JP Addison

• JP Addison 16 Apr 2024 18:53 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  I believe what you’re looking for is the personal blog distinction. Authors can decide that they want to post their writing on the Forum, but not submit it to the frontpage. Examples might be a post that is political, or if someone is dumping a larger number of posts. Devin actually did this, so you’ll notice that the posts you mentioned are in the personal blog category. If you’re seeing them on the frontpage, then my guess is you’ve customized your feed.

Con­fer­ences are great for sci­en­tific entrepreneurs

• JP Addison 15 Apr 2024 15:09 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JP Addison’s comment on: JP’s Shortform

  FYI thanks for all the helpful comments here — I promptly got covid and haven’t had a chance to respond 😅

• JP Addison 15 Apr 2024 15:06 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Simon Newstead’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  This is a really nice idea, thanks!

• JP Addison 5 Apr 2024 20:20 UTC

  26 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: JP’s Shortform

  Here’s a puzzle I’ve thought about a few times recently:

  The impact of an activity ($I$) is due to two factors, $X$ and $Y$. Those factors combine multiplicatively to produce impact. Examples include:

  • The funding of an organization and the people working at the org

  • A manager of a team who acts as a lever on the work of their reports

  • The EA Forum acts as a lever on top of the efforts of the authors

  • A product manager joins a team of engineers

  Let’s assume in all of these scenarios that you are only one of the players in the situation, and you can only control your own actions.

  From a counterfactual analysis, if you can increase your contribution by 10%, then you increase the impact by 10%, end of story.

  From a Shapley Value perspective, it’s a bit more complicated, but we can start with a prior that you split your impact evenly with the other players.

  Both these perspectives have a lot going for them! The counterfactual analysis has important correspondences to reality. If you do 10% better at your job the world gets $0.1I$ better. Shapley Values prevent the scenario where the multiplicative impact causes the involved agents to collectively contribute too much.

  I notice myself feeling relatively more philosophically comfortable running with the Shapely Value analysis in the scenario where I feel aligned with the other players in the game. And potentially the Shapley Value approach downsides go down if I actually run the math (Fake edit: I ran a really hacky guess as to how I’d calculate this using this calculator and it wasn’t that helpful).

  But I don’t feel 100% bought-in to the Shapley Value approach, and think there’s a value in paying attention to the counterfactuals. My unprincipled compromise approach would be to take some weighted geometric mean and call it a day.

  Interested in comments.

• JP Addison 28 Mar 2024 16:54 UTC

  27 points

  10 ∶ 1

  on: Re­post: The Cen­tre for Effec­tive Altru­ism’s CEO says, “Bankman-Fried doesn’t rep­re­sent the ideas of effec­tive al­tru­ism or the move­ment of peo­ple who sup­port them.”

  I think it’s a pretty important distinction that “EA” is a question which has no CEO, while the Centre for Effective Altruism does. I recommend changing the title here.

• JP Addison 27 Mar 2024 18:25 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Yanni Kyr­i­a­cos’s Shortform

  I agree with you, and so does our issue tracker. Sadly, it does seem a bit hard. Tagging @peterhartree as a person who might be able to tell me that it’s less hard than I think.

Hire the CEA On­line team for soft­ware de­vel­op­ment & consulting

• JP Addison 7 Mar 2024 13:54 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SamDeere’s comment on: Who’s hiring? (Feb-May 2024)

  I worked with Sam for 4 years and would recommend the experience. He’s an absolute blast to talk tech with, and a great human.

• JP Addison 27 Feb 2024 17:02 UTC

  23 points

  11 ∶ 0

  on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  Maybe a report from someone with a strong network in the silicon valley scene about how AI safety’s reputation is evolving post-OAI-board-stuff. (I’m sure there are lots of takes that exist, and I guess I’d be curious for either a data driven approach or a post which tries to take a levelheaded survey of different archetypes.)

• JP Addison 7 Feb 2024 19:24 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Look­ing for: songs or art that in­spire EA values

  I’m not sure if this qualifies, but the Creative Writing Contest featured some really moving stories.

  I have a spotify playlist of songs that seemed to rhyme with EA to me.

• JP Addison 6 Feb 2024 21:43 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Some good kabbalistic significance to our issue tracker, but I’m not sure how.

  First, a note: I have heard recommendations to try to lower the number of issues. I’ve never understood it except as a way to pretend like you don’t have bugs. For sure some of those issues are stale and out of date, but quite a few are probably live but ultimately very edge-case and unimportant bugs, or feature requests we probably won’t get to but could be good. I don’t think it’s a good use of time to prune it, and most of the approaches I’ve seen companies take is to auto-close old bugs, which strikes me as disingenuous.

  In any case, we have a fairly normal process of setting OKRs for our larger projects, and tiny features /​ bugfixes get triaged into a backlog that we look at when planning our weekly sprints. The triage process done in our asana and is intentionally not visible publicly so we can feel comfortable marking something as low priority without worrying about needing to argue about it.

• JP Addison 6 Feb 2024 21:26 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Thanks for the report. We currently do the second, which isn’t ideal to be sure. If someone redrafts and republishes after a post has been up for a while, an admin will have to adjust the published date manually. This happens surprisingly infrequently relative to what I might’ve expected, so we haven’t prioritized improving that.

• JP Addison 31 Jan 2024 14:45 UTC

  1 point

  1 ∶ 1

  on: Lower-suffer­ing egg brands available in the SF Bay Area

  This is really helpful, thank you!

• JP Addison 29 Jan 2024 13:51 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Definitely. I agree, and so do a few other users. We have an open ticket on it.

• JP Addison 29 Jan 2024 13:44 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Samrin Saleem’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  No, sorry. I appreciate the question though, and I’ll record a ticket about it.

• JP Addison 12 Jan 2024 20:23 UTC

  50 points

  18 ∶ 1

  on: Cause-Gen­er­al­ity Is Hard If Some Causes Have Higher ROI

  My guess is that cause-neutral activities are 30-90% as effective as cause-specific ones (in terms of generating labor for that specific cause), which is remarkably high, but still less than 100%

  This isn’t obvious to me. If you want to generate generic workers for your animal welfare org, sure, you might prefer to fund a vegan group. But if you want people who are good at making explicit tradeoffs, focusing on scope sensitivity, and being exceptionally truth-seeking, I would bet that an EA group is more likely to get you those people. And so it seems plausible that a donor who only prioritized animal welfare would still fund EA groups if they otherwise wouldn’t exist.

  In a related point, I would have been nervous (before GPT-4 made this concern much less prominent) about whether funding an AI Safety group that mostly just talked about AI got more safety workers, or just got more people interested in working on explicit AGI.

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: De­cem­ber 2023

• JP Addison 30 Nov 2023 21:43 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  We’ve discussed something like this, I’m generally in favor, subject to opportunity cost.

• JP Addison 30 Nov 2023 13:28 UTC

  1 point

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: keller_scholl’s comment on: Dialogue on Dona­tion Splitting

  Seems reasonable.