Currently researching how cost-benefit analysis is used in US regulatory decision-making and what this might imply for the regulation of Frontier AI. Supervised by John Halstead (GovAI).
In the past, I’ve done community building and operations at GovAI, CEA, and the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars program. My degree is in Computer Science.
I also sometimes worry about the big-picture epistemics of EA à la “Is EA just an ideology like any other?”.
My impression is that others have thought so much less about AI x-risk than EAs and rationalists, and for generally bad reasons, that EAs/rats are the “largest and smartest” expert group basically ‘by default’. Unfortunately with all the biases that come with that. I could be misunderstanding the situation tho.
Thanks a lot, I think it’s really valuable to have your experience written up!
Thanks Max!
Sounds like a plausible theory that you lost motivation because you pushed yourself too hard. I’d also pay attention to “dumber” reasons like maybe you had more motivation from supervisors/social environment/more achievable goals in the past.
Similar to my call to take a vacation, maybe it’s worth it for you to only do motivating work (like a side project) for 1.5 weeks and see if the tiredness disappears.
All of this with the caveat that you understand your situation a lot better than I do ofc!
yes! From reading about burnout it can seem like it only happens to people who hate their job, work in bad environments, etc. But it can totally happen to people who love their job!
thanks and big agree; I want to see many more different experiences of energy problems written up!
the causes of people’s energy problems are so many and varied! It would be great to have many different experiences written up, including stress and anxiety-induced problems.
Thanks for feedback re:appendix, will see if others say the same :)
Optimistic note with low confidence:
In my impression, SBF thought he was doing an ‘unpalatable’ but right thing given the calculations (and his epistemic immodesty). Promoting a central meme in EA like “naïve calculations like this are too dangerous and too fallible” might solve a lot of the issue. I think dangerously-optimize-y people in EA are already updating in this direction as a result of FTX. Before FTX, being “hardcore” and doing naïve calculations was seen as cool sometimes. If we correct hard for this right now, it may be less of an issue in the future.
2 main caveats:
The whole “don’t do naïve calculations” idea is quite complex and not easy to communicate. This may make it hard to correct for it.
The movements of the memes of a space as large and complex as EA are probably hard to predict. All sorts of crazy things might happen and I have no clue. Like for example there could be a new counterculture part of EA that becomes super dangerously-optimize-y. (But at least they would face more of an uphill battle in this world.)
ah, the thing about fragile cooperative equilibria makes sense to me.
I’m not as sure as you that this shift would happen to core EA though. I could also imagine that current EAs will have a very allergic reaction to new, unaligned people coming in and trying to take advantage of EA resources. I imagine something like a counterculture forming where aligned EAs start purposefully setting themselves apart from people who’re only in it for a piece of the pie, by putting even more emphasis on high EA alignment. I believe I’ve already seen small versions of this happening in response to non-altruistic incentives appearing in EA.
The faster the flood of new people and change of incentives happens, the more confident I am in this view. Overall, I’m not extremely confident at all though.
On your last point, if I understand this right this is not the thing you’re most worried about though? Like, these people hijacking EA are not the mechanism by which EA may collapse in your view?
It’s unclear to me whether you are saying that the potentially huge number of new people in EA will try to take advantage of EA resources for personal gain or that WE, who are currently in EA for altruistic reasons, will do so. The former sounds likely to me, the latter doesn’t.
I might be missing crucial context here since I’m not familiar with the Thielosphere and all that, but overall I also don’t think a huge number of new, unaligned people will be the downfall of EA. As long as leadership, thought-leaders, and grantmakers in EA stay aligned, it may be harder for them to determine whom to give that grant (or that stamp of approval), but wouldn’t that just simply lead to less grants? Which seems bad but not like the end?
Or are you imagining highly intelligent people with impressive resumes who strategically aim to hijack EA resources for their aims and get into important positions in EA?
Thanks for commenting this. Any tips for how to get disordered breathing diagnosed reliably?
pls make one!
If effective altruists’ messages are hacked, taken out of context, and publicly revealed, it could substantially and even permanently harm the movement. Consider the example of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Many of his emails, including those that made Clinton and her campaign look bad, were obtained by hackers in a data breach and published in Wikileaks.
How likely is it that someone would target the EA movement by hacking messages and taking them out of context?
I agree with you, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are different goals. This post is heavily influenced by my experience as a new community builder and my perception that, in this situation, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are pretty similar. If I wasn’t so sociable and network-y, I’d probably still be running my EA reading group with ~6 participants, which is nice but not “doing things which need to be done”. For technical alignment researchers, this is probably less the case, though still much more than I would’ve expected.
Hi Claire,
what are your thoughts on “going one meta-level up” and trying to build the meta space? Specifically creating opportunities like UGAP, the GCP internships, or running organisers’ summits to get more and better community builders? I’m unsure but I thought this might be at odds with some of the points you raised, e.g., that we might neglect object-level work and its community-building effect. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
So when I entered university I was probably capable of doing 0.5 hours per day on average.
hahah I feel this
(I’m an organiser at EA Edinburgh and from Germany.)
Yes. Your point about the social culture at German universities seems crucial. The lack of an extensive extracurricular life in and around the university should lead to smaller EA groups (because of people not looking for student groups, less enthusiasm from organisers, lacking knowledge about how to build such groups, …)
In terms of action plans, I think an important component is getting EA group organisers excited and ambitious. Communication between large, vibrant EA groups and German groups would be good for this. Show them what is possible. And then we probably need upskilling.
Apart from that, German groups probably need the same things as other groups. I think that this is mainly, again, excited organisers, who are willing to put in time. Just in case this is interesting to you, I’m thinking about running a “bootcamp” in the UK for new organisers, fellowship facilitators, etc. to get them excited about organising. (Approaches similar to this seem to have an amazing track record.) Would be happy to chat about this!
Thanks! I need to ask a lot of clarifying questions:
When you say “This is because the type of centralized support CEA might provide and the type of skills/characteristics required of someone working full-time running a university group or a city/national professional network might look very different depending on the ultimate model.”, (1) does “This” refer to the fact that you have 2 subteams working with focus locations as opposed to everyone working on all locations? (2) If so, could I reword the explanation the sentence gives to “We need to work on focus locations to figure out the ultimate model before scaling up with that ultimate model”? In even more words, “We want to hire knowing for what model we are hiring, and we want to grow CEA knowing for what model we are growing it as soon as possible.”
I really want to know how you mean this!
(3) I interpret your staff capacity being limited as “we need to prioritise” and the prioritisation coming out of that being “prioritise building a model based on focus-locations, then scale later”. Correct?
(4) Your staff capacity being limited also suggests the major priority of hiring. I understand CEA is hiring quite fast, but I don’t have any idea how fast. Do you think you are prioritising hiring highly enough?
(5) What do you mean by “we think that this focus will enable faster scaling in the long term”? Firstly, again, which “focus” exactly is this referring to? Secondly, isn’t “focussing” more intended to improve the quality at the expense of speed of scaling? Intuitively I would say scaling is what enables faster scaling in the long term.
Maybe I can give some context from my side so we can find the crux of this quickly, and we are working in the same direction. I mostly see the lack of a pipeline into full-time CB in non-focus locations in stark contrast to all the extremely high-impact low-hanging fruit in CB and think “This can’t be the best we can do”. It seems imperative we find a way to funnel talented EAs everywhere into this neglected career path. Hence my insistence on rolling things like the CBGs out in as many locations as possible.
I’m really interested in getting to the bottom of this. I hope I don’t come across as intrusive into CEA’s decisions without having any background knowledge. My interest is not to criticise CEA, but to solve this problem I see! :)
I’m running two retreats this week whilst working with Swarthmore College EA. Both retreats are along the lines of what you described as a bootcamp
Ah, super exciting! I’ll DM you
I agree you could let someone run a social straight off. In general I guess people are more likely to agree to running a social if they are already a fellowship facilitator (fellowship social), and more likely to agree to become a committee member if they are already organising socials. The whole idea of moving people down a funnel etc.
To your skepticism: Thanks for raising the point! It’s true that if we had perfect organiser training either locally in the groups or in one big bootcamp, it’s unclear the bootcamp would cost less organiser hours. However organisers locally often don’t have the time/skills to train new organisers. So the comparison probs isn’t decisive. Hope that makes sense!
I found the framing of “Is this community better-informed relative to what disagreers expect?” new and useful, thank you!
To point out the obvious: Your proposed policy of updating away from EA beliefs if they come in large part from priors is less applicable for many EAs who want to condition on “EA tenets”. For example, longtermism depends on being quite impartial regarding when a person lives, but many EAs would think it’s fine that we were “unusual from the get-go” regarding this prior. (This is of course not very epistemically modest of them.)
Here are a more not-well-fleshed-out, maybe-obvious, maybe-wrong concerns with your policy:
It’s kind of hard to determine whether EA beliefs are weird because we were weird from the get-go or because we did some novel piece of research/thinking. For example, was Toby Ord concerned about x-risks in 2009 because he had unusual priors or because he had thought about novel considerations that are obscure to outsiders? People would probably introduce their own biases while making this judgment. I think you could even try to make an argument like this about polyamory.
People probably generally think a community is better-informed than expected when spending more time engaging with it. At least this is what I see empirically. So for people who’ve engaged a lot with EA, your policy of updating towards EA beliefs if EA seems better-informed than expected probably leads to deferring asymmetrically more to EA than other communities. Since they will have engaged less with other communities. (Ofc you could try to consciously correct for that.)
I overall often have the concern with EA beliefs that “maybe most big ideas are wrong”, just like most big ideas have been wrong throughout history. In this frame, our little inside pet theories and EA research provide almost no Bayesian information (because they are likely to be wrong) and it makes sense to closely stick to whatever seems most “common sense” or “established”. But I’m not well-calibrated on how true “most big ideas are wrong” is. (This point is entirely compatible with what you said in the post but it changes the magnitude of updates you’d make.)
Side-note: I found this post super hard to parse and would’ve appreciated it a lot if it was more clearly written!