From my experience with running EA at Georgia Tech, I think the main factors are:
not prioritizing high-impact causes
not being interested in changing their career plans
lack of high-impact career opportunities that fit their career interests, or not knowing about them
not having the skills to get high-impact internships or jobs
I think I was primarily concerned that negative information about the campaign could get picked up by the media. Thinking it over now though, that motivation doesn’t make sense for not posting about highly visible negative news coverage (which the media would have already been aware of) or not posting concerns on a less publicly visible EA platform, such as Slack. Other factors for why I didn’t write up my concerns about Carrick’s chances of being elected might have been that:
no other EAs seemed to be posting much negative information about the campaign, and I thought there might have been a good reason for that
aside from the posting of “Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now”, there weren’t any events that triggered me to consider writing up my concerns
the negative media coverage was obvious enough that I thought anyone considering volunteering would already know about it, and it had to already have been priced into the election odds estimates on Metaculus and PredictIt, so drawing attention to it might not have been valuable
time-sensitivity, as you mentioned
public critiques might have to be quite well-reasoned, and I might want to check-in with the campaign to make sure that I didn’t misunderstand anything, etc. That could be a decent amount of effort on my part and their part and also somewhat awkward given that I was also volunteering for the campaign.
However, if someone privately asked me for my thoughts on how likely the campaign was to succeed or how valuable helping with it was, I would have been happy to share my honest opinion, including any concerns.
Thanks for the suggestion, just copied the critiques of the “especially useful” post over!
Before the election was decided, I agreed with the overall point that donating, phone banking, or door-knocking for the campaign seemed quite valuable. At the same time, I want to mention a couple critiques I have (copied from my comment on “Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid”)
The post claims “The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.” However, it declines to mention that the same poll found that “26 percent of the district’s voters [hold] an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas” (The Hill).
At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim “the campaign is especially impactful right now” seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren’t able to show Carrick speaking, and I’ve read a few internet comments complaining about how they’ve never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn’t have much support from Oregonians.
If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it’s in out-of-state EAs’ comparative advantage to do so.
Overall, I agree with Habryka’s comment that “negative evidence on the campaign would be ‘systematically filtered out’”. Although I maxed out donations to the primary campaign and phone banked a bit for the campaign, I had a number of concerns about the campaign that I never saw mentioned in EA spaces. However, I didn’t want to raise these concerns for fear that this would negatively affect Carrick’s chances of winning the election.
Now that Carrick’s campaign is over, I feel more free to write my concerns. These included:
The vast majority of media coverage was negative from the start. If voters made even a cursory Google of Carrick Flynn’s name, they would be met with plenty of negative headlines like “Carrick Flynn, Crypto-Backed Candidate in New Congressional District, Has Rarely Voted in Oregon” or “Environmental Groups Condemn Congressional Candidate Carrick Flynn’s Comments on Spotted Owls and Timber Unity”.
The vast majority of comments on Oregon subreddits were also negative.
The campaign seemed to have quite few non-EA donors or volunteers, suggesting a lack of local support.
The campaign seemed to have few volunteers until about a week ago, after Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now was posted.
Even putting aside the issue of crypto funding, Carrick had a notable amount of other controversies such as his comments on spotted owl conservation, the fact that only 2.5% of donations were from Oregon, and that he only voted twice in the past 20 years.
I also have some critiques of the post Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now but I declined to write a comment. These include:
The post claims “The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.” However, it declines to mention that “26 percent of the district’s voters holding an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas” (The Hill).
At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim “the campaign is especially impactful right now” seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren’t able to show Carrick speaking, and I’ve read a few internet comments complaining about how they’ve never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn’t have much support from Oregonians.
If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it’s in out-of-state EAs’ comparative advantage to do so.
Another introductory post about why one may want to care about insect welfare: Does Insect Suffering Bug You? - Faunalytics (Jesse Gildesgame, 2016).
Recently, activists have started campaigning against silk because they believe the production process is cruel to silkworms. Many people respond to these campaigns with skepticism: who cares about silkworms? It’s easy to feel for the chinchillas, foxes, and other furry mammals used in fur clothing. But insects like silkworms are a harder sell. It seems crazy to grant moral consideration to a bug.
Nonetheless, the idea that we should care about insect welfare has been gaining credibility among activists, scientists, and philosophers in recent years.
[…]
The question of whether insects can feel pain or have other negative subjective experiences is hotly contested among scientists.12 Amid the uncertainty and debate, one thing is clear: at least for now, we can’t be sure. Whether or not insects have the capacity to suffer is still very much an open question.
If insects can suffer, they probably suffer a lot. Starvation, desiccation, injury, internal organ failure, predation, infection, chemical imbalances, and other stressors are common features in a bug’s life.13 It’s possible that insect lives are full of suffering.
Should we be worried?
Since the science isn’t clear, we should assign a nontrivial likelihood to the hypothesis that insects suffer. However, even if you think the likelihood that insects suffer is extremely low, it’s worth keeping in mind just how many insects there are. Their sheer numbers suggest that if they do suffer, the scale of the issue would be enormous. […]
What should be done, if anything?
[…]
Even if we should prioritize vertebrate welfare, there are things we can do to mitigate the risk of insect suffering that don’t impede efforts to promote vertebrate welfare.19 We can replace silk with polyester or rayon. We can develop and improve standards for the humane use of insects in research. We can help farmers choose pesticides that limit possible insect suffering. We can also take care to avoid hurting insects in our daily lives in a number of ways.
It might turn out that insects don’t suffer, but until we know, it’s a risk worth taking seriously.
The Qualia Research Institute might be funding-constrained but it’s questionable whether it’s doing good work; for example, see this comment here about its Symmetry Theory of Valence.
Also relevant: the EA Software Engineering Discord
I see, I thought you were referring to reading a script about EA during a one-on-one conversation. I don’t see anything wrong with presenting a standardized talk, especially if you make it clear that EA is a global movement and not just a thing at your university. I would not be surprised if a local chapter of, say, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, used an introductory talk created by the national organization rather than the local chapter.
introducing people to EA by reading prepared scripts
Huh, I’m not familiar with this, can you post a link to an example script or message me it?
I agree that reading a script verbatim is not great, and privately discussed info in a CRM seems like an invasion of privacy.
AXRP
Nonlinear Library: Alignment Forum
Towards Data Science (the podcast has had an AI safety skew since 2020)
Alignment Newsletter Podcast
Would you be interested in supporting EA groups abroad to recruit local talent to work on impactful causes? I’m not sure what country you’re from or what languages you’re fluent in. But even if you only know English, it seems like you could potentially help with EA Philippines, EA India, EA University of Cape Town, EA Nigeria, or EA groups in the UK, US, and Australia. You can browse groups and get in contact with them through the EA Forum.
To get a sense of why this could be valuable, see “Building effective altruism − 80,000 Hours” and “A huge opportunity for impact: movement building at top universities” (especially relevant to groups like EA Philippines which are focused on supporting university groups).
Besides distillation, another option to look into could be the Communications Specialist or Senior Communications Specialist contractor roles at the Fund for Alignment Research.
Could 80,000 Hours make it clear on their job which roles they think are valuable only for career capital and aren’t directly impactful? It could just involve adding a quick boilerplate statement like in the job details, such as:
Relevant problem area: AI safety & policy
Wondering why we’ve listed this role?
We think this role could be a great way to develop relevant career capital, although other opportunities would be better for directly making an impact.
Perhaps this suggestion is unworkable for various reasons. But I think it’s easy for people to think, since this job is listed on the 80,000 Hours jobs board and seems to have some connection to social impact, then it’s a great way to make an impact. It’s already tempting enough for people to work on AGI capabilities as long as it’s “”safe”″. And when the job description says “OpenAI […] is often perceived as one of the leading organisations working on the development of beneficial AGI,” the takeaway for readers is likely that any role there is a great way to positively shape the development of AI.
What are your thoughts on Habryka’s comment here?
Please don’t work in AI capabilities research, and in particular don’t work in labs directly trying to build AGI (e.g. OpenAI or Deepmind). There are few jobs that cause as much harm, and historically the EA community has already caused great harm here. (There are some arguments that people can make the processes at those organizations safer, but I’ve only heard negative things about people working in jobs that are non-safety related who tried to do this, and I don’t currently think you will have much success changing organizations like that from a ground-level engineering role)
China-related AI safety and governance paths—Career review (80000hours.org) recommends working in regular AI labs and trying to build up the field of AI safety there. But how would one actually try to pivot a given company in a more safety-oriented direction?
My bad, I meant to write “Part-time volunteering might not provide as much of an opportunity to build unique skills, compared to working full-time on direct work”. Fixed.
Is it possible to have a 10% version of pursuing a high-impact career? Instead of donating 10% of your income, you would donate a couple hours a week to high-impact volunteering. I’ve listed a couple opportunities here. In my opinion, many of these would count as a high-impact career if you did full-time.
Or in-person/remote volunteering for a university EA group, to help with managing Airtable, handling operations, designing events, facilitating discussions, etc. Although I don’t know that any local EA groups currently accept remote volunteers, from my experience with running EA at Georgia Tech, I know we’d really benefit from one!
If you’re quite knowledgeable about EA/longtermism and like talking to people about EA, being something like an EA Guides Program mentor could be a great option. One-on-one chats can be quite helpful for enabling people to develop better plans for making an impact throughout their life. I don’t know the Global Challenges Project is looking for more mentors for its EA Guides Program at this time, but it would be valuable if it had a greater capacity.
Facilitating for EA programs that are constrained by the number of (good) facilitators. In Q1 2022, this included the AGI Safety Fundamentals technical alignment and governance tracks. (Edit) EA Virtual Programs is also constrained by the number of facilitators.
Signing up as a personal assistant for Pineapple Operations (assuming this is constrained by the number of PAs, though I have no idea whether it is)
Phone banking for Carrick Flynn’s campaign (though this opportunity is only available through May 17)
Gaining experience that would be helpful for pursuing a high-impact career (e.g., by taking a MOOC on deep learning to test your fit for machine learning work for AI safety)
Volunteering for Apart Research’s AI safety or meta AI safety projects
Volunteering for projects from Impact CoLabs, perhaps
Running a workplace EA group, especially if you’re able to foster discussion about working on pressing problems
Part-time volunteering might nprovide as much of an opportunity to build unique skills, compared to working full-time on direct work, but I think it could still be pretty valuable depending on what you do.
In a way, sacrificing your time might be more demanding than sacrificing your excess income. But volunteering can help you feel more connected to the community and feel more fulfilling than just donating money as an individual. It might not even be a sacrifice as for some opportunities, you could get paid, either directly (as in the case of Pineapple Operations) or through applying to the EA Infrastructure Fund or Long-Term Future Fund.
most AI experts think advanced AI is much likelier to wipe out human life than climate change
I’m not sure this is true, unless you use a very restrictive definition of “AI expert”. I would be surprised if most AI researchers saw AI as a greater threat than climate change.
Meta: This post was also cross-posted to LessWrong.
Companies and governments will find it strategically valuable to develop advanced AIs which are able to execute creative plans in pursuit of a goal achieving real-world outcomes. Current large language models have a rich understanding of the world which generalizes to other domains, and reinforcement learning agents already achieve superhuman performance at various games. With further advancements in AI research and compute, we are likely to see the development of human-level AI this century. But for a wide variety of goals, it is often valuable to pursue instrumental goals such as acquiring resources, self-preservation, seeking power, and eliminating opposition. By default, we should expect that highly capable agents will have these unsafe instrumental objectives.
The vast majority of actors would not want to develop unsafe systems. However, there are reasons to think that alignment will be hard with modern deep learning systems, and difficulties with making large language models safe provide empirical support of this claim. Misaligned AI may seem acceptably safe and only have catastrophic consequences with further advancements in AI capabilities, and it may be unclear in advance whether a model is dangerous. In the heat of an AI race between companies or governments, proper care may not be taken to make sure that the systems being developed behave as intended.
(This is technically two paragraphs haha. You could merge them into one paragraph, but note that the second paragraph is mostly by Joshua Clymer.)
Is the application form “EAGxBerkeley, India & Future Forum Organizing Team Expression of Interest” supposed to have questions asking about whether you’re interested in organizing the Future Forum? I don’t see any; I only see questions about EAGxBerkeley and EAGxIndia.