Hi, I’m Max :)
background in cognitive science & biology
most worried about AI going badly for technical & coordination reasons
vegan for the animals
forecasts at Metaculus: https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/110500/
currently exploring AI governance roles, currently currently research contractor at Rethink Priorities’ AI Governance and Strategy team
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, especially your points on PR updated me a bit towards taking PR more seriously.
One piece of pushback on your overall message is that I think there are different kinds of communications than cold or hot takes (which I understand as more or less refined assessments of the situation and its implications). One can:
share what one is currently doing about the situation,
share details that help others figure out what can be learned from this,
(this sometimes might require some bravery and potentially making oneself susceptible to legal risks, but I’d guess that for many who can share useful info it wouldn’t?)
share your feelings about the crisis.
I’m overall feeling like contributing to the broader truth-seeking process is a generally cooperative and laudable move, and that it’s often relatively easy to share relatively robust assessments that one is unlikely to have to backtrack, such as those I’ve seen from MacAskill, Wiblin, Sam Harris.
For example I really appreciated Oliver Habryka reflecting publicly about his potential role in this situation by not sufficiently communicating his impression of SBF. I expect Habryka giving this “take” and the associated background info will not prove wrong-headed in 3 months, and it didn’t seem driven by hot emotions or an overreaction to me.
Do you have something specific in mind where you were too hasty, or do you in hindsight generally think you should’ve contributed less to trying to figure things out while things were happening? Because my first gut reaction is that the time you and other invested here was likely worth it. Two things that come to mind:
Some things cannot wait 2 weeks, things are sometimes developing very quickly and one can prevent damages by understanding things better quicklier, even if many things will turn out to be dead-ends and wrong calls.
Especially when it seems likely to be such a defining moment in the history of EA.
Related to 1, EA is under a lot of scrutiny right now and cooperating with broader truth-finding processes and clearly saying that we do not condone immoral behavior for the sake of the greater good seems to me very important. And doing this better rather than worse seems important.
I saw that people are (I think correctly) worry about legal risk, and that contributes to people close to SBF not wanting to speak up much yet. But I’d guess people who don’t face considerable risks are currently being very helpful by trying to contribute to truth-seeking and emphasizing the values of the EA community to outsiders.
Thanks a lot for joining the discussion and sharing these observations, that’s super valuable info and imo extremely damning if true. Do you happen to have some sources I could check which corroborate what you’ve written here?
Yeah, I think it’s a good point that stretching the replication process over time seems kind of arbitrary and might making the existence of the replica and yourself contemporaneous reduces the intuition that it is “you” who gets to live the life you wished for.
At the same time my personal intuitions (which are often different from other reasonable people :D) are actually not reduced much by the thought of a replicated copy of myself living at the same time. E.g. if I now think about a 1:1 copy of mine living a fullfilled life with his wife and children in a “parallel universe”, I feel more deeply happy about this than thinking about the same scenario for friends or strangers.
Similarly, I think it would help to right past wrongs if, in the future, the past person’s desired state of the world comes to pass. But I still don’t see how it is any better for that person, or somehow corrected further, if some replica of their self experiences it.
I think where my intuitions diverge is that I expect many people to have a lot of self-directed preferences that I regard as ethically on the same footing as non-self directed preferences: It seems you’re mostly considering states of the world like ensuring the survival and flourishing of their loved ones, or justice happening for crimes against humanity, or an evil government being overthrown and replaced by a democracy. But I’d guess this class of preferences should not be so distinct from people wanting the state of the world in future including themselves being happy, with a loving partner and family, friends and a community that holds him or her in high regard. And that’s why I feel like a past person would feel at least a little redeemed if they knew that in some future time they would see themselves living the fulfilled live that the past selves wished they could’ve enjoyed.
Thanks for the thoughts and pointers. I hadn’t considered this anthropics connection, interesting thought.
Thanks for the pushback, it clarified my thinking further.
if I cloned you absolutely perfectly now, and then said, I’m going to torture you for the rest of your life, but don’t worry, your clone will be experiencing eqaul and opposite pleasures, would you think this is good (or evens out)
I think this thought experiment introduces more complexities that the scenario in the post avoids, e.g. having to weigh suffering vs. happiness. In the original scenario the torture/suboptimal life already would have happened to me, and now the question is whether it’s better from a moral sense to have a future filled with tons of happy fulfilled lives vs. one where one of those lives is lived by somebody that is basically me. And my intuition is, that I’d feel much better knowing that what “I” am, my hopes, dreams, basic drives, etc. will be fulfilled at some point in the future despite having been first instantiated in a world where those hopes etc. where tragically crushed.
So my intuition here probably comes more from a preference utilitarian perspective, where I want the preferences of specific minds to be fulfilled, and this would be somewhat possible by having a future close version of yourself with almost identical preferences/hopes/desires/affections etc.
Nice, that’s good to hear. :)
Hey Eli, just stumbled upon the post. Sorry that you had to go through bad times. Hope you got the chance to take at least a week off and that things are looking only up since then and from here on. <3 Was really nice to see you again in DC, btw.
Yeah, that’s a fair worry and would be worth looking out for, though I spontaneously don’t feel like it’s among the most significant sources of the skew.
Some evidence that influential EAs have broader and less obviously biased views on what skills are most urgently needed is the career aptitudes advice from Holden Karnovsky, where he encourages EAs to significantly skill up in e.g. communication, politics, founding and running orgs, and community building.
While I didn’t downvote, I think your interpretation of the reasoning of the downvotes comes across as uncharitable, like they’d be thinking “Hey, my parents are wealthy and Caucasian, and I think it’s great that a majority of attendees here have the same background as me”. Or later you write as if the downvotes were meant to help with denying the fact of overrepresentation. In reality, I think all EAs I know would all else equal prefer if the broader movement had more diverse backgrounds. And there are people who work on reaching out to people who don’t hear about EA through the existing outreach channels, or to people who would become involved with more refined communication and support, e.g. Magnify Mentoring, or translators.
And Jordan’s initial comment doesn’t contribute so much, imo:
admissions to EA Global are not intended to be based on cred or committment, but on how much people would get out of the conference in terms of doing the most good, or how much they’d be able to help others with that (though I think this was never communicated particularly well) (some discussion about this here)
the gender ratio of EA is iirc around 70⁄30. Quick googling tells me that this is the same ratio as in Philosophy graduates and STEM workers, backgrounds that are fairly naturally overrepresented in EA due to the nature of the EA project and the careers the movement is focussing on most strongly. So I wouldn’t agree that it’s ridiculous.
Appreciate you explaining the downvote. While a more legible argument than “I don’t trust X because of what I perceive to be a long pattern of bad behavior I’m not going to specify much” would be much more useful, I still find this more useful than not commenting at all, so others have at least a pointer to investigate further themselves.
I suppose the downside of purely ad hominem arguments is that it often just smears the target for too often unjustified reasons. But for me a charitable interpretation is that the author of the ad hominem wants to be helpful/informative and just doesn’t have the time (or maybe legible or non-confidential information) to do more than say they don’t trust the person.
I had the same thought only with Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures, which is an organisation that is even fairly closely associated with EA (e.g. I personally know two EAs who are among their fellows).
Thanks for explaining, really interesting and glad so much careful thinking is going into communication issues!
FWIW I find the “meme” framing you use here offputting. The framing feels kinda uncooperative, as if we’re trying to trick people into believing in something, instead of making arguments to convince people who want to understand the merits of an idea. I associate memes with ideas that are selected for being easy and fun to spread, that likely affirm our biases, and that mostly without the constraint whether the ideas are convincing upon reflection, true or helpful for the brain that gets “infected” by the meme.
Some support for this interpretation from the Wikipedia introduction:
Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.[8] Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme’s reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[9]
I listened to your article the other night and enjoyed it, thanks for submitting. :) I also listened to this article by Holden Karnofsky and (without listening to both super carefully) I had the impression you both covered fairly similar ground and you might be interested in the more active discussion over there. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T975ydo3mx8onH3iS/ea-is-about-maximization-and-maximization-is-perilous
Damn, that really sucks. :| Thanks for sharing.
Adding my three related cents:
I personally would very likely have felt really sad about being rejected from EAG as well, and knowing this played a role in me not being particularly excited about applying in the past.
A good friend of mine who’s like a role model highly-engaged EA was told a year or so ago by a very senior EA (they knew each other well-ish) that he shouldn’t take for granted being admitted to EAG, which IIRC felt pretty bad for him, as if he’s still not doing “enough”.
Another good friend of mine from my local chapter got rejected from one of the main local community events in Germany due to capacity limitations a few years ago, and that felt very bad to me and IIRC he said he was at least a little sad.
(IIRC the admission process afterwards switched to being fairly inclusive and adding a lottery in case of capacity limitations.)
Cool, thanks for the extremely quick responses! :)
Thanks a lot for taking the time to elaborate!
Two points of feedback on how EA Global is currently presented a little bit more like an event for the EA community:
“The conference is called “EA Global” and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere
This is the headline description from https://www.eaglobal.org :
EA Global is the conference series for the effective altruism community.
Our events are designed for community members who already have a solid understanding of effective altruism but would like to make new connections, discuss ideas, develop their skills, or move into new roles.
I think from this description I personally interpret more Scott’s caricature than EAG being intended as a high bar networking event:
“for the effective altruism community” → makes it sound like it’s a community event, which I’d expect to be inclusive
“community members who already have a solid understanding” → does not sound particularly exclusive to me
“make connections, discuss ideas, develop skills” → sounds somewhat vague and general for me, and “make connections” sounds to me like “connect to your fellow EAs”
Secondly, the first picture series on the website also makes it look to me more like a community event and less like a professional networking event. Half of them are photos of large groups and speakers. Only one of the pictures seems to be a 1-to-1 conversation.
I’d have guessed it’s not outrage or indignation but instead feeling 1) sorry for how frustrating it must be to deal with Torres and dishonest criticism in general, and 2) gratitude for pushing back against it.