President 2021 of EA Austria | Co-Founder of EA Graz | Entrepreneur | Circling Facilitator | Running Applied Rationality Workshops
Open to meet potential cofounders or joining an existing EA-aligned startup. Read more: https://lukastr.me/about
Current Business: https://www.fwsim.com/
Thanks for sharing about your initiative. I do have some significant doubts about this project.
Have you interviewed charities and asked them whether they prefer donations through your scheme vs donations made directly to them?
Is there a chance that this project has negative impact, by cannibalizing direct donations and turning them into indirect donations via your platform—potentially against the will of the charities themselves, i.e., against their judgement that they could have more impact with direct donations?
Or alternatively, looking at the opposite: Have you got evidence that this will attract new donations to highly effective charities that wouldn’t otherwise have happened—for example, by introducing these charities to people that have never heard about them before? (but even then, the same question applies—why your scheme instead of direct donations?)
Related: There is EA the actual movement, and EA the philosophy. I wonder how much we are losing out on by not having a clear line between the two. Maybe internally this distinction can be carefully navigated, but to an outsider it is one and the same. I wonder if that might be one of the things that could be improved about EA.
I imagine it feels challenging to share that and I applaud you for that.
While my EA experiences have been much more positive than yours, I do not doubt your account. For many of the points you mention, I can see milder versions in my own experience. I believe your post points towards something important.
Not if this just destroys momentum towards sustainable funding for AI safety and other longtermist causes.
Downvoted for several reasons: because I would expect colleagues in any work environment to hook up, because I think it’s very unkind to assume sexual relations in the workplace are indicative of a problem, because I’m against outing people’s sex lifes unless directly relevant to a scandal. And finally, because it seems unnecessary to mention polyamory when talking about two people hooking up.
(Retracted after more consideration. I still disagree with the wording of the comment I responded to but can now see it points towards a real problem)
Strongly disagree-voted because “I wish they had sat down” doesn’t address the publicly stated reason why Binance pulled out. It makes it seem like they had no good reason, and a good conversation would have fixed the issues. Without knowing much, this seems implausible to me.
Also, I consider “I don’t think he did anything in bad faith” to be somewhat irresponsible. If SBF actually did something wrong, then EAs going around and supporting him by saying “I don’t think he did anything wrong” will hurt the optics of this further.
Curious why this is getting downvoted. It seems like another initiative in the Applied Rationality space, which sounds quite useful to me.
While I’m personally not interested in the bootcamp, I am curious if the people who downvoted have specific criticism or reservations about the program.
Location: Graz, Austria
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity
Skills:
Startup Founder & Software Developer with 12 years of experience
Basic knowledge of most aspects of running a business
Strong Technical Skills
Computer Graphics and Game Development
Web Scraping and Automation
Performance Optimization
Algorithmic Problems
General backend development
Microsoft .NET
Desktop Development
Some experience in
Data Pipelines
Network Engineering
Computer Vision
Applied Math
Software Testing
UI Design & Usability
Other non-technical
Workshop Facilitation (trained circling facilitator)
Filmmaking
Photography
Previous Research I’ve done:
Résumé/CV/LinkedIn: https://lukastr.me/about
Email: lukas@fwsim.com
Available from and until: To be discussed
I frequently catch myself, and I’m embarrassed to admit that, being more likely to upvote posts of users that I know. I also find myself anchoring my vote to the existing vote count (if a post has a lot of upvotes then I am less likely to downvote it). Pretty sure I’m not the only one.
Furthermore, I observe how vote count influences my reading of each post more than it should. Groupthink at its best.
I suspect if the forum hid the vote count for a month, there would be significant changes in voting patterns. That being said, I’m not sure these changes would actually influence the votesorted order of the postings—but they might. I suspect it would also change the nature of certain discussions.
In order to make this even remotely plausible, the rules for tax deductible charities would need to be far more stringent. And then you get a situation like we currently have in Austria, where not a single EA-aligned charity is tax-deductible at all.
Nevertheless it does send a certain signal to the public. The way things look is important, especially when it comes to completely legal ways to circumvent taxes—where intent plays a role.
The justification of crypto regulation requires background information that outside observers don’t have. Also, it’s impossible to judge from the outside whether or not tax savings was one of the arguments considered in addition to the regulatory situation.
There is no extreme poverty or starvation in democratic countries
This seems like a strong claim to me. What’s your source for that?
and access to education and health care is one hundred percent, at least in older democracies. Younger ones are getting there fast.
Where do you draw the line between older and younger democracies? Isn’t the US pretty old compared to other democracies [1] - and does it provide “100% access to health care” to its citizens?
all countries and all people lived in democracies the major problems of humanity would be solved or be dramatically smaller.
Would you classify X-Risks like AI and pandemics as major problems? Do you think having more countries be democratic would reduce these risks—given that the existing democracies don’t do enough on either?
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-worlds-oldest-democracies
pretty much generally agreed upon in the EA community that the development of unaligned AGI is the most pressing problem
While there is significant support for “AI as cause area #1”, I know plenty of EAs that do not agree with this. Therefore, “generally agree upon” feels like a bit too strong of a wording to me. See also my post on why EAs are skeptical about AI safety
For viewpoints from professional AI researchers, see Vael Gates interviews with AI researchers on AGI risk.
I mention those pieces not to argue that AI risk is overblown, but rather to shed more light on your question.
I found myself confused about the quotes, and would have liked to hear a bit more where they came from. Are these verbatim quotes from disillusioned EAs you talked to? Or are they rough reproductions? Or completely made up?
The sample is biased in many ways: Because of the places where I recruited, interviews that didn’t work out because of timezone difference, people who responded too late, etc. I also started recruiting on Reddit and then dropped that in favour of Facebook.
So this should not be used as a representative sample, rather it’s an attempt to get a wide variety of arguments.
I did interview some people who are worried about alignment but don’t think current approaches are tractable. And quite a few people who are worried about alignment but don’t think it should get more resources.
Referring to my two basic questions listed at the top of the post, I had a lot of people say “yes” to (1). So they are worried about alignment. I originally planned to provide statistics on agreement / disagreement on questions 1⁄2 but it turned out that it’s not possible to make a clear distinction between the two questions—most people, when discussing (2) in detail, kept referring back to (1) in complex ways.
I’m not quite sure I read the first two paragraphs correctly. Are you saying that Cotra, Carlsmith and Bostrom are the best resources but they are not widely recommended? And people mostly read short posts, like those by Eliezer, and those are accessible but might not have the right angle for skeptics?
I’m a software entrepreneur transitioning into higher-impact ventures. Had a mentoring call with Yonatan a couple of months ago. What I really liked about his approach was the structure of the call: First, gathering an overview of the issues of the table. Second, going through them in a fast-forward kind of way. And third, figuring out which ones are the most important to talk about.
The outcomes of the call directly led into the next steps I needed to explore this path.
The fact that he asked for feedback at the end of the call shows me that Yonatan is serious about helping EAs and getting better at it. I did have one or two pieces of critical feedback to his style, but these were just minor points that are to be expected for someone without a lot of coaching experience. I can recommend having a call with him without hesitation.
The German-speaking EA meetups I know are all very happy to switch to English whenever non-German-speakers are present. Can’t imagine it would be a problem anywhere in the German-speaking world!
Would you say that inexperienced people benefit less from a Mastermind than experienced people? Or would you say that they benefit so little that a Mastermind is not worth for them?
If your claim is that Masterminds are only worthwhile for experienced people, then I disagree for two reasons:
First, the way I see Masterminds, one core aspect is that a group of peers can be much more effective in thinking through problems than a single individual. This is true even if none of my peers have any experience that I don’t have. It is surely not true for any imaginable group, but I would guess it is true in the case of intellectually humble and reasonably smart people with similar values, who come together explicitely to support each other. I personally have managed to solve dozens of tricky personal & professional problems with the help of Masterminds groups—problems which I was not able to solve on my own.
Second, people with little experience might need more personal support and motivation than people who already have a lot of experience. They also have less access to mentoring. Obviously, this is not always true, but it seems plausible.
Related: this quote from the FAQ on their website
“They will spend your money directly”—seems like a strong statement, makes it sounds like charities usually do not invest any of the money they receive. Is that true? I don’t know, just flagging this for further discussion.