Lukas_Gloor

• Lukas_Gloor 12 Jul 2022 12:18 UTC

  240 points

  8 ∶ 0

  on: EA for dumb peo­ple?

  I know that lukeprog’s comment is mostly replying to the insecurity about lack of credentials in the OP. Still, the most upvoted answer seems a bit ironic in the broader context of the question:

  If you read the comment without knowing Luke, you might be like “Oh yeah, that sounds encouraging.” Then you find out that he wrote this excellent 100++ page report on the neuroscience of consciousness, which is possibly the best resource on this on the internet, and you’re like “Uff, I’m f***ed.”
  
  Luke is (tied with Brian Tomasik) the most genuinely modest person I know, so it makes sense that it seems to him like there’s a big gap between him and even smarter people in the community. And there might be, maybe. But that only makes the whole situation even more intimidating.

  It’s a tough spot to be in and I only have advice that maybe helps make the situation tolerable, at least.

  Related to the advice about Stoicism, I recommend viewing EA as a game with varying levels of difficulty.

  Because life isn’t fair, the level of difficulty of the video game will sometimes be “hard” or even “insane”, depending on the situation you’re in. The robot on the other hand would be playing on “easy”, because it would never encounter a lack of willpower, skills, or thinking capacity. So don’t worry about not being able to score too many points in the absolute sense, and focus instead on how many points are reachable within the difficulty-level that you’re playing on.

  I also like the concrete advice in the post SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work, by Ryan Carey and Tegan McCaslin.

  1. Get Skilled: Use non-EA opportunities to level up on those abilities EA needs most.

  2. Get Humble: Amplify others’ impact from a more junior role.

  3. Get Outside: Find things to do in EA’s blind spots, or outside EA organizations.

  4. Get Weird: Find things no one is doing.

  Of course, for some people, it may feel like the only useable advice is “Get Humble.” However, I think at least “Get Skilled” is also advice that should always work, and people who feel discouraged about it may want to start working on developing a bit more of a growth mindset* and combine the search for useful skills with “Get Humble” (i.e., look for skills that are in reach).
  
  *There’s no use in feeling bad about not having as much of a growth mindset as others, because that’s also a trait that varies among people, just like intelligence. And a growth mindset most likely comes easier to highly intelligent people.

  I think “Get Outside” can also work out well because altruistically motivated people who think carefully about the impact of their role are in rare supply outside of EA. However, there might be a problem where doing well in roles outside of EA isn’t very compatible with the typical identity of going to EA Global and talking about cause priortization and so on. I think that’s a tricky situation. Maybe it makes sense for EAs in this sort of situation to meet up, compare experiences, and see if they find ways of dealing with it better.
  
  I have the maximum amount of respect for anyone who is motivated to spend a large portion of their time and resources to do the most good they can, no matter what their personal situation turns out to be. Especially if people are honest with themselves about personal limitations.

  What links here?

  • Linch's comment on EA for dumb peo­ple? by Olivia Addy (12 Jul 2022 23:41 UTC; 47 points)

• Lukas_Gloor 13 Dec 2023 2:10 UTC

  205 points

  45 ∶ 4

  on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  I read this post and about half of the appendix.

  (1) I updated significantly in the direction of “Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought” and “it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.”

  (I’m still confused about some of the fact-checking claims, especially the specific degree to which Emerson flagged early on that there were dozens of extreme falsehoods, or whether this only happened when Ben said that he was about to publish the post. Is it maybe possible that Emerson’s initial reply had little else besides “Some points still require clarification,” and Emerson only later conveyed how strongly he disagreed with the overall summary once he realized that Ben was basically set on publishing on a 2h notice? If so, that’s very different from Ben being told in the very first email reply that Nonlinear’s stance on this is basically “good summary, but also dozens of claims are completely false and we can document that.” That’s such a stark difference, so it feels to me like there was miscommunication going on.)

  At the same time:

  (2) I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning (in a “this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity” rather than “this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word”). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn’t change my initial opinion here by too much because there are features of how Kat and Emerson are presenting their side of things that make me think “ah, I see it: not surprised Chloe felt negative emotions about her perceived standing in relation to them.” (Admittedly, I think if I applied more charitable priors here, I could see alternative explanations like “the negative features I believe I see here are best explained by Kat and Emerson feeling hurt and upset by things Chloe said, so they come across as defensive and one-sided in return, but they’d be better able to see and re-state Chloe’s perspective if they were more distanced from the events, and may have been better at seeing Chloe’s perspective earlier, before they all had a falling out.”)

  To elaborate on (1):

  • If Nonlinear’s description of Alice is even halfway accurate, then I feel like Ben should have decided not to air any of her claims altogether, and only gone with Chloe as the single source. This would have made clear that the picture is one of mostly just one person. This would probably have changed the forcefulness of the post by quite a bit, which would’ve been less immediately condemning towards Nonlinear (making the resulting discussion fairer).

  • I also thought some of the replies Nonlinear gave towards Chloe seemed more persuasive than I would’ve expected. (At the same time, I think many of their replies seemed roughly what I would have expected, and in fact seem arguably revealing to me in some ways – see my point below on “(2).” [I guess the people who disagree with me will think I’m still influenced by the priors I’ve formed from the previous discussion, and that it’s hard to be objective after having initially formed a negative-leaning view.])

  To elaborate on (2)

  • I didn’t like the repeated mentions of phrases like “this would have been your dream day!” or “to many [...], this would have been their dream job!.” Sure, I get where this is coming from: Contrasted with accusations of not feeding people well or not paying them enough money, it makes sense to highlight that the role had lots of perks. At the same time, the lengths to which they went to highlight this, and the talk about hanging out with other high-status community heroes, gave me too much of a feeling that they almost expected Chloe and Alice to feel indebted towards them. I can see how this attitude would lead to difficult dynamics in a setting where you’re co-living and forming “what-can-feel-like-friendships” with people you also expect to do all sorts of tasks for you.

  • Relatedly, it’s begging the question to self-describe your group with “Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. There’s this sense in the group that anything is possible if you are just creative, brave, and never give up. It feels really empowering and inspiring.” It’s fair if Kat or Emerson perceived their group that way, but, evidently, Chloe felt very different about it. So, it feels like it’s not hearing her perspective when they describe things like that. This is a strange disconnect. (As another commenter pointed out, there’s a similar disconnect with posting the pictures of social fun and tropic scenery, without at least pointing out that it’s not actually what most of the discussion was about. I get the desire to share pictures, fwiw, but I think this could’ve been embedded with a framing that acknowledges the disconnect issue.) (Also relatedly: On “warm vibes,” I’m remembering some of the screenshots in the food-ordering discussion made me feel like “I can see why Chloe wouldn’t necessarily feel like they’re being super warm towards her.” Not in a way that’s too bad or anything, but, Idk, something about how much value is put on productivity and the ability to negotiate, as opposed to, e.g., going out of one’s way to make sure Chloe feels comfortable voicing whenever she struggles with something or needs something when she’s sick or feeling low. [I’m not claiming that all employers need to be particularly warm or proactive about encouraging their employees to become better at asking for their basic needs to be met; I’m just pointing out that it’s problematic if there’s a mismatch between self-perceived warmth vibes and actual effect one has on others, combined with risky work setups like isolated travels and co-working with people who do tasks for you, and blurring potential-for-friendship and professional interactions.]) Overall, there just feels like too little engagement with the possibility that Chloe’s experience was maybe predictable and not out of the ordinary, i.e., that Chloe wasn’t entitled or disgruntled to react the way she did.

  • I thought some of the short-summary replies to Chloe seemed uncharitable to the point of being mean. For instance, this part: “CHLOE: I had unclear work boundaries and was pressured into working on a weekend (implies this was a regular occurrence). NONLINEAR: “My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.” I remember reading Chloe’s account of this incident and it felt very different to me. When I read Chloe’s account, I could easily see where she was coming from. I admit that it’s okay to use hyperbole in a summary. Maybe they thought it’s okay because everyone can see that this is meant somewhat hyperbolically. However, the following is a case where it’s more unambiguously mean-spirited rather than just hyperbolic: “Complex situations she herself cites: ordering a taxi, asking for a ride, packing suitcases. [...] This is some of the best public evidence of her being mentally unwell. These are not overwhelming tasks for most people.” I feel like this is very unfair. Having read Chloe’s descriptions, I’d say it fails to engage with what makes these things complicated (people having various strong preferences about specifics related to the tasks, and you have juggle all of them and make everyone happy, while taking care of other constraints + brain fog from having worked too much before the weekend you’re supposed to have off).

  • “So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?” Maybe this is a minor point, but I don’t like this style of “writing things as though it’s now conclusively established that Ben and Chloe were in the wrong, so we can move on to lessons learned given that specific conclusion.” It feels premature. I also didn’t like this part: “I wish I could think that Alice, Ben, and Chloe were villains.” Ben and Chloe get tainted by association with Alice. The points made by Nonlinear against Alice are way more concerning-if-true than the points made against Chloe or Ben. (I’m not sure about the degree to which they are contested because some of it goes well beyond earlier things that were said about Alice, and people who know more context about Alice, which doesn’t describe me at all, haven’t had the chance to comment on this.)

  • Overall, I thought it’s simply implausible that the most Nonlinear leadership could come up with in terms of “things we could’ve done differently” (see their appendix on this) is stuff like “Emerson shouldn’t have snapped at Chloe during that one stressful day” or “we shouldn’t have have lived together with employees who weren’t previously assistants because, apparently, such employees cannot handle it and will think we’re friends.” (I’m being admittedly a bit unfair/​hyperbolic here; also, note that there were like two or three other short items.) To be more fair, I realize that when you’re faced with lots of false accusations (and I agree many of the claims now seem dubious to me and probably uncalled for!), it’s understandable to focus mostly on defending yourself and on highlighting how outrageous everything is. However, I think there are several reasons to also focus a lot on what one could’ve done better. One: I think there’s almost always something one can learn from conflicts, even if one is genuinely 98% percent in the right and dealing with a person who has an unhealthy relationship to their own negative emotions that turn them into a wrecking ball of toxicity. Secondly, it’s sometimes hard to be right about things like that, so one kind of has a duty, when “fighting back,” to make sure one isn’t the one “in the wrong” rationalizing one’s negative perspective of the other party. Thirdly, and very related to the previous point, I feel like pointing out what one could’ve done differently is some of the more reliable types of evidence one can readily give in favor of not being someone who looks at things in a one-sided and distorted fashion. So, even if this is just about making sure one’s defense is credible, it’s strategically smart to inspect and point out what didn’t go well. Lastly, I noticed that the post and appendix by Nonlinear is quite well-written in terms of persuasive rhetoric across a number of dimensions, which makes me think that them not including a more comprehensive takeaways/​”lessons learned” section is unlikely to be a simple strategic mistake (not realizing that this sort of thing is something that readers in the audience would look out for). Instead, it feels like maybe more a genuine display of their belief that they’re close to infallible. If this is the case, it’s easy to see why this attitude increases the potential for things to not go well interpersonally.

  Even though many the things in my elaboration of “(2)” are negative about Nonlinear, I want to emphasize again that this post made me update positively about them and that I think it’s unfortunate how the initial presentation and resulting discussion was too one-sided. I appreciate the length of this post; it must have been very stressful and anxiety-inducing to feel compelled to write it. (I’m overall inclined to think that it was positive for them/​their reputation to write it.)

  What links here?

  • pseudonym's comment on Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims by Kat Woods (13 Dec 2023 22:52 UTC; 49 points)

• Lukas_Gloor 28 Dec 2021 21:42 UTC

  121 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Democratis­ing Risk—or how EA deals with critics

  “Don’t be fanatical about utilitarian or longtermist concerns and don’t take actions that violate common sense morality” is a message that longtermists have been emphasizing from the very beginnings of this social movement, and quite a lot.
  
  Some examples:

  • https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​dWTEtgBfFaz6vjwQf/​​ethical-injunctions (2008)

  • https://​​philpapers.org/​​rec/​​ORDHTB (2008)

  • https://​​longtermrisk.org/​​reasons-to-be-nice-to-other-value-systems/​​ (2015)

  • https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​tag/​​naive-vs-sophisticated-consequentialism (multiple articles; 2016-2021)

  More generally, there’s often at least a full paragraph devoted to this topic when someone writes a longer overview article on longtermism or writes about particularly dicey implications with outsized moral stakes. I also remember this being a presentation or conversation topic at many EA conferences.
  
  I haven’t read the corresponding section in the paper that the OP refers to, yet, but I skimmed the literature section and found none of the sources I linked to above. If the paper criticizes longtermism on grounds of this sort of implication and fails to mention that longtermists have been aware of this and are putting in a lot of work to make sure people don’t come away with such takes, then that seems like a major omission.

  What links here?

  • Lukas_Gloor's comment on If EA Com­mu­nity-Build­ing Could Be Net-Nega­tive, What Fol­lows? by joshcmorrison (4 Jan 2023 20:48 UTC; 4 points)

• Lukas_Gloor 2 Feb 2023 9:52 UTC

  108 points

  55 ∶ 1

  on: Ques­tions about OP grant to Helena

  There is scant public information that could justify it as the best-placed and most appropriate recipient, a clear risk of nepotism inherent in the recipient organization, and [...]

  When I read this part of your bullet point summary, I thought someone at Open Phil might be related to someone at Helena. But then it became clear that you mean that the Helena founder dropped out of college supported with money from his rich investor dad to start a project that you think “(subjectively) seems like” self-aggrandizing.

  (The word “inherent” probably makes clear what you mean; I just had a prior that nepotism is a problem when someone receives funding, and I didn’t know that you were talking about other funding that Helena also received.)

• Lukas_Gloor 14 Dec 2023 2:58 UTC

  87 points

  22 ∶ 3

  on: Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims

  I find it interesting and revealing to look at how Nonlinear re-stated Chloe’s initial account of an incident into a shorter version.

  First, here’s their shortened version (by Nonlinear):

  One of Chloe’s jobs was to organize fun day trips (which she’d join us on). In fact, one of her unofficial titles was Fun Lord of Nonlinear, First of Her Name. One day, spontaneously, we decided to go on a trip to St. Barths. Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend” and he said, “But you like organizing fun trips!”—she had said so many times—and she said sure.

  She continued doing her job (arranging ATV rentals for the group—herself getting to ride as well of course). Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her. And that was that.

  (This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)

  The day after she talks to me about it, how she wants to not have work spontaneously sprung on her on a break day. I agree with her. I think break days should be sacred. I talk to Emerson about it and tell him that he can’t do that, and that we cannot spring work on her on break days unless they’re an actual emergency. He disagrees because he thinks it’s totally normal for startup employees to ocassionally work on weekends, but I insist, and that’s that.

  We proceed to only ask her to do her job on work days. She must just not remember that we set up this policy. But we did.

  For comparison, here’s Chloe’s original:

  There was a time during our stay at St Martin when I was overwhelmed from living and seeing only the same people every single day and needed a day off. Sometimes I’d become so overwhelmed I became really bad at formulating sentences and being in social contexts so I’d take a day off and go somewhere on the island where I could be on my own, away from the whole team—I’ve never before and after experienced an actual lack of being able to formulate sentences just from being around the same people for too long. This was one of these times. We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize (me and Kat would take off Tuesdays and Saturdays, these were sometimes called weekend or vacation days).

  Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself.

  I didn’t have time to eat, had just woken up, and the actual task itself required to rally up 7 people and figure out their passport situation as well as if they want to join. St Barths means entering a different country, which meant that I needed to check in with the passport as well as covid requirements and whether all 7 people can actually join. I needed to quickly book some ferry tickets there and back for the day, rally the people to the cars and get to the ferry—all of this within less than an hour. We were late and annoyed the ferry employees—but this is one of the things generally ignored by the Nonlinear team, us being late but getting our way is a sign of our agency and how we aren’t NPCs that just follow the prescribed ferry times—they’re negotiable after all, if we can get away with getting to St Barths anyway.

  I thought my work was done. We got to the island, my plan was to make the most of it and go on my own somewhere but Emerson says he wants an ATV to travel around with and without an ATV it’s a bit pointless. Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer. All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.

  I did describe this to Kat in my next meeting with her that it’s not okay for me to have to do work tasks while I’m on my weekends, and she agreed but we struggled to figure out a solution that would make sense. It remained more of a “let’s see how this plays out”.

  It’s probably best for readers to think first about whether they feel like the summary omits important things. I think it’s fine to omit some things and mostly describe the incident from Kat and Emerson’s perspective. But I think not mentioning the following three things, at least, is pretty bad form and misleading:

  • There’s a huge difference between
    “I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself”
    versus
    “Emerson asked her to do her usual job, and she said “It’s a weekend”
    This difference above really changes the context for
    ”He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”.”
    Basically, for the version where Chloe only said “It’s a weekend,” it’s defensible to interpret Emerson’s reply as a friendly negotiation attempt. By contrast, in the version where Chloe says “I really need the vacation day for myself,” the comment that most readily comes to my hyperbole-prone mind for “But organizing stuff is fun for you!” is “psychopathic.”
    (To be fair, it could be that Chloe failed at expressing just how much she needed that day off – I think that’s a common pattern with many people to struggle with voicing their needs and limits. Even so, I think it’s bad form by Nonlinear to not acknowledge this discrepancy of accounts and instead impose their own framing on Chloe’s account. It feels like trying to alter the frame covertly rather than discussing what happened in the open.) (Not to mention that “she said so many times” (about liking to organize trips) is totally beside the point, and pretending otherwise is bizarre. Like, if they can’t even get this right here on the forum after three months of thinking about it, things don’t look good.)

  • I think it’s not okay to omit relevant context when they summarized the following passage:
    ”(This is another example of Chloe coming in with the implicit frame that doing her job is abusive. “Everyone sits down at a lovely cafe to have coffee and chit chat, while I’m running around to car and ATV rentals to see what they have to offer.” We can empathize with her wishing she could join us before finishing her job, but this was her job. Being an assistant is not abuse.)”
    They make it seem like Chloe was complaining about normal work on a normal work day. However, in this story, Chloe had agreed here to work on a weekend and she only expected that she had to organize the trip (St Martin and back) and nothing else. Getting the ATV rentals while everyone else was having coffee was yet another unexpected task on her off day. It’s a very different thing to feel bad about unexpected new tasks coming up on your off day after you already felt like you got talked into doing more than you wanted, than it is to feel bad about normal work while your bosses are resting. It feels unfair not to acknowledge the true source of Chloe’s discontent in this specific story about the cafe.

  • Chloe doesn’t seem to agree with the following description:
    “Then, when she complained, Emerson said “OK” and then just… went and did her job for her.”
    Here, what Nonlinear omitted was this contradicting passage in Chloe’s account:
    ”All ATVs have been rented out—it’s tourist season. I check back in, Emerson says I need to call all the places on the island and keep trying. I call all the places I can find, this is about 10 places (small island). No luck. Eventually Emerson agrees that using a moped will be okay, and that’s when I get relieved from my work tasks.”
    It’s strange to omit this. It sounds like Emerson insisted that she made ten phone calls before dropping the idea. To me, it feels quite demanding to ask your assistant to go to such great lengths on what was initially an off day for them (or at all, tbh), especially if you can probably infer based on their mood and behavior that they’re not in the happiest and most energetic of states.

  In any case, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like “Nonlinear are being unfair and somewhat sneaky in their presentation.”
  
  To be clear, I’m not necessarily accusing them of deliberately misrepresenting what Chloe said. They might reasonably reply, “We know Chloe said different things; after all, we linked to her long comment and we think forum readers can read for themselves. We decided to showcase our side of the story, how we remember it.” However, even if that’s how they reply, I think it’s not okay to do things underhandedly like that, especially when they then go on and make strong negative statements about Chloe’s entitlement and bad attitude based on their version of events, without flagging that Chloe disagrees about so much of the context. Doing things underhandedly is manipulative because it hides possible points of disagreement, making it seem like their version of the story is more obviously accurate/​objective than it actually is.

  What links here?

  • Lukas_Gloor's comment on Non­lin­ear’s Ev­i­dence: De­bunk­ing False and Mislead­ing Claims by Kat Woods (14 Dec 2023 1:40 UTC; 20 points)

Mul­ti­verse-wide co­op­er­a­tion in a nutshell

AI al­ign­ment re­searchers may have a com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage in re­duc­ing s-risks

Pop­u­la­tion Ethics Without Ax­iol­ogy: A Framework

• Lukas_Gloor 12 Jan 2023 12:55 UTC

  78 points

  24 ∶ 4

  in reply to: pseudonym’s comment on: [Linkpost] Nick Bostrom’s “Apol­ogy for an Old Email”

  To add one more person’s impression, I agree with ofer that he apology was “reasonable,” I disagree with him that your post “reads as if it was optimized to cause as much drama as possible, rather than for pro-social goals,” and I agree with Amber Dawn that the original email is somewhat worse than something I’d have expected most people to have in their past. (That doesn’t necessarily mean it deserves any punishment decades later and with the apology –non-neurotyptical people can definitely make a lot of progress between, say, early twenties and later in life, in understanding how their words affect others and how edginess isn’t the same as being sophisticated.)
  
  I think this is one of these “struggles of norms” where you can’t have more than one sacred principle, and ofer’s and my position is something like “it should be okay to say ‘I don’t know what’s true’ on a topic where the truth seems unclear ((but not, e.g., something like Holocaust denial)).” Because a community that doesn’t prioritize truth-seeking will run into massive troubles, so even if there’s a sense in which kindness is ultimately more important than truth-seeking (I definitely think so!), it just doesn’t make sense as an instrumental norm to treat it as sacred (so that one essentially forces people to say things that might be false or else they are punished).

  Separately from that, I think it’s bad to reinforce the idea that group averages have any normative relevance whatsoever. If we speak as though the defence against racism is empirically finding that all intelligence differences for group averages are at most environmentally-caused, then that’s a weak defence against racism! It’s “weak” because it could turn out to be false. But in reality, I don’t think there’s any possible finding that could make us think “racism is okay.” In my view, not being racist – in the sense that has moral significance for me – means that (1) you’re not more inclined to falsely reach a conclusion about people from a different ethnicity than you’d reach the same conclusion about (e.g.) your own ethnicity and (2) when you consider “candidates” (in whatever context) with equal characteristics/​interests/​qualifications, etc., you’re not more inclined to treat some worse than others based solely on their ethnicity. If we hold this view, we get to relax to about what could be found out about group averages.

  That said, I do agree that there’s very little, if anything, to gain from discussions about group averages, and that the people who are eager to bring up the topic seem morally suspicious. (In this specific case of Bostrom_2023 writing the apology, it’s not like he could have chosen to avoid the topic entirely – so given the mistakes he made 26 years ago, he had to address it again.)
  

  What links here?

  • Lukas_Gloor's comment on [Linkpost] Nick Bostrom’s “Apol­ogy for an Old Email” by pseudonym (12 Jan 2023 16:45 UTC; 34 points)
  • Lukas_Gloor's comment on FLI FAQ on the re­jected grant pro­posal controversy by Tegmark (20 Jan 2023 11:19 UTC; 32 points)
  • Lukas_Gloor's comment on CEA state­ment on Nick Bostrom’s email by Shakeel Hashim (12 Jan 2023 20:28 UTC; 30 points)

• Lukas_Gloor 29 Aug 2020 8:17 UTC

  77 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: Some thoughts on the EA Mu­nich //​ Robin Han­son incident

  This seems like a tradeoff to me

  Yes, it’s a tradeoff, but Hanson’s being so close to one extreme of the spectrum that it starts to be implausible that anyone can be that bad at communicating carefully just by accident. I don’t think he’s even trying, and maybe he’s trying to deliberately walk as close to the line as possible. What’s the point in that? If I’m right, I wouldn’t want to gratify that. I think it’s lacking nuance if you blanket object to the “misstep” framing, especially since that’s still a relatively weak negative judgment. We probably want to be able to commend some people on their careful communication of sensitive topics, so we also have to be willing to call it out if someone is doing an absolutely atrocious job at it.

  For reference, I have listened to a bunch of politically controversial podcasts by Sam Harris, and even though I think there’s a bit of room to communicate even better, there were no remarks I’d label as ‘missteps.’ By contrast, several of Hanson’s tweets are borderline at best, and at least one now-deleted tweet I saw was utterly insane. I don’t think it’s fair that everyone has to be at least as good at careful communication as Harris to be able to openly talk about sensitive topics (and it seems the bar from societal backlash is even higher now, which is of course terrible), but maybe we can expect people to at least do better than Hanson? That doesn’t mean that Hanson should be disinvited from events, but I feel like it would suck if he didn’t take more time to make his tweets less needlessly incendiary.

Cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion for down­side-fo­cused value systems

What Is Mo­ral Real­ism?

• Lukas_Gloor 30 Jan 2024 12:40 UTC

  64 points

  14 ∶ 8

  in reply to: Vaipan’s comment on: EV in­ves­ti­ga­tion into Owen and Com­mu­nity Health

  [T]here is a certain irony to see these two people coming to defend Owen while the community health head, Julia, admits to a certain level of bias when handling this affair since he was her friend.

  Jonas’s comment includes statements like “This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it” and “I think a temporary ban is important, both as an incentive against bad behavior and as a precaution so the harms don’t continue. That said, two years are a long time, [...]”
  
  So, I don’t think this would be repeating the mistakes that the community health team acknowledged. I also think Jonas made important points.
  
  Generally, I think as long as someone acknowledges what’s at stake for both sides (underreaction vs overreaction), it should be okay to try to add important nuance to a conversation.
  
  Regarding lyra’s comment, among other things, she says that she thinks Owen would be positively welcoming for lots of communities. In light of several people speaking up about their negative experiences, I can see why that’s weird to hear. Like, even if it’s true going forward (I think it might be!), I’d personally would have liked it better if lyra’s comment had contained more of a mention of how she agrees the patterns described in the update were indeed concerning and very much warranted action. (I don’t know who lyra is – it’s plausible that she’d agree with that and simply didn’t bother to write it because she thought readers can already see all the negative descriptions.)

  Can you put yourself two seconds in the shoes of these women who received unwanted and pressing attention from Owen,

  Again, I can see why you’re writing this in response to lyra’s comment. At the same time, I want to point out that “being concerned about overreactions” isn’t just one-sidedly bad for the goal of improving community safety and welcomingness. If the community doesn’t have a sense of how there’s still a big difference in “potential for future harm” between someone like Owen and someone like Jeffrey Epstein, then how is that conducive for welcomingness and safety? This isn’t yet a fleshed out argument, but I have the intuition that if we react with all-out outrage at even comparatively more fixable/​improvable incidents of harm, we’ll do a worse job at having the energy and vigilance to maximally pursue the worst cases of it, which often also involve a lot of deception and “enemy action” that distorts the discourse around what’s happening and around “who’s the bad party?.” In those situations, you really want people who can pay attention to lots of subtleties of character and don’t fall into outrage traps around whose side is currently winning.

• Lukas_Gloor 21 Feb 2023 1:36 UTC

  64 points

  24 ∶ 4

  in reply to: Lauren Maria’s comment on: EV UK board state­ment on Owen’s resignation

  It doesn’t seem right for “would never have been investigated.” My understanding is that the community health team looked into this. They talked to affected parties and came to some decision that didn’t call for a public apology or Owen stepping down. Instead, their “steps to take” included writing that post on power dynamics and probably(?) they made a judgment call of the sort “our impression is that Owen learned from mistakes and is very unlikely to do this again.” So, I’d imagine they resolved to keep an eye on things, but decided on no further actions otherwise.
  
  [Edit1: Julia writes “I hope I would have eventually recognized there was more to do here, including telling the board, but it’s possible I wouldn’t have recognized this.” This suggests that maybe the team was overwhelmed with things happening and hadn’t conclusively finalized dealing with this situation before the TIME article came out.]

  [Edit2: Oh, I now see that posters above probably meant “official investigation by experts” rather than “investigation by a team at an EA org.” I agree that it looks like this wouldn’t have happened.]

  Then, the TIME article brought this up again and pressure mounted to hear more details about the incident and about the fact that the person mentioned is still active in the community, despite the description in the TIME piece sounding crazy and indefensible. And so here we are.

  Personally, if we take Owen’s account at face value, I think the incident is bad and shouldn’t have happened, but it was a lot less bad than what I’d have expected based on the TIME piece account. Even so, subjective judgment calls about how much someone learned from mistakes are risky to rely on all by themselves. In this particular instance, I can sympathize with wanting to take a forgiving stance. One reason I was extremely surprised about this post and the circumstances behind it is because I knew Owen (not very closely, but it still felt like a strong impression) as someone who’s unusually committed to high integrity and modest and forthcoming about mistakes he might be making, etc. Still, there’s a strong case that there should be procedures that call for more “objective” actions when complaints of this sort come to light and are even corroborated (“corroborated” in the sense that Owen, given his apology, must have agreed about many facts of what happened, even if he highlighted things that the person who complained about him may not have highlighted or may have thought about differently). So, instead of just making a judgment call about whether the person learned the most from mistakes, I think it would’ve been more appropriate to make a public statement about the incident. This would’ve put more eyes on Owen’s behavior in this area and brought about the conditions for better accountability.

  Personally, I think “removal from the board” wouldn’t necessarily be warranted if this had been handled differently at the time when it happened (but as I say further below, some kind of public statement and apology seemed warranted!). But I think it would’ve made sense to ask Owen to step down from mentorship-type roles?
  
  I think that if we just looked at the specific actions, the measures taken should probably be more severe than I just described them. However, if we then add extra context and if I go with my best guess about everything that Owen was thinking and so on, I pretty much believe the account he gave in the apology.
  
  Since things didn’t come out earlier, I want to say that I don’t feel like it’s good that basically nothing happened at the time. Even if the community health team has good judgment about these sorts of things (whether someone made genuine mistakes instead of deliberately using their position of power to push boundaries), it’s much safer for incentives and overall accountability if they draw public eyes on this in some way (perhaps keeping some measure of discretion). (Edit: Also conflict of interest concerns!) To help with that, it would be good if the “public eye” has enough nuance to distinguish cases like the one here from things that would be significantly worse, and not call for the most extreme punitive measures in all cases. My impression is that the EA community is probably good at preserving this sort of nuance (or at least was so before the recent series of polarizing scandals), even though I often see EA forum comments that I disagree with in one direction or the other – too lenient or too strict for my taste for a given situation.

• Lukas_Gloor 23 Sep 2022 15:27 UTC

  63 points

  25 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: My Per­sonal Story of Re­jec­tion from EA Global

  Hi Amy, I think it’s hard to justify a policy of never discussing someone’s application publicly even when they agree to it and it’s in the public interest. This is completely different from protecting people’s privacy.

  If you read Amy’s reply carefully, it sounds like she told Constance some of the reasons for rejection in private and then Constance didn’t summarize those reasons (accurately, or at all?) in her post. If so, it’s understandable why Amy isn’t sure whether Constance would be okay having them shared (because if she was okay, she’d have already shared them?). See this part of Amy’s reply:

  I did explain to Constance why she was initially rejected as one of the things we discussed on an hour-long call.
  [...]
  I don’t think this post reflects what I told Constance, perhaps because she disagrees with us. So, I want to stick to the policy for now.

  FWIW, based on everything Constance writes, I think she seems like a good fit for EAG to me and, more importantly, can be extremely proud of her altruism and accomplishments (and doesn’t need validation from other EAs for that).
  
  I’m just saying that on the particular topic of sharing reasons for the initial rejections, it seems like Amy gave an argument that’s more specific than “we never discuss reasons, ever, not even when the person herself is okay with public discussion.” And you seem to have missed that in your reply or assumed an uncharitable interpretation.

• Lukas_Gloor 13 Sep 2022 11:12 UTC

  62 points

  13 ∶ 1

  on: Democratis­ing risk: a com­mu­nity misled

  As a (minor) point related to this discussion, I want to flag that Zoe never got back to me after this interaction.
  
  [Edit: This no longer applies – Zoe and I had a call and she could indeed convince me. See here for my update. Also, I want to flag that after it came out that Torres’ involvement wasn’t as a co-author at the time when Zoe faced criticism of the draft, it anyway wouldn’t make sense to assume that she’d be misleading anyone about any sort of info. I didn’t have a call with her to vet her or anything because that wasn’t needed. I just took the opportunity to learn more about what happened before the publication of the paper and so I can post an update to this comment here which would be unfair to Zoe if left unaltered.]
  
  It’s very possible that this may just be due to not using FB frequently (I messaged her on FB). Even so, I think it’s bad form to pocket the credit (e.g., I at first somewhat changed my mind about a comment where I initially voiced skepticism about something, and could imagine that others updated in the same direction) for having specific info by saying that one is going to share it privately and then not sharing it privately.
  
  For context, the specific claim under question was me saying that I’m skeptical that she presented an accurate view of the pushback she received on publishing the paper.

  As soon as there’s some evidence for non-optimal integrity (the evidence brought forward here about Torres IMO qualifies if it is accurate – though I wouldn’t necessarily trust Torres to represent accurately what happened), then it becomes also an issue of game theory rather than just epistemics whether to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

  Of course, if anyone else has talked to Zoe about the topic or if Zoe herself wants to share more about the situation, we could more easily decide what’s going and if her initial account of the pushback against the paper was roughly accurate.

Why Real­ists and Anti-Real­ists Disagree

• Lukas_Gloor 21 Feb 2023 16:04 UTC

  61 points

  18 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Hattie Carroll’s comment on: A state­ment and an apology

  I agree with (edit: many parts of) this comment and I’ve made a mental note to stay extra vigilant in this regard and go out of my way to consider that I might be biased in Owen’s favor (I tend to really like people who seem unusually introspective and open about their exact motivations, potential flaws, etc).

  Also, I want to emphasize that while I made comments here that tried to shift the balance more in one direction, I wouldn’t necessarily describe and condense this as”taking Owen’s side.” (I feel like the only comment that “took Owen’s side” without any caveats has more than 120 disagreement karma, which is a pretty clear statement.) And I want to say somewhere that this incident was a negative update for me not just in a social-implications sense (pattern of having made people uncomfortable in asymmetric power dynamics). It also affected my impression of the strength of Owen’s orientation and ability to overcome “self-serving traps.” Especially for the longtermist project where we can’t help but rely on the best judgment of a few expert researchers (because there aren’t really any short-and-unambiguously-relevant/​helpful feedback loops we can check instead), having people with strong orientations of this sort feels essential. If I learn about someone spending a lot of attention on sex or romance in contexts where EA impact is at stake, it updates me negatively about their potential to steer us towards actual impact.

• Lukas_Gloor 6 Feb 2023 18:27 UTC

  60 points

  22 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: Should EVF con­sider ap­point­ing new board mem­bers?

  I agree the Elon Musk thing was sketchy and arguably a bad decision, but that also wasn’t public and not related to SBF’s EA activities.

  Whether it was “sketchy and arguably a bad decision” isn’t the primary issue. Peter Wildeford pointed out that Will vouched for SBF. Vouching = staking your reputation to guarantee that someone has integrity/​can be trusted.
  
  (Many of the things you say in your comment seem reasonable to me as well, but I feel like we can’t just skip over the vouching part even if it was non-public. If he vouched towards Musk he probably did the same in lots of other contexts, or conveyed trust in Sam in less explicit ways, at least.)

• Lukas_Gloor 13 Jan 2023 13:50 UTC

  57 points

  25 ∶ 4

  in reply to: JWS’s comment on: CEA state­ment on Nick Bostrom’s email

  I downvoted it (weakly) because my impression is that “it’s pseudoscience” is not a nuanced statement on a topic where there’s bad science all over the place on both sides. Apart from the awfully racially-biased beliefs of many early scientists/​geneticists, there has been a lot of pseudoscience from far right sources on this also more recently – that’s important to mention – but so has there been pseudoscience in Soviet Russia (Lysenkoism) that goes in the other ideological direction and we’re currently undergoing a wave of science denial where it’s controversial in some circles to believe that there are any psychological differences whatsoever between men and women. Inheritance stuff also seems notoriously difficult to pin down because there’s a sense in which everything is “partly environmental” (if put babies on the moon, they all end up dead) and you cannot learn much from simple correlation studies (there could still be environmental influences in there). I think a lot of the argument against genetic influences is about pointing out these limitations of the research and then concluding that, because of the limitations, it must be environmental only. But that’s only half-right: if the research has all these limitations, it makes more sense to be uncertain about the causes.

  When I closely followed the controversy around Sam Harris and his interview of Charles Murray and later the conflict and subsequent discussion between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, I noticed that the side that was accusing Sam Harris of pandering to pseudoscience was lying about a bunch of easily-verifiable things. I’m not sure I would understand the science well enough to say that they’re wrong about their scientific claims (and I didn’t bother to read their work in detail), but I think it’s good practice not to trust liars. (Ezra Klein was more of a weasel in that discussion than a liar – the people I think were lying were people whose hit piece against Harris and Murray Ezra Klein allowed to be published on Vox.)
  
  Given the above, it seems possible to me that genetic influences also play a role. It seems plausible on priors (would be a coincidence if all groups are the same in all regards), we have some precedent for group differences (I think the research on Ashkenazi jews having higher average IQ is less controversial?), and it can’t fill you with confidence in the other position when we can observe how some people are morally confused so they think the topic is so politically dangerous that they feel the need to lie about things (e.g., in the Sam Harris context, but also recent EA twitter threads I’ve seen go in that direction).

  It seems clear that some group differences are environmental-only. However, note that, even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t have any political implications. The benefits of access to good things that underprivileged groups often have less of, like access to education, health care, infrastructure, both parents involved in upbringing (though of course many single parents do an excellent job raising their kids), etc., these benefits don’t have much to do with IQ increases! Instead, access to these things is beneficial in all kinds of ways for anyone. So, politically, nothing would change and it would remain morally important to work towards more equality.

  As I said before, it’s totally counterproductive for the goal of fighting racism to stake your case on scientific claims that could turn out to be false. (Imagine how much of a convenient weapon you’d be handing over to racists if they can point out how the anti-racists are staking their claims on potentially flawed science and how they’re punishing anyone who expresses uncertainty.) There’s no reason to consider group averages morally relevant. It’s a huge confusion to act as though there’s a lot that morally depends on it.
  
  I also downvoted sapphire’s comments in some places (though not this thread) because they make it seem like there’s some conspiracy in EA around this stuff and because I don’t like their use of the term “Scientific Racism.” (I think the term is very appropriate for many scientists in the early 20th century or before, but very unfair to use towards people like Charles Murray or ones who say things like Bostrom said in his apology.) Regarding the alleged conspiracy, I had to look up what “HBD” exactly means. It might be true that some contrarian types are drawn to these topics in Bay area and via that spinoff from Slatestarcodex where people get kicks from discussing controversial topics. But that seems not particularly representative to me (and more rationalists than EAs)? In any case, I mostly talk to EAs in London and Oxford, where I’ve never seen anyone express any interest in these topics whatsoever, “EA leadership” least of all. I agree that the voting patterns maybe suggests something about EA being unusual, but to me that mostly implies stuff like “EAs/​rationalists are skeptical of making confident claims where the evidence is unlikely to support such claims.”