JoshYou

• JoshYouMar 29, 2025, 10:21 PM

  3 points

  2 ∶ 1

  on: How We Might All Die in A Year

  Kinda weird that the story contains an intelligence explosion that happens both incredibly fast and incredibly soon but glosses over how it happens in a single paragraph, in favor of descriptions of nanobots dematerializing people.

• JoshYouMar 8, 2025, 12:55 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: huw’s comment on: An­thropic’s sub­mis­sion to the White House’s RFI on AI policy

  This is worth considering, but FWIW, 50 GW would be around 10% of US electricity if it runs continuously (the US consumes at a rate of about 500 GW if you divide total consumption by one year). If the new capacity is as clean as the overall electric grid that would be about 2.5% of US emissions (25% of US emissions come from electricity) and 0.35% of global emissions (US emissions are ¹⁄₇ of global emissions).

  I’m not going to do this math now but I think if the new capacity is 100% natural gas then that’s about as carbon-intense as the US electric grid as a whole, or maybe somewhat worse (the US has a lot of clean energy, but it also has coal plants which are >2x more carbon intense than gas). 100% natural gas would be the worst case, because there is no scenario where the US builds new coal plants (edit: it’s not the worst case, because increased power demand could cause the delay of coal plant retirements, but I don’t think this changes the conclusion all that much)

• JoshYouJan 26, 2025, 12:58 AM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Is Deep­Seek-R1 already bet­ter than o3 when in­fer­ence costs are held con­stant?

  R1 is probably not 6x cheaper than o1-mini and 30x cheaper than o1 in terms of the actual, underlying cost. (meaning that DeepSeek probably charges a much lower gross margin on its API than OpenAI does). R1 has 37B active parameters (though its 671B total parameters are also relevant). We don’t know how many parameters o1-mini or o1 have, but IMO they’re probably a lot less than ~200B and ~1T, respectively.

• JoshYouJan 10, 2025, 4:33 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Cullen 🔸’s comment on: Fund­ing Diver­sifi­ca­tion for Mid-Large EA Or­ga­ni­za­tions is Nearly Im­pos­si­ble in the Short-Medium Term

  Forbes estimates that the seven co-founders are now worth $1-2 billion each.

• JoshYouAug 28, 2024, 7:43 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jacob Watts🔸’s comment on: How do you deal with the “meat eater” problem

  I’m not proposing any sort of hard rule against concluding that some people’s lives are net negative/​harmful. As a heuristic, you shouldn’t think it’s bad to save the lives of ordinary people who seem to be mostly reasonable, but who contribute to harmful animal agriculture.

  The pluralism here is between human viewpoints in general. Very naively, if you think every human has equal insight into morality you should maximize the lifespan and resources that go to any and all humans without considering at all what they will do. That’s too much pluralism, of course, but I think refraining from cheaply saving human lives because they’ll eat meat is too far in the other direction.

• JoshYouAug 23, 2024, 2:19 PM

  11 points

  5 ∶ 3

  on: How do you deal with the “meat eater” problem

  I think if you put some weight on viewpoint pluralism you should mostly not conclude that other peoples’ lives aren’t valuable because those people will make the wrong moral choices.

• JoshYouJan 3, 2024, 1:15 PM

  5 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Stop talk­ing about p(doom)

  Toby Ord’s existential risk estimates in The Precipice were for risk this century (by 2100) IIRC. That book was very influential in x-risk circles around the time it came out, so I have a vague sense that people were accepting his framing and giving their own numbers, though I’m not sure quite how common that was. But these days most people talking about p(doom) probably haven’t read The Precipice, given how mainstream that phrase has become.

  Also, in some classic hard-takeoff + decisive-strategic-advantage scenarios, p(doom) in the few years after AGI would be close to p(doom) in general, so these distinctions don’t matter that much. But nowadays I think people are worried about a much greater diversity of threat models.

• JoshYouDec 28, 2022, 4:10 PM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How many hours is your stan­dard work­week? Why?

  I’m probably “on the clock” about 45 hours per week—I try to do about 8 hours a day but I go over more often than not. But maybe only about 25-35 hours of that is focused work, using a relatively loose sense of “focused” (not doing something blatantly non-work, like reading Twitter or walking around outside). I think my work output is constrained by energy levels, not clock time, so I don’t really worry about working longer hours or trying to stay more focused, but I do try to optimize work tasks and non-work errands to reduce their mental burdens.

• JoshYouDec 11, 2022, 3:25 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Per­sonal Fi­nance for EAs

  Thanks for writing this, I think it’s important that people at least understand the basics. EA blogs used to contain much more personal finance advice. In the past I’ve wondered whether EAs who joined more recently were less likely to know about personal finance as a result.

• JoshYouNov 9, 2022, 1:29 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Two key strate­gies to miti­gate the dam­age from los­ing FTX

  I think you’re overestimating how high EA-org-salary spending is compared to (remaining) total EA funding per year (in the neighborhood of 10%?)

• JoshYouOct 27, 2022, 1:34 AM

  9 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: Where in the USA should an EA live?

  I think the benefits of living in a hub city (SF, NYC, Boston, or DC) are very large and are well worth the higher costs, assuming it’s financially feasible at all, especially if you currently have no personal network in any city. You’ll have easy access to interesting and like-minded people, which will have many many diffuse impact and personal benefits.

  Also, those are probably the only American cities besides maybe Chicago and Philly where’s it is easy to live without a car (and arguably it’s only NYC).

• JoshYouOct 13, 2022, 2:31 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ClaireZabel’s comment on: Cul­tural EA con­sid­er­a­tions for Nordic folks

  I loved this Wikitravel article about American culture for this same reason.

• JoshYouSep 29, 2022, 4:22 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: I’m in­ter­view­ing pro­lific AI safety re­searcher Richard Ngo (now at OpenAI and pre­vi­ously Deep­Mind). What should I ask him?

  What makes someone good at AI safety work? How does he get feedback on whether his work is useful, makes sense, etc?

• JoshYouSep 15, 2022, 11:18 PM

  46 points

  8 ∶ 1

  on: It’s not effec­tive to call ev­ery­thing effec­tive and how (not) to name a new organisation

  see also

  

• JoshYouAug 29, 2022, 4:28 PM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Earn To Give $1M/​year or Work Directly?

  For the big-buck EtGers, what sort of donation percentages is this advice assuming? I imagine that if you’re making $1M and even considering direct work then you’re giving >>10% (>50%?) but I’m not sure.

“Ne­glect­ed­ness” is a po­ten­tially con­fus­ing sim­plifi­ca­tion of true impact

• JoshYouAug 5, 2022, 2:07 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Gran­tees: how do you struc­ture your fi­nances & ca­reer?

  I also actually have no idea how people do this, curious to see answers!

  Also, the questions seem to assume that grantees don’t have another (permanent, if not full-time) job. I’m not sure how common that is.

• JoshYouJul 19, 2022, 1:07 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Re­duc­ing night­mares as a cause area

  Melatonin supplements can increase the vividness of dreams, which seems counterproductive here. But maybe there is a drug with the opposite effect?

• JoshYouJul 6, 2022, 1:22 AM

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What is the top con­cept that all EAs should un­der­stand?

  The margin/​marginal value.

  Anyone trying to think about how to do the most good will be very quickly and deeply confused if they aren’t thinking at the margin. E.g. “if everyone buys bednets, what happens to the economy?”

• JoshYouJun 10, 2022, 4:19 PM

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The dan­gers of high salaries within EA organisations

  It might help to put some rough numbers on this. Most of the EA org non-technical job postings that I have seen recently have been in the $60-120k/​year range or so. I don’t think those are too high, even at the higher end of that range. But value alignment concerns (and maybe PR and other reasons) seem like a good reason to not offer, say, 300k or more for non-executive and non-technical roles at EA orgs.