MichaelDickens

Karma: 6,069

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 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
5 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 ∶ 2
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
14 points
13 ∶ 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
4 points
2 ∶ 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.

MichaelDickens Apr 28, 2025, 8:58 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio
To be honest I did not read the post, I just looked at the poll questions. I was thinking of AGI in the way I would define it*, or as the other big Metaculus AGI question defines it. For the “weakly general AI” question, yeah I think 50% chance is fair, maybe even higher than 50%.

*I don’t have a precise definition but I think of it as an AI that can do pretty much any intellectual task that an average human can do

MichaelDickens Apr 28, 2025, 2:29 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Poll: Should people with more forum karma have more powerful votes?
That makes sense to me—I would be more okay with vote power scaling if it was capped. Maybe it scales linearly up to 1000 karma and then stops scaling.

MichaelDickens Apr 28, 2025, 2:25 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Poll: Should people with more forum karma have more powerful votes?
Vote power should scale with karma
I dislike strong votes and I personally never use them. I agree with OP’s criticisms.
(The exception is that my own posts are strong-upvoted by default, and I don’t undo this because that would be unfairly penalizing my own posts relative to other people’s.)
There is an argument that perhaps power users are “better” at voting. But from the voting patterns I’ve observed, my impression is that power users are still too liable to upvote shallow posts, drama-y posts, etc. I have some uncertainty about this because it could be that the median user’s voting patterns are even worse.

MichaelDickens Apr 28, 2025, 2:20 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio
Bioweapons are an existential risk
Not sure how to interpret this question but the interpretation that comes to mind is “there is some risk that bioweapons cause extinction”, on other words “there is a non-infinitesimal probability that bioweapons cause extinction”, in which case yes that is certainly true.
Or, a slightly stronger interpretation could be “the risk from bioweapons is at least as large as the risk from asteroids”, which I am also pretty confident is true.

MichaelDickens Apr 28, 2025, 2:18 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio
AGI by 2028 is more likely than not
This question is already probabilistic, so arguably I should put my vote all the way on the “disagree” side, because I don’t think it’s more likely than not.
But I also don’t think it’s that far from a 50% chance either—maybe 40% although I don’t have a strong belief. So my answer is that I weakly disagree.

MichaelDickens Apr 25, 2025, 4:33 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Why you can justify almost anything using historical social movements
Piggybacking off of this to say that I recently looked at a lot of scientific literature on protests (for this post, although that post doesn’t address the relevant evidence), and my current position is
1. there is only limited evidence on whether the “throwing soup at paintings” genre of protests is effective
2. if anything, the evidence suggests that it has a positive effect
I wouldn’t confidently say that it has a positive effect, but I certainly wouldn’t confidently say that’s counterproductive, either, because the (very weak) evidence goes the other direction.

MichaelDickens Apr 25, 2025, 12:41 AM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: tlevin’s comment on: Insects Are Not Moderately Important
If you use a standard expected-value-like method for determining preferences, you still get that insect suffering is very important. Say (for simplicity) you have a 50% credence that aggregate insect suffering is 10,000x more important than aggregate human suffering, and a 50% credence that it’s 0x as important. In expectation, it is 5,000x more important.

If you reject expected value reasoning, then it’s not clear how you can form consistent preferences. Perhaps under a “moral parliament” view, you could allocate 50% of your charitable resources to insects and 50% to humans. IIRC there are some issues with moral parliaments (I think Toby Ord had a paper on it) but there might be some way to make it work.

MichaelDickens Apr 23, 2025, 2:11 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: How We Learned to Write Better Research Papers
You should disclose that you are affiliated with Scifocus and stand to profit from people using it.

MichaelDickens Apr 23, 2025, 2:05 PM
7 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: CB🔸’s comment on: Mechanisms Behind Breast Cancer Cell Dormancy and Their Subsequent Wakefulness and Metastasis
I believe it was AI-generated. This author runs a service that appears to be a custom LLM for writing medical articles and they’ve posted a dozen AI-generated articles to the EA Forum, none of which were relevant or good. Profile picture appears to be AI-generated as well. Should probably be banned IMO, I just reported the profile.