Be the change you want to see in the world.
Larks
Karma: 15,856
Visa cap on the number of souls allowed to migrate to earth per year.
I think the lowest hanging fruit is ‘don’t repeatedly post publicly about how conservatives are odious people that we don’t want to be even vaguely associated with’.
You might also enjoy this longer piece I shared here.
Or maybe you think that abortion bans seem 4 orders of magnitude more tractable than factory farming bans, which seems extremely unlikely to me.
You might be interested in this excellent post by Ariel Simnegar, which argues that mandating fetal anesthesia for late-term abortions could be an effective and tractable intervention.
Thanks for sharing this detailed report, and most important for your important work keeping a potentially viable anti-pandemic technology legal!
I realized that if you were even arguing about abortion, then you must value human fetuses(which look a lot like chicken fetuses) 8,650 times more than tortured, murdered chickens.
This seems not at all true to me? Quite apart from my being skeptical about your maths, people are allowed to care and argue about things that aren’t as important as factory farming. Very few people spend all their effort on the single most important cause. To be honest, this seems like an isolated demand for rigour.
I think that centralisation (by which I assume you really mean OP-funding-centralisation) is a contingent fact about the EA movement, rather than an inherent one. And it sounds like you agree. But then I’m not sure why we’d use this as an exclusion criteria? If nothing else, if, once centralised, no a group being quite independent is sufficient alone for exclusion, then you can basically never decentralise.
Oh wow, I actually think your grandparent comment here was way more misleading than their tweet was! It sounds like they almost verbatim quoted you. Yes, they took out that you set up the experiment… but of course? If write “John attempted to kill Sally when he was drunk and angry”, and you summarise it was “John attempted to kill Sally, he’s dangerous, be careful!” this is a totally fair summarisation. Yes it cuts context but that is always the case—any short summarisation does this.
In contrast, unlike your comment, they never said ‘escape into the wild’. When I read your comment I assumed they had said this.
Also, the tweet direct quotes your tweet, so users can easily look at the original source. In contrast your comment here doesn’t link to their tweet—before you linked to it I assumed they had done something significantly worse.
in response to our recent paper “Alignment Faking in Large Langauge Models”, they posted a tweet which implied that we caught the model trying to escape in the wild. I tried to correct possible misunderstandings here.
Probably would be easier for people to evaluate this if you included a link?
Thanks for the comment! You’re right that this approach would need modification if ‘dangers that only become apparent after mass deployment’ becomes a major risk factor, and that a ‘trial’ commercialisation period could be a good response. My hope is that the regulatory exam period would be able to catch much more than at present though—the regulator would have ample time to design and deploy more sophisticated tests, with the aid of labs who would presumably love to submit a test their competitor would fail (so long as they themselves pass).
If EA was a broad and decentralised movement, similar to e.g., environmentalism, I’d classify SMA as an EA project. But right now EA isn’t quite that. Personally, I hope we one day get there.
This seems pretty circular to me?
Interesting suggestion! Continuous or pseudo-continuous threshold raising isn’t something I considered. Here are some quick thoughts:
Continuous scaling could make eval validity easier, because the jump between eval-train (n-1) and eval-deploy (n) is smaller.
Continuous scaling encourages training to be done quickly, because you want to get your model launched before it is outdated.
Continuous scaling means you give up on the idea of models being evaluated side-by-side.
Rolling Thresholds for AGI Scaling Regulation
They rightly note that protectionism constitutes a sales tax which falls hardest on low-income Americans
A bit of a nitpick but no they don’t? They argue it is similar in many ways to a consumption tax, but consumption taxes are not the same as sales taxes. Sales taxes have unique difficulties around compliance which other types of consumption taxes like VAT do not have. Sales taxes are an unusually hard type of tax to enforce (because shops will increasingly under-report sales) leading to distortions in favour of less compliant businesses, but tariffs are unusually easy to enforce because the government controls the ports and airports. My recollection is economists generally think well-designed consumption taxes, like VAT, are unusually good taxes. The problem is that neither sales taxes nor tariffs are particularly good examples of consumption taxes.
Using a very simple cntrl-f methodology, I estimated that over 95% of this post is the CC Guidelines. In contrast you spend less than one sentence arguing for having such a policy, and zero words whatsoever considering tradeoffs. If you want engagement on something you need to provide some material to engage with, and if you thought the CC Guidelines were inappropriate for EA orgs and require significant modification you should say so in the post! I don’t think you can share a lengthy post and then declare, post hoc, that almost the entire post is off-limits, running the risk that orgs might copy-paste it without understanding the issues, and that comments should be restricted to a topic which was barely mentioned in the post.
Indeed, as far as I can see even you agree with this, since one paragraph after chastising me for getting “bogged down in the specifics of the document” you ask for advice on how to adapt these policies, which necessarily involves engagement with the specifics.
Thanks for working on this, seems potentially very valuable, good initiative!
by posting it I don’t necessarily endorse its exact contents.
Well you did suggest people could “emulate” and “copy-paste”
Even if taken literally, this would only apply to Palantir employees who work directly on weapons systems or any software that is being used to commit violations of international law (such as war crimes).
No, any employee who is ‘involved’ in arms, including totally unobjectionable sales to the US Government, would be involved. The language is quite clear that, while it includes illegal weapons, there is nothing to suggest it is limited to them. As far as I can see even accountants would be ‘involved’ - you can’t make weapons without accounting!
PopVax is an Indian biotechnology company. Biotech is a type of pharma company.
This seems quite burdensome. In order to accept a $10k donation from a ‘high-risk’ PopVax employee (listed on 80k’s job board!) you’d have to:
Involve a wide range of senior people in your org:
A wide range of functions and units across CC are part of the process to decide on Donations and Partnerships. The process will typically include input from CC’s:
Development Team
Relevant program or project team
Legal Team
CEO
Development Council
Members of the Board of Directors, where relevant expertise is needed
Pay for a wealth screening database:
current and prospective Donors that meet the criteria for screening described above will be screened using a wealth screening database
Write a written report that is reviewed by many senior people:
the Development Team will provide a written report to the CEO, the Legal Team, any relevant program / project teams, the Development Council and board members selected by it and the Development Team for review and approval during the Qualification Stage of the fundraising pipeline.
be very diligent:
Decisions are taken after thorough examination of such Donation [emphasis added]
Review each year:
CC reviews Donors and their fundamentals every year at the renewal or annual anniversary of a multi-year relationship
Regularly stalk them on social media:
regularly monitors the media for developments linked to Donors. The monitoring is carried out by the Development Team with support from staff and relevant project teams as reasonably requested.
Communicate frequently with donors with feedback about their business practices:
CC aims to maintain a frequent, transparent and constructive engagement with Donors. This enables the CC to be a critical friend where appropriate.
… and a $10k donation from a Palantir employee would simply be totally prohibited.
Overall it seems plausible to me that actually following this for a $10k donation would eat up most of the donation in due diligence overhead. My guess is that CC does not actually follow the letter of this policy in practice.
A possible comparison is to dollar-a-year men, successful business leaders who go to work for the government for basically zero.