny Spicer 27 Apr 2022 19:51 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Jonny Spicer’s Shortform

  Earlier I had a conversation with Yonatan Cale about, among other things, ideas for EA projects that could be looking for founders. My prior is that “ideas are easy, execution is hard” and therefor there are plenty of good ideas, he pushed back on this and cited this thread.

  Then I went for a run and tried to think of some ideas. I haven’t checked to see if anyone has proposed any of them before, and given that I thought of them off the top of my head, they have likely already been discussed. We had talked about software projects specifically, but not all of these are software-centric. I haven’t spent longer than five minutes thinking about any of them, and I think it’s unlikely any of them are particularly good; this is an exercise in generating ideas, on the grounds that if there’s enough of them, one of them might be good.

  • Prediction market aggregators that include markets from non-anglophone countries, eg Russia/​China/​India. Basically Metaforecast but with more markets (maybe I should reach out to Nuño to see if this would be possible?). I don’t know if those markets already exist—if not, maybe they could be created.

  • A system to automate or crowd-source FOI requests, open source the data and provide tools to access and use it.

  • Basically any of the digital democracy tools Audrey Tang talked about on her episode of the 80000 Hours podcast. Build an MVP, pitch it to small local government, show some success, scale it up. Given the open-source nature of the tools currently used in Taiwan, “build an MVP” could be as easy as just running git clone polis. Low chance of success, potential for huge impact if successful regardless.

  • A system for polling representative samples of a population and/​or having demographic information available about those sampled. Something like mechanical turk but in app-form and not associated with Amazon.

  • Web scraping/​sentiment & quantitative analysis for information on Western/​Russian/​Chinese/​Indian sites, similar to prediction market thing above. If lots of Chinese netizens suddenly start talking about shortening their AGI timelines, what information do they have that folks in the West don’t? Similarly, the analysis should be published in the same languages to try to foster a more global community.

  • Org specifically for AI info security. Could either be for pen testing or building new defensive tools.

  • I originally thought “something like Guesstimate but more specific to Bayes calculations” but having looked at Guesstimate again, that already looks great.

  • A scientific journal which better incentivizes high quality research, eg by mandating preregistration, or by rewarding attempts to replicate studies. I presume this has been debated at length already though.

  Obviously I know the last two definitely don’t have legs, and #1 seems like it might just be submitting a pull request after a weekend or two of work, but still. I’m confident that there is a non-zero amount of value across all of these ideas, that if I thought about them more there’s a possibility that they could yield an appreciable amount of value, and that I can think of a large number of similar ideas given more time, with at least some of them being better than the best one of these ideas.

• Jonny Spicer 27 Apr 2022 20:30 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  From a software engineering point of view there are a couple of things that would potentially put me off applying to an EA-org:

  • Lack of mentorship (this is somewhat covered by your small teams point but this is the specific part that I think of). I’m sure this isn’t true for all EA orgs but the appeal of ie FAANG is that I am very confident that I’ll be able to get mentored by engineers at the top of the field, who likely already have a lot of experience mentoring, having good structures for mentors and are generally empowered to be great at that.

  • Small scope/​scale for projects, particularly for frontend work. In SWE a big part of your career capital comes from being able to say you’ve worked on projects that are really big and/​or really fast. There are plenty of fullstack jobs at EA orgs around at the moment but a lot of them are basically look after a website or build an app which will serve a niche community.

  I think there has been discussion before about SWEs feeling like EA orgs don’t offer them enough career capital, but I can’t remember where and it doesn’t appear to have updated me much in favour of the EA orgs.

• Jonny Spicer 20 May 2022 15:15 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: “Big tent” effec­tive al­tru­ism is very im­por­tant (par­tic­u­larly right now)

  Thanks for writing this Luke! Much like others have said, there are some sections in this that really resonate me and others I’m not so sure on. In particular I would offer a different framing on this point:

  Celebrate all the good actions^[6] that people are taking (not diminish people when they don’t go from 0 to 100 in under 10 seconds flat).

  Rather than celebrating actions that have altruistic intent but questionable efficacy, instead I think we could be more accepting of the idea that some of these things (eg donating blood) make us feel warm fuzzy feelings, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel those feelings and taking actions to achieve them, even if they might not be obviously maximally impactful. Impact is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s important that people who are looking to have a large impact make sustainable choices, including keeping their morale high. For example, for people working on causes like AI safety where it’s difficult to see tangible impact, if donating blood gives you the boost you need to keep you feeling good about yourself and what you are doing with your life and therefor prevents you from becoming disillusioned with your choices and contributing less to AI safety, then I think that makes it very worth doing—however I think that is more an act of self-care rather than something that ought to be celebrated in the community (although perhaps acts of self-care ought to be more celebrated in the community).

  I also think that a lot of average day-to-day charity (and perhaps other kinds of altruism) is primarily motivated by guilt, which I don’t think is particularly helpful for donors and I’d be surprised if it proved to be sustainable for charities either. I think effective altruism does a great job of reframing this: when I donate to GiveWell MIF, instead of doing it to assuage a sense of guilt, I do it because it lets me feel good about myself, knowing that I am actually making a tangible difference in the world with my actions. These are the same warm fuzzy feelings as from before, and I think perhaps that’s the framing I would prefer here: humans are warm-fuzzy-feeling-optimisers, and EA could do a better job at empowering people to feel those feelings when they make maximally impactful choices, rather than just ones where their impact is immediately obvious or provides some social kudos.

• Jonny Spicer 21 May 2022 7:06 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kevin Lacker’s comment on: “Big tent” effec­tive al­tru­ism is very im­por­tant (par­tic­u­larly right now)

  Thanks for pointing that out, I didn’t realise how effective blood donation was. I think my original point still stands, if “donating blood” is substituted with a different proxy for something that is sub-maximally effective but feels good though.

• Jonny Spicer 31 May 2022 18:19 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ad­vice on Pur­su­ing Tech­ni­cal AI Safety Research

  Thanks for writing this up Frances! I just wanted to point out that the post on biosecurity talent you linked to includes the following:

  Disclaimer: All uses of “engineering” in this post refer to the engineering of physical systems (e.g. materials engineering or civil engineering). Sorry, software engineers.

• Jonny Spicer 21 Sep 2022 17:41 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing “Effec­tive Dropouts”

  My application

  I dropped out of my undergrad about halfway through and think I made some learnable mistakes in the process.

  Originally I was studying law, on the grounds that:

  1. My teachers and parents said I’d make a good lawyer;

  2. They similar pressured me to do a subject perceived as “highly academic”;

  3. I was quite a good public speaker at school;

  4. I thought it represented the best chance I had of getting in to Oxbridge.

  None of these reasons are particularly good ones for choosing a degree, but nobody ever sat me down and gave me a better framing for of the problem, so I just went along with it. Point #4 was potentially true given that I did get an offer from Cambridge, and at one point my academic career seemed to be on a solid trajectory—I would go to Cambridge, become a barrister afterwards, be financially secure and successful and ride off into the sunset. Unfortunately I suffered from various executive dysfunction and mental health issues both at school and uni but didn’t legitimise them and therefor didn’t devote the necessary resources to resolve them. This led to me declining my Cambridge offer as I knew there was no way I was going to get the required grades, and subsequently also led to me dropping out of Lancaster University about halfway through my second year, at which point I went from having a solid life plan to no plan whatsoever as well as some potent mental health struggles.

  Fast forward a few years and I’m a software engineer at a big tech company, which seems to be a significantly better fit for me than being a barrister. It’s a great time to be a programmer—it’s well paid and relatively low stress, building things is rewarding, it suits me as someone who has a quantitative worldview combined with a decent chunk of social anxiety. Being in big tech also appears to give me a reasonably clear pathway towards career success, by building career capital I can later parlay into impact, founding a start up or similar.

  In general it’s hard to evaluate the counterfactual of dropping out/​remaining at uni, however one of the posts Gavin linked mentioned shame around dropping out that strongly resonates with me. At various points in the last 6 years I have considered if I ought to try to find a way to get a degree, and often find myself thinking that had I actually acquired a degree from Cambridge, my career might be significantly more advanced than it is now. It’s also worth noting that not having an undergrad can make it harder to immigrate, for example it is very difficult for me to get a H1-B visa for the US.

  I also think Eli is completely correct that much of the value of university is in the people rather than the education. The sense of belonging I felt as part of a sports team at university was one I’ve been wholly unable to replicate since, despite various attempts to do so. I suspect the majority of the value of an Oxbridge or similar degree is in the networking opportunities, particularly in the long term.

  Advice to my 17 year old self

  1. Think about what you want out of your life, even if it seems hard to imagine a life outside of school. Talk to people you find interesting, ask them difficult questions, try to imagine if being in their shoes would make you happy. Your parents want you to make the most stable possible option, which might not be the best.

  2. Take a year out to work on your mental health. Your career will be long, and a year spent wisely will more than pay for itself. Do anything you can to make those around you see that this is valuable. This is potentially also good advice for my 27 year old self.

  3. The opportunity to go to university is likely once-in-a-lifetime, and thus you should make sure that you go to the right one and study the right subject. I think I would’ve enjoyed, maths, economics and computer science significantly more than law.

  4. Equally, it is not the be-all and end-all. If you’re smart, curious and hard-working then you’ll land on your feet. You have a big safety net so you shouldn’t be scared of falling.

  Takeaways

  1. I think at least trying to do an undergrad is worth it, for the people more than the education.

  2. Degrees are pretty clearly more valuable to some people than others, and this depends on how credentialist your field is and whether you have traits that would be sufficient to overcome your lack of degree when looking for opportunities.

  3. Most 17 year olds I know and have known do not seem well equipped to deal with big decisions like this.

• Jonny Spicer 24 Nov 2022 21:28 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Soft­ware engineering

  Do you have a draft for this at all? I’d love to see/​give feedback :)

• Jonny Spicer 24 Nov 2022 21:31 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JP Addison’s comment on: Soft­ware engineering

  I use Anki if I’m likely to forget it exists at all at the point when it would potentially be useful to me, and a Zettelkasten for things that I’ll likely remember vaguely exist but will need more detail on

• Jonny Spicer 2 Dec 2022 15:31 UTC

  20 points

  6 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman in­volved in Effec­tive Altru­ism. I’m sad, dis­ap­pointed, and scared.

  I’m worried a lot of this is missing the point, and potentially missing important solutions. I’m going to use EAG for my examples here, as I think it is the strongest case of what I’m describing, but I think my argument generalises to a lot of scenarios and spaces in the EA community.

  In my mind, there are two competing things going on here:

  1. At an EAG, you are likely to meet people who are at a similar stage in their life to you, who have similar interests, and who are likely to be both intelligent and altruistic, both attractive qualities. If you meet one of these people, and they feel similarly about you, you could enjoy some flavour of romance together, and it would be mutually fulfilling. Things being mutually fulfilling between parties is self-evidently a good thing.

  2. At an EAG, some people, primarily women, have bad experiences as a result of others’ romantic attention. These experiences can range from uncomfortable to traumatic. I think these negative experiences can then be grouped into two further categories:

     1. Those that are are the result of malicious intent

     2. Those that are the result of power dynamics, and can arise despite positive intentions.

  I think your solutions are primarily concerned with the 2a category, and when reading it I was reminded of this comment, which I think puts it better than I could. There are people with malicious intent in every community, and I don’t think EA requires any particularly novel solution to deal with them. I agree with Isabel in that I’m also worried that when these threads come up, people will spend their efforts trying to either gauge the size of the problem, or theorise the optimal solution, rather than take any meaningful action.

  I think 2b can be equally as damaging, and more should be done about it. Because EA is such a small, well-resourced community, there are especially strong power dynamics at play between individuals. As discussed in the blog post linked above, the EA community does not have strong boundaries between professional and romantic lives, in fact it seems especially tolerant of this intermingling—I claim this is a strongly negative thing. If someone a prospective future employer/​grantmaker/​”senior leader” starts flirting with me at EAG, even if they are being incredibly respectful and only have good intentions, I am under a lot of pressure to cooperate, even if that’s not what I want at all. If at the start I do genuinely reciprocate that attraction, and we engage in some kind of romantic interaction, and I later change my mind, there is again a huge pressure on me not to leave the arrangement, even though that’s what I want to do.

  I’m not suggesting that EAs shouldn’t date one another, but I am suggesting a much stronger acknowledgement of power dynamics at play, both on an individual community level. Due to the lack of community emphasis, I suspect many beneficiaries of power dynamics in these situations do not think of themselves that way, and so may inadvertently do harm (this isn’t aimed at you personally—I don’t know whether you are or aren’t aware of this). It seems plausible to me that this would also help with 2a, as well as make the community feel more inclusive.

• Jonny Spicer 3 Dec 2022 12:49 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman in­volved in Effec­tive Altru­ism. I’m sad, dis­ap­pointed, and scared.

  Thanks for pointing this out—I’d pasted the wrong link, and have edited my original comment.

• Jonny Spicer 5 Jan 2023 12:09 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  I had several calls and exchanged messages with Yonatan for a couple of months last year while I was searching for a new job. I would strongly recommend his services. I’ve been programming for ~5 years now, although I wouldn’t consider some of those years to be particularly high quality experience.

  The calls felt a little like “career therapy”. Yonatan tended to answer a lot of my questions with questions of his own, in order to help me draw my own conclusions. He was perceptive and particularly good at pointing out irrational thoughts I had around my career—it turned out there was a lot more of these than I was expecting!

  Estimating counterfactual impact is obviously hard, but I’m going to try anyway.

  • I ended up getting a FAANG job, which I estimate will reduce my time to getting a highly impactful job by 18-24 months compared to offers from good-but-not-FAANG companies.

  • I have slightly greater counterfactual earning-to-give potential, but I think it’s negligible.

  • I don’t have a reasonable estimate of how likely it was to get to interview stage for FAANG companies, so I can’t comment on how impactful Yonatan was in helping me land interviews in the first place (I suspect his CV review probably added a few % points, but <10)

  • Without speaking to Yonatan, I would’ve applied for fewer jobs, done fewer interviews, been less prepared for them, and got less proficient in the process of doing them. Contingent on my getting a FAANG interview, my counterfactual estimate would be that I had a 10% chance of success, with Yonatan’s help I think I was ~40% ex ante.

  • If we use the (poor) assumption that I was always going to at least get the interview, I estimate Yonatan’s coaching added an extra 6-7 months of direct work to my career. If his help increased the chances of getting an interview in the first place, then the impact is higher.

  My biggest takeaways from his coaching:

  • Have a low bar for applying to jobs, apply for lots of them, filter once you have more information about them. This helps you get better at interviews and allows you to compare potential offers against one another.

  • Only write a cover letter if the job is significantly higher value than others, otherwise cover letters are likely a poor spend of your time (apply for more jobs in the time you would’ve spent writing them).

  • Apply early, see what parts of the interview process you get rejected at, and work on that part. Don’t assume you need to grind LeetCode for 6 months before you can apply anywhere—maybe you’re already great at LeetCode but suck at other things.

  • If you think “I would really like this job. I want to wait 3 months before applying to maximise my chances of success”, email them and ask how before you can reapply in the event that you fail. Same goes for various other questions you might have—ask the company rather than not applying.

  • If you are applying for jobs with the purpose of gaining career capital, ask about whether there is structured mentorship available. I found this question particularly valuable in interviews, and was surprised by the amount of times I got a long, convoluted answer that amounted to “no”. If you are trying to improve, you want short feedback loops, and many companies don’t have these in place.

  What links here?

  • Do peo­ple have a form or re­sources for cap­tur­ing in­di­rect in­ter­per­sonal im­pacts? by PeterSlattery (4 Jan 2023 4:47 UTC; 47 points)

• Jonny Spicer 9 Jan 2023 16:58 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Howard’s comment on: Effec­tive giving

  If SBF makes the list then Ben Delo might count too.

• Jonny Spicer 11 Jan 2023 10:42 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: Forecasting

  Scott Alexander offers one answer to this concern in his Prediction Market FAQ:

  Another method (mostly associated with Manifold) is to just leave it up to human judgment—specifically, the judgment of the person who made the market. For example, I could make a market in “By 2050, will there be an AI which Scott Alexander thinks qualifies as ‘human-level’?” This will force market participants to price in the risk that I have bad judgment or act dishonestly. But perhaps these risks are small. For example, I might say elsewhere what I think qualifies as “human-level” AI, or you might think human-level AI will be so obvious when it comes that I will definitely agree with you about it. As for honesty, this could be enforced either legally or by reputation. Someone who has resolved their past 100 prediction markets honestly will probably resolve this one honestly too, especially if they get paid to do so and will never get customers again if they lie. When we invest on the normal stock market, we trust that our brokers /​ the NYSE /​ etc won’t run off with our money, and this trust is usually well-deserved. Even when we make an online purchase, we trust that the store we’re sending our money to won’t steal it and refuse to send us the product. It would be an exaggeration to say that trust is a solved problem, but evidence from Manifold suggests that most people price in a <1% chance that well-known market makers with good reputation resolve dishonestly.

  I think you can see this adjustment-for-dishonesty effect in action on Manifold a fair bit—for example when a market is left up after the event it relates to has finished, and the probability is still at 2% rather than 0%.

EA Lon­don Hackathon Retrospective

• Jonny Spicer 17 Feb 2023 14:30 UTC

  12 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: EA Lon­don Hackathon Retrospective

  Thanks :)

  Yes that’s correct, I’m a software engineer and Sam’s a product manager. I think we both felt pretty comfortable with our roles despite of our lack of experience, and would recommend others who are interested in organizing not to be put off by not having done it before. I’m very happy to chat with anyone who feels this way and can hopefully offer more advice than I laid out in the post.

• Jonny Spicer 17 Feb 2023 15:30 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Adam Binks’s comment on: EA Lon­don Hackathon Retrospective

  I think this is a great idea, thanks for the feedback—I completely agree we want people to be able to hit the ground running on the day. I would imagine groups are most effective when they’re formed around strong coders, perhaps there’s a way we can work that into the doc.

  One thing we’re considering is an ongoing Discord server, where people could see ideas/​projects/​who’s working on what, etc. The idea would be that the server would persist between events, and move more towards having ongoing projects as above. I think this could potentially solve some of the cold start issues, but I am also hesitant to ask people to join yet another Discord server, and it’d probably need to reach a critical mass of people in order to be valuable. Having written out this comment, I think we will likely start it and push to get it to a good size, and if not we can re-evaluate.

  Thanks for pointing out the bad link, I’ve corrected it now!

• Jonny Spicer 26 Mar 2023 7:46 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: The sup­ply gap of EA org ser­vice providers

  Could you expand a bit on “software implementation” being a missing service? At first glance I would’ve thought the Altruistic Agency would provide that, am I mistaken?

• Jonny Spicer 25 Apr 2023 15:55 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Vote Man­i­fold mar­kets to­day for 2,000$ to char­ity (givewell and other EA) (~1 minute)

  If Isaac has already spent that much money on mana, it seems to me like it could be addictive behaviour and shouldn’t be encouraged.

  Also he might well donate his winnings too.