MathiasKB

• MathiasKB 3 Feb 2023 18:12 UTC

  275 points

  110 ∶ 11

  on: EA, Sex­ual Harass­ment, and Abuse

  This was incredibly upsetting for me to read. This is the first time I’ve ever felt ashamed to be associated with EA. I apologize for the tone of the rest of the comment, can delete it if it is unproductive, but I feel a need to vent.

  One thing I would like to understand better is to what extent this is a bay area issue versus EA in general. My impression is that a disproportionate fraction of abuse happens in the bay. If this suspicion is true, I don’t know how to put this politely, but I’d really appreciate it if the bay area could get its shit together.

  In my spare time I do community building in Denmark. I will be doing a workshop for the Danish academy of talented highschool students in April. How do you imagine the academy organizers will feel seeing this in TIME magazine?

  What should I tell them? “I promise this is not an issue in our local community”?

  I’ve been extremely excited to prepare this event. I would get to teach Denmark’s brightest high schoolers about hierarchies of evidence, help them conduct their own cost-effectiveness analyses, and hopefully inspire a new generation to take action to make the world a better place.

  Now I have to worry about whether it would be more appropriate to send the organizers a heads up informing them about the article and give them a chance to reconsider working with us.

  I frankly feel unequipped to deal with something like this.

  What links here?

  • Jeff Kaufman's comment on EA, Sex­ual Harass­ment, and Abuse by whistleblower9 (3 Feb 2023 16:49 UTC; 99 points)
  • JWS's comment on Why I Spoke to TIME Magaz­ine, and My Ex­pe­rience as a Fe­male AI Re­searcher in Sili­con Valley by Lucretia (12 Jun 2023 18:35 UTC; 20 points)

• MathiasKB 15 Nov 2022 21:25 UTC

  179 points

  55 ∶ 6

  on: Why you’re not hear­ing as much from EA orgs as you’d like

  Thank you for writing this. It’s barely been a week, take your time.

  There’s been a ton of posts on the forum about various failures, preventative measures, and more. As much as we all want to get to the bottom of this and ensure nothing like this ever happens again, I don’t think our community benefits from hasty overcorrections. While many of the points made are undoubtedly good, I don’t think it will hurt the EA community much to wait a month or two before demanding any drastic measures.

  EA’s should probably still be ambitious. Adopting rigorous governance and oversight mechanisms sometimes does more harm than good. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

  I’m still reflecting and am far from having fully formed beliefs yet, I am confused about just how many strong views there have been expressed on the forum. Alone correctly recalling my thoughts and feelings around FTX before the event is difficult. I’m noticing a lot of finger pointing and not a lot of introspection.

  I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m pretty horrified at just how similar my thinking seems to have been to SBF’s. If a person who seemingly agreed with me on so many moral priorities was capable of doing something so horrible, how can I be sure that I am different?
  
  I’m going to sit with that thought for a while, and think about what type of person I want to strive to be.

• MathiasKB 19 Jan 2023 18:48 UTC

  164 points

  78 ∶ 18

  on: FLI FAQ on the re­jected grant pro­posal controversy

  I think some of us owe FLI an apology for assuming heinous intentions where a simple (albeit dumb) mistake was made.

  I can imagine this must have been a very stressful period for the entire team, and I hope we as a community become better at waiting for the entire picture instead of immediately reacting and demanding things left and right.

• MathiasKB 19 Nov 2023 21:35 UTC

  134 points

  34 ∶ 0

  on: Open Phil Should Allo­cate Most Neart­er­mist Fund­ing to An­i­mal Welfare

  For those who agree with this post (I at least agree with the author’s claim if you replace most with more), I encourage you to think what you personally can do about it.

  I think EAs are far too willing to donate to traditional global health charities, not due to them being the most impactful, but because they feel the best to donate to. When I give to AMF I know I’m a good person who had an impact! But this logic is exactly what EA was founded to avoid.

  I can’t speak for animal welfare organizations outside of EA, but at least for the ones that have come out of Effective Altruism, they tell me that funding is a major issue. There just aren’t that many people willing to make a risky donation a new charity working on fish welfare, for example.

  Those who would be risk-willing enough to give to eccentric animal welfare or global health interventions, tend to also be risk-willing enough with their donations to instead give it to orgs working on existential risks. I’m not claiming this is incorrect of them to do, but this does mean that there is a dearth of funding for high-risk interventions in the neartermist space.

  I donated a significant part of my personal runway to help fund a new animal welfare org, which I think counterfactually might not have gotten started if not for this. If you, like me, think animal welfare is incredibly important and previously have donated to Givewell’s top charities, perhaps consider giving animal welfare a try!

• MathiasKB 14 Oct 2023 15:49 UTC

  53 points

  11 ∶ 0

  on: Mathi­asKirkBonde’s Shortform

  I’ve noticed a decrease in the quality and accuracy of communication among people and organizations advocating for pro-safety views in the AI policy space. More often than not, I’m seeing people go with the least charitable interpretations of various claims made by AI leaders.

  Arguments are increasingly looking like soldiers to me.

  Take the following twitter thread from Dr. Peter S. Clark describing his new paper co-authored with Max Tegmark.

  The authors use game theory to justify a slew of normative claims that don’t follow. The choice of language makes refutations difficult and pollutes epistemic commons. For example, they choose terms such as ‘pro-human’ and include parameters such as ‘naivety’.
  
  These are rhetorical sleights of hand. Arguing for the benefits from automation to the consumer is now anti-human! You wouldn’t want to be naive and anti-human now, would you?

  I don’t want this to be an attack on those who are against further AI development. PauseAI is a great example of what open and honest advocacy can look like. Being a vocal advocate for a cause is fine, disguising opinion as fact is not!

• MathiasKB 31 Mar 2023 15:33 UTC

  46 points

  18 ∶ 5

  on: Cri­tiques of promi­nent AI safety labs: Red­wood Research

  Good critique, my main conclusion is that redwood seems reasonable overall and not far out of line from other ai safety orgs. Benchmarked against non-ai safety orgs, I would have my usual critique that redwood (and other longtermist orgs) seems unreasonably expensive for reasons I don’t quite understand. Does salary really make that big a difference in attracting talent? If that is the case, what does that say about our community’s values?

  In any case, remember that every org has issues. When listing every issue an org has in a row it can give an impression of things being worse than they really are. Would love a similar critique be made of the organization I co-founded once we grow to a similar size. More critique is good for the community.

  We should be able to write scathing criticisms without getting mad at each other. We need to be able to read criticisms and not go completely ham and want to see the org and everyone associated guillotined.

• MathiasKB 4 Feb 2023 23:27 UTC

  45 points

  39 ∶ 9

  in reply to: temporalis’s comment on: EA, Sex­ual Harass­ment, and Abuse

  This is absolutely not how I’m going to go about dealing with it.
  
  If I were on their side and somebody at any point responded to my concerns with a trivializing reminder that rape and abuse, in fact, happens in every community, I would nope out immediately.

  I appreciate that this comment is trying to be helpful, but I feel a responsibility to point out that this is outright harmful advice.

  EDIT: Sorry, I phrased myself with unnecessary meanness. To be clear the reason this, in my opinion, is poor advice is not because the arguments themselves are wrong. The reason is that what matters in good communication is to signal an understanding of the counterpart’s concerns, and even if these arguments are right they send the wrong signal.

  What links here?

  • MathiasKB's comment on The num­ber of burner ac­counts is too damn high by quinn (7 Feb 2023 9:49 UTC; 27 points)

• MathiasKB 29 Jun 2022 8:13 UTC

  42 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Kurzge­sagt—The Last Hu­man (Longter­mist video)

  Many of the comments in this video were incredibly inspiring for me to read.
  
  Most outside engagement with EA I see tends to scew heavily negative. I tend to disprortionally focus on the negative as those impressions are especially important for me to understand, so reading comments claiming how inspired they felt by the prospects of humanity, was so refreshing! Where was the all the sneering I’m so used to!?

• MathiasKB 7 Feb 2023 8:26 UTC

  37 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: temporalis’s comment on: EA, Sex­ual Harass­ment, and Abuse

  I think you are right and I overreacted.

• MathiasKB 19 Mar 2022 9:29 UTC

  37 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: Milan Griffes on EA blindspots

  To be frank, I think most of these criticisms are nonsense and I am happy that the EA community is not spending its time engaging with whatever the ‘metaphysical implications of the psychedelic experience’ are.
  
  I get a sense of dejavu reading this criticism as I feel I’ve sixteen variants of this over the years of how EA has psychological problem this, deep nietzschean struggle that and fails to value <author’s pet interest>
  
  If the EA community has not thought sufficiently about a problem, anyone is very welcome to spend time thinking about it and do a write-up of what they learned. Doing the most good doesn’t require others approval. I would even wager that if someone wrote a convincing case for why we should be ‘taking dharma seriously’, then many would start taking it seriously.
  
  Yes, there are biases and blindspots in EA that lead us to have less accurate beliefs, but by large I think the primary reason many of these topics aren’t taken seriously is that the case for doing so usually isn’t all that great.
  
  There’s definitely more charitable readings than I give here, but after seeing variants of this criticism again and again I don’t think the charitable enterpretations are the most accurate. The EA community has a thousand flaws, but I don’t think these are it.

• MathiasKB 22 Apr 2024 10:23 UTC

  35 points

  6 ∶ 1

  on: Should we break up Google Deep­Mind?

  I suspect the primary reasons you want to break up Deepmind from Google is to:

  1. Increase their autonomy, reducing pressure from google to race

  2. Reduce Deepmind’s access to capital and compute, reducing their competitiveness

  Perhaps that goes without saying, but I think it’s worth explicitly mentioning. In a world without AI risk, I don’t believe you would be citing various consumer harms to argue for a break up.

  The traditional argument for breaking up companies and preventing mergers is to reduce the company’s market power, increasing consumer surplus. In this case, the implicit reason for breaking up Deepmind is to decrease its competitiveness thus reducing consumer surplus.

  I think it’s perfectly fine to argue for this, I just really want us to be explicit about it.

• MathiasKB 3 May 2022 19:35 UTC

  35 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Is EA “just longter­mism” now?

  Open philanthropy is not the only grantmaker in the EA Space! If you add the FTX Community, FTX Future Fund, EA Funds etc. my guess would be that it recently made a large shift towards longtermism, primarily due to the Future fund being so massive.

  I also want to emphasize that many central EA Organisations are increasingly focused on longtermist concerns, and not as transparent about it as I would like for them to be. People and organisations should not pretend to care about things they do not for the sake of optics. One of EA’s most central tenets is to hold truth at a very high regard. Being transparent about what we believe is necessary to do so.
  
  I think there are a few pitfalls EA can fall into by its increasing focus on longtermism, but by and large people are noticing these and actively discussing them. This is a good sign! I’m a bit worried if many longtermists entirely stop caring about global poverty and animal suffering. Having a deep intuition that losing your parent to malaria is a horrible thing for a child to go through and that you can prevent it, is a very healthy sanity check.

  I think the best strategy for ‘hardcore’ longtermists may very well be to do a bit of both, not because of optics but because regularly working on things with tight feedback loops reminds you just how difficult even well-defined objectives can be to achieve. That said there is enormous value in specialisation, so I’m not sure what the exact optimal trade-off is.

• MathiasKB 27 Jun 2023 10:17 UTC

  34 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Mathi­asKirkBonde’s Shortform

  Why you should buy a desk treadmill

  I’ve wanted to do a ‘things I recommend you buy’ list for a while, but I think my purchase of a desk-treadmill has been so much higher value than any other purchase I’ve made that I instead will make the case for only this item.

  I’ve never liked standing desks. When I stand my feet get restless to the point of it being so distracting that I have to sit back down if I want to focus. Half a year ago, I got to try a desk treadmill and I immediately bought one for myself.

  Since February I’ve been walking on this desk treadmill while working. I went from getting an average of <3000 steps a day, to an average of 17,000 daily steps (my day record is 46,000). It’s been the single easiest improvement to my health I’ve made, and I highly recommend you get one as well.

  I was fortunate to try it out before buying, but my biggest initial worries were:

  • Whether I would actually use it, or it would just sit and collect dust

  • Whether it would affect my productivity

  Since buying it my home office desk has been permanently raised and I haven’t used my office chair since. If I’m working or playing video games, I’m walking. When my feet need to rest, I take my laptop to the kitchen.

  I also found no negative effects on my productivity. Unlike desk exercise bikes where people tell me they forget to pedal effectively making it an uncomfortable chair, with a desk treadmill my brain just goes ‘oh I’m walking now’ and then I entirely stop thinking about it until I’m out of flow state and I notice I’ve walked 5000 steps and could use a quick break.

  I pushed my brother into buying one, and he’s been very happy with his as well.

  tips and tricks:

  • I put mine on a homemade tennis-ball platform, to avoid my downstairs neighbour hearing my footsteps.

  • You can’t hear the engine through walls or while wearing noise-canceling headphones, but I suspect it would be too loud for an open office.

  • I would get a bit dizzy after stepping off the treadmill the first week, but this quickly went away

  • If you walk all day, you will be really sore after a few days. This doesn’t happen to me anymore, but i’m also 25 so your experience may differ.

  • I switch from running shoes to sandals once a day to avoid my feet blistering.

• MathiasKB 21 Mar 2022 9:32 UTC

  32 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: A Land­scape Anal­y­sis of In­sti­tu­tional Im­prove­ment Opportunities

  Can you comment on why you chose not to release the quantitative model and calculations that you used to derive these conclusions? As detailed as this work is, I don’t feel comfortable updating my views based on calculations I can’t see for myself.
  
  As you point out in the post, I imagine there is huge variability based on various guesstimates (as there should be!). To me at least, the most valuable part of this work lies in the model and the better understanding we get from attempting to make models, rather than the conclusions of the model.

• MathiasKB 17 Sep 2023 14:01 UTC

  29 points

  11 ∶ 1

  on: Mathi­asKirkBonde’s Shortform

  Why is it that I must return from 100% of EAGs with either covid or a cold?
  
  Perhaps my immune system just sucks or it’s impossible to avoid due to asymptomatic cases, but in case it’s not: If you get a cold before an EAG(x), stay home!

  For those who do this already, thank you!

• MathiasKB 7 Feb 2023 9:49 UTC

  27 points

  9 ∶ 1

  on: The num­ber of burner ac­counts is too damn high

  I think there’s two separate dynamics at play here:

  I think we could do more to avoid punishing opinions perceived wrong. An example of punishing behavior at play is my own comment two days ago. I made it while being too upset for my own good and lashed out at someone for making a completely reasonable point.

  I don’t blame the user I replied to for wanting an anonymous account when that is the response they can expect.

  Secondly, I suspect that people are vastly overrating just how much anybody cares about who says what on the forum.

  While I understand why someone making a direct attack on some organization or person might want to stay anonymous, most things I see posted from anonymous accounts seem to just be regular opinions that are phrased with more hostility than the mean.

  It’s a bit weird to me why somebody would think that a few comments on the EA forum would do all that much to ones reputation. At ea globals, at most, I’ve had a few people say “oh you are the one who wrote that snakebite post? Cool!” and that’s about it.

  It all feels very paranoid to me. I’m way too busy worrying about whether I look fat in this t-shirt to notice or care that somebody wrote a comment that was too woke/​anti-woke.

  Maybe there’s a bunch of people smarter than me who think my opinions are mid and now think less of me, but like, they were going to realize that after speaking to me for five minutes anyways.

• MathiasKB 17 Jan 2023 18:12 UTC

  26 points

  10 ∶ 1

  on: Posts from 2022 you thought were valuable (and un­der­rated)

  get absolutely dunked on, Will!

  

  In all seriousness, thank you to the many people who contributed with posts and comments in 2022 and a thank you to the forum team for the hard work you put in. Whatever our community’s flaws (and there are many!), there are few other places online with a similar breadth of topics discussed in as much depth.

  Barring the meta-posts, time spent procrastinating on the EA forum in 2022 was for me time well spent.

• MathiasKB 23 Aug 2022 14:33 UTC

  26 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Cri­tique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy Peo­ple?”

  Words cannot express how much I appreciate your presence Nuno.

  Sorry for being off-topic but I just can’t help myself. This is comment is such a perfect example of the attitude that made me fall in with this community.

• MathiasKB 24 Nov 2023 15:24 UTC

  25 points

  11 ∶ 7

  on: The Odyssean Process

  Forgive me for having the IQ of a shrimp, but could you spell out a concrete problem that the odyssean process could be used to solve?

  ie:

  problem: “People disagree over what colors the new metro line should be”

  hypothetical process: “12 people sit in a room and hypothesize on color palettes. Those colour palettes are handed out to a panel of 100 randomly picked citizens to deliberate and then finally voted upon”

  I skimmed through the report and am pretty confused as to what concretely the process is.

• MathiasKB 7 Sep 2023 16:06 UTC

  25 points

  13 ∶ 20

  on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Under all circumstances this is just a terrible day for EA. If the accusations are even half-accurate then I am appalled. If the accusations don’t hold water, then I am also appalled.

  I don’t have an informed opinion as to whether it was correct to publish without waiting for Nonlinear to prepare a response. I’m leaning towards thinking it was the right decision given the supposed threatening behavior of nonlinear leadership.

  With that said, I would encourage most readers to wait with making up their mind until Nonlinear has had a chance to leave a response. Save your sanity, block this thread from your browser, and come back in a few weeks once the dust has settled.

  Witch hunts do happen among well-intentioned people. I have many more thoughts I want to share, but this is not the right time or place.