MichaelDickens

Karma: 5,847

I do independent research on EA topics. I write about whatever seems important, tractable, and interesting (to me).

I have a website: https://mdickens.me/ Much of the content on my website gets cross-posted to the EA Forum, but I also write about some non-EA stuff like [investing](https://mdickens.me/category/finance/) and [fitness](https://mdickens.me/category/fitness/).

My favorite things that I’ve written: https://mdickens.me/favorite-posts/

I used to work as a software developer at Affirm.

MichaelDickens May 14, 2025, 8:06 PM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
What can ordinary people do to reduce AI risk? People who don’t have expertise in AI research / decision theory / policy / etc.

Some ideas:
- Donate to orgs that are working to AI risk (which ones, though?)
- Write letters to policy-makers expressing your concerns
- Be public about your concerns. Normalize caring about x-risk

MichaelDickens May 13, 2025, 3:55 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph’s comment on: Managing Your Money 101
1. This portfolio has nothing to do with chasing past performance. According to standard finance theory (including making a bunch of assumptions about rational investors, zero transaction costs etc.), the global market portfolio is the theoretically optimal portfolio to hold. The idea is that if markets are efficient then you can’t predict which asset classes will outperform, so you should just hold some of everything.
2. This portfolio doesn’t require any rebalancing. It’s the global market portfolio (or it was as of 2015). If you have 18% in US stocks because they represent 18% of the global market portfolio, and then US stocks go up to 20%, your holdings also go up to 20% so you don’t have to do anything. Although it might still take some work to manage if you’re adding more money to the portfolio on a monthly basis (or whatever) because you need to deploy your new investment in the correct proportions.
3. Realistically you can get pretty close to the global market portfolio by buying global stocks + global bonds and not worry about the smaller positions. You can do a 2-fund portfolio with 50% VT, 50% BNDW.
4. 1973 to 2013 isn’t arbitrary. 1973 was the chosen start year because that’s the earliest date at which we have good data on global equity returns.

MichaelDickens May 11, 2025, 3:29 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔶️’s comment on: Clara Torres Latorre ️’s Quick takes
Ah I see what you’re saying. I can’t recall seeing much discussion on this. My guess is that it would be hard to develop a non-superintelligent AI that poses an extinction risk but I haven’t really thought about it. It does sound like something that deserves some thought.

When people raise particular concerns about powerful AI, such as risks from synthetic biology, they often talk about them as risks from general AI, but they could come from narrow AI, too. For example some people have talked about the risk that narrow AI could be used by humans to develop dangerous engineered viruses.

MichaelDickens May 10, 2025, 7:14 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔶️’s comment on: Clara Torres Latorre ️’s Quick takes
My take is that I think there are strong arguments for why AI x-risk is overwhelmingly more important than narrow AI, and I think those arguments are the main reason why x-risk gets more attention among EAs.

MichaelDickens May 10, 2025, 1:43 AM
6 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Chicken welfare reforms may be harmful accounting for effects on wild arthropods?
I agree with David’s comment. These sorts of ethical dilemmas are puzzles for everyone, not just for utilitarianism.

And in the case of insect welfare, rights-based theories produce more puzzling puzzles because it’s unclear how to reckon with tradeoffs.

MichaelDickens May 9, 2025, 7:45 PM
13 points
3 ∶ 3
in reply to: LeahC’s comment on: Please Donate to CAIP (Post 1 of 3 on AI Governance)
There is a related concern where most of the big funders either have investments in AI companies, or have close ties to people with investments in AI companies. This biases them toward funding activities that won’t slow down AI development. So the more effective an org is at putting the brakes on AGI, the harder a time it will have getting funded.*

Props to Jaan Tallinn, who is an early investor in Anthropic yet has funded orgs that want to slow down AI (including CAIP).

*I’m not confident that this is a factor in why CAIP has struggled to get funding, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

MichaelDickens May 9, 2025, 1:39 PM
14 points
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: emre kaplan’s Quick takes

In general, writing criticism feels more virtuous than writing praise.

FWIW it feels the opposite to me. Writing praise feels good; writing criticism feels bad.

(I guess you could say that it’s virtuous to push through those bad feelings and write the criticism anyway? I don’t get any positive feelings or self-image from following that supposed virtue, though.)

MichaelDickens May 7, 2025, 3:01 PM
8 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Why “Solving Alignment” Is Likely a Category Mistake
I think this is an important point that’s worth saying.

For what it’s worth, I am not super pessimistic that “solving alignment” is something that can be solved in principle. But I’m quite concerned that the safety-minded AI companies seem to completely ignore the philosophical problems with AI alignment. They all operate under the assumption that alignment is purely an ML problem and they can solve it by basically doing ML research. Which I expect is false (credence: 70%).

Wei Dai has written some good stuff about the problem of “philosophical competence”. See here for a collection of his writings on the topic.
What links here?
- Will Aldred's comment on The Soul of EA is in Trouble by Mjreard (May 9, 2025, 10:03 AM; 13 points)

MichaelDickens May 2, 2025, 4:33 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Poll: the next existential catastrophe is likelier than not to wipe off all animal sentience from the planet
This is a good point that I hadn’t thought of when I wrote my poll answer—a “gradual disempowerment” risk scenario would probably not kill all sentient animals, and it represents a non-trivial percentage of AI risk.

MichaelDickens May 2, 2025, 4:32 AM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Poll: the next existential catastrophe is likelier than not to wipe off all animal sentience from the planet

The next existential catastrophe is likelier than not to wipe off all animal sentience from the planet

If an existential catastrophe occurs, it will probably (~90%) be AI, and an AI that kills all humans would probably also (~80%) kill all sentient animals.

The argument against killing all animals is that they are less likely than humans to interfere with the AI’s goals. The argument in favor is that they are made of atoms.

Edit: Updated downward a bit based on Denkenberger’s comment.

MichaelDickens May 1, 2025, 5:06 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Community Polls for the Community
Some invitees to the Meta Coordination Forum (maybe like 3 out of the ~30) should be ‘independent’ EAs
Independent as in not affiliated with any org? If that’s what it means then I probably agree

MichaelDickens May 1, 2025, 5:05 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Community Polls for the Community
There exists a cause which ought to receive >20% of the EA community’s resources but currently receives little attention
My top picks for small causes that should maybe receive >20% of resources:
- wild animal welfare
- post-AGI non-human welfare

MichaelDickens May 1, 2025, 5:03 PM
5 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Community Polls for the Community
The case for doing EA community building hinges on having significant probability on ‘long’ (>2040) AI timelines
>2040, no. >2030, yes.

MichaelDickens May 1, 2025, 5:01 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Community Polls for the Community
We should try to make some EA sentiments and principles (e.g., scope sensitivity, thinking hard about ethics) a core part of the AI safety field
On a literal interpretation of this statement, I disagree, because I don’t think trying to inject those principles will be cost-effective. But I do think people should adopt those principles in AI safety (and also in every other cause area).

MichaelDickens May 1, 2025, 4:10 AM
5 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Debate Poll: Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected
Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected
I’m not opposed to the idea in principle, but I can’t think of any specific position that should be elected, and I don’t know how you would determine who gets to vote.

MichaelDickens Apr 30, 2025, 10:02 PM
12 points
12 ∶ 0
on: EA Funds and CEA are merging
I like that you wrote a “Tradeoffs” section!

MichaelDickens Apr 30, 2025, 8:50 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: tylermjohn’s comment on: tylermjohn’s Quick takes
Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding you but this idea seems to follow from a chain of logic that goes like this:
1. We need more widely-read, high-quality writing on AI risk.
2. Therefore, we need a large quantity of writing on AI risk.
3. We can use LLMs to help produce this large quantity.
I disagree with #2. It’s sufficient to make a smaller amount of really good content and distribute it widely. I think right now the bottleneck isn’t a lack of content for public consumption, it’s a lack of high-quality content.

And I appreciate some of the efforts to fix this, for example Existential Risk Observatory has written some articles in national magazines, MIRI is developing some new public materials, and there’s a documentary in the works. I think those are the sorts of things we need. I don’t think AI is good enough to produce content at the level of quality that I expect/hope those groups will achieve.

(Take this comment as a weak endorsement of those three things but not a strong endorsement. I think they’re doing the right kinds of things; I’m not strongly confident that the results will be high quality, but I hope they will be.)

Although, I do agree with you that LLMs can speed up writing, and you can make the writing high-quality as long as there’s enough human oversight. (TBH I am not sure how to do this myself, I’ve tried but I always end up writing ~everything by hand. But many people have had success with LLM-assisted writing.)

MichaelDickens Apr 30, 2025, 8:33 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: TFD’s comment on: Criticism on the EA Forum
FWIW I do not expect people to run cost-effectiveness analyses by orgs before publishing them.

MichaelDickens Apr 29, 2025, 6:21 PM
31 points
5 ∶ 3
on: Criticism on the EA Forum
I am somewhat against a norm of reaching out to people before criticizing their work. Dynomight’s Arguing Without Warning has IMO the strongest arguments on this topic.

First: Criticism is difficult; requiring more effort on the part of critics makes criticism less likely to happen. OP did acknowledge this with

The best reason not to involve the criticised person or org is if doing so would in practice stop you from posting your criticism.

But realistically, there is a social penalty to saying “I would not have posted this criticism if I’d been required to reach out to orgs first.” It makes you look lazy. A norm of “reach out to people, unless it would stop you from posting your criticism” is not a viable norm because critics who would’ve been stopped from posting criticism are unable to defend themselves. In some cases, I expects this norm to stop criticisms from getting written. So I think a better norm is “you don’t have to reach out to people”.

Second: A big reason to reach out to people is to resolve misunderstandings. But it’s even better to resolve misunderstandings in public, after publishing the criticism. Readers may have the same misunderstandings, and writing a public back-and-forth is better for readers.

(Dynomight’s post also gives a couple other arguments that I don’t think are quite as important.)

My preferred norms are:
1. Critics don’t have to do anything.
2. If they want to be nice, critics can reach out to the subject of criticism to inform them of the criticism after it has already been published.
That’s what I did for my recent critical review of one of Social Change Lab’s reports.

There are some circumstances where it makes sense to reach out to people before publishing, but I don’t think that should be the norm, and I don’t think we should have any expectation that critics do it.

MichaelDickens Apr 28, 2025, 10:56 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Parker_Whitfill’s comment on: Parker_Whitfill’s Quick takes
The lead could also break down if someone steals the model weights, which seems likely.