I’m a quantitative biologist with a background in evolutionary theory, microbiome data science, and metagenomics methods development. I co-lead the [Nucleic Acid Observatory project](https://naobservatory.org), which seeks to develop a metagenomics-based early warning system for future pandemics.
mike_mclaren
Karma: 419
I’d be really interested in reading an updated post that makes the case for there being an especially high (e.g. >10%) probability that AI alignment problems will lead to existentially bad outcomes.
My understanding is that Toby Ord does just this in his new book The Precipice (his new AI x-risk estimate is also discussed in his recent 80K podcast interview about the book), though it would still be good to have others weigh in.
This version that has been making the rounds on twitter makes the point even plainer:
sourceThe syntax for embedding images is
. For this and other forum formatting issues, try googling along the lines of “markdown insert image” or “markdown cheatsheet” (still what I do despite using markdown regularly)
We recorded some of the talks and intend to edit + upload them, we’re writing a “how to organize a conference” postmortem / report, and one attendee is planning to write a magazine article
That all sounds useful and interesting to me!
Would another post like this be helpful?
I think multiple posts following events on the personal experiences from multiple people (organizers and attendees) can be useful simply for the diversity of their perspectives. Regarding Catalyst in particular I’m curious about the variety of backgrounds of the attendees and how their backgrounds shaped their goals and experiences during the meeting.
Thanks for your report! I was interested but couldn’t manage the cross country trip and definitely curious to hear what it was like.
Can you clarify the point you’re trying to make with the reference to spurious correlations, Will? I don’t think the author is trying to make any deep claim about causation here, but just pointing out that a growing amount of taxpayer money is wasted due to retractions. (I appreciate the point from other commenters that this is still presumably a small fraction of the total funding though and so might not be as big a concern as the author suggests.)
Just a note that the reproduction number can decrease for other reasons; in particular if and as the disease spreads you might expect greater public awareness, CDC guidance, travel bans, etc leading to greater precaution and less opportunity for infected individuals to infect others.
Small suggestion to include the full citation at the top of the post along with the link; The article and journal titles in particular are useful context.
Garrett KA, Alcala-Briseno R, Andersen KF, Brawner J, Choudhury R, Delaquis E, Fayette J, Poudel R, Purves D, Rothschild J, Small I, Thomas-Sharma S, Xing Y. 2019. Effective altruism as an ethical lens on research priorities. Phytopathology PHYTO-05-19-0168-RVW. DOI: 10.1094/PHYTO-05-19-0168-RVW.
12 of 14 of authors (including first and last authors) are at the University of Florida and one is at Louisiana State University, both major universities in the US Southeast, and one author is at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Laos.
Thanks for posting this! Very interesting to see effective altruism being directly discussed in this context. I was curious whether EA had been discussed in other academic biology journals. Entering “effective altruism” into the Pubmed search bar brings up four articles,
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Funding Conservation through an Emerging Social Movement. Freeling BS, Connell SD. Trends Ecol Evol. 2019 Oct 12. pii: S0169-5347(19)30276-9. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.09.002. [Epub ahead of print]
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Impediments to Effective Altruism: The Role of Subjective Preferences in Charitable Giving. Berman JZ, Barasch A, Levine EE, Small DA. Psychol Sci. 2018 May;29(5):834-844. doi: 10.1177/0956797617747648. Epub 2018 Apr 16.
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Effective altruists ought to be allowed to sell their kidneys. Tonkens R. Bioethics. 2018 Mar;32(3):147-154. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12427. Epub 2018 Jan 25.
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Framework for integrating animal welfare into life cycle sustainability assessment. Scherer L, Tomasik B, Rueda O, Pfister S. Int J Life Cycle Assess. 2018;23(7):1476-1490. doi: 10.1007/s11367-017-1420-x. Epub 2017 Nov 20.
The last three fall into categories I might have expected—psychology, ethics, and animal welfare. But I find #1 particularly notable because it is going to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (also known as TREE), which is a high impact review journal that is widely read within ecology and evolution. I suspect this TREE article will be more widely seen by scientists than the Phytopathology article in the OP, though perhaps the title of the article will only appeal to the subset of TREE readers working in conservation biology.
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After doing a 5$ practice donation, I re-examined the instructions at https://www.eagivingtuesday.org/instructions/us-500-or-more and understood you are suggesting get to the “confirm donation page” before the 8am start time. But I think if the recommendation to start the donation prior to 8am was in the “In a nutshell” section I would have figured it out sooner. You might consider editing the third sentence in the first bullet of the “In a nutshell” section to something like ”We recommended starting the donation process prior to the official match start so that you are able to click the final “Donate” button within the first second after the match start time of December 3rd, 2019, at 08:00:00am EST (05:00:00am PST).”
I think part of my (slight) confusion might be captured in your language “We’re recommending donating within the first second”; by “donating” you mean click the final Donate button whereas I naturally interpret this as meaning do the entire donation process.
It seems basically impossible to reliably execute a newly-learned many-step task within one second.
Since this also seemed hopeless to me after my test donation took me 20 seconds, I thought I’d reiterate the key part of AviNorowitz’s reply even more plainly: What the EA Giving Tuesday team’s instructions recommend is that you do all of the steps except the last one prior to 8AM. So you only need to do one step (a single mouse click) in one second.
For the record, you can see all of GPI’s papers at https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/papers/, and seminars by the authors presenting some of these papers can be seen on GPI’s YouTube channel.
(and thanks to the OP for helping bring them to my attention!)
Last week, Science published four responses to the original article,
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay8060
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay7976
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay8334
along with a reply to the responses from the original authors,
(hat tip to the Future Perfect newsletter)
Just wanted to say thanks to both Gregory and Spiracular for their detailed and thoughtful back and forth in this thread. As someone coming from a place somewhere in the middle but having spent less time thinking through these considerations, I found getting to hear your personal perspectives very helpful.
The link to the previous post is broken
Thanks for writing this and posting it here on the forum. Beyond the helpful suggestions, I feel that both managers and those experiencing imposter syndrome need reminders that many people experience this, likely including many who they themselves view as highly competent. I imagine that imposter syndrome also affects many people not working at EA organizations but who are working towards applying to an EA org or taking another form of career move for EA reasons, especially for orgs or cause areas that are high-profile within the community. (It certainly affects me in this way.) Regarding therapy options for anxiety related to imposter syndrome or more generally—if you’re currently in college or graduate school then you likely have easy access to cheap/free therapy through your university’s student health services.
As a scientist, I consider science a way of learning about the world, and not what a particular group of people say. I think the article is fairly explicit about taking a similar definition of “science-aligned”:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out...
(...)
Science-aligned. The best means to figuring out how to do the most good is the scientific method, broadly construed to include reliance on careful rigorous argument and theoretical models as well as data.
There is usually a vast body of existing relevant work on a topic across various fields of research. Trying to seriously engage with existing work is part of being scientific; and the opinions or consensus of researchers in the field are a form of data one should not ignore. You can disagree after serious consideration without being unscientific. Simply coming to your own conclusions without engaging with existing work, or acting based on emotion or gut feelings acquired without ever thinking about them critically would be unscientific.
A part of being scientific is also being open to and trying to learn from critiques of your work. It is true that scientists often make bad critiques for bad (unscientific) reasons, and it can take quite a lot of effort to understand the social and historical reasons behind consensus opinions in particular fields on particular issues. I don’t think most EAs would think having a certain degree of support from a particular group of scientists is the relevant criterion.
A possible reason for the downvote is that your initial question ‘What does it mean to be “pro-science”?’ is explicitly answered in the article and it’s not immediately clear that you are acknowledging that and really asking, isn’t everything science-aligned under this definition?
Reading this paper carefully actually left me feeling quite skeptical about how species population monitoring is conducted and reported. … So the conclusions have to be pessimistic if all the studies you have to review focus on monitoring species with the highest risk of extinction.
I haven’t read the paper, but did listen to a More or Less episode about the paper. The episode discusses the poor quality of the available data and left me feeling similarly. The radio episode also highlights a potential bias in search strategy used by the authors in their meta-analysis that would favor finding an overall population decline. If I recall correctly, it was something along the lines of the authors searching with keywords related to “declining populations”, so they would naturally tend to be including papers that found declines and excluding papers that found population increases. This idea squares with your interpretation that the −2.5% number shouldn’t be interpreted as a projection for total insect biomass or numbers.
Regarding the breakdown by subject, I agree that this would be very valuable, but that having a bunch of subforums probably isn’t the answer. To me, the obvious solution is having keyword/tag support, where authors and/or mods set the keywords for their article, and users can view all posts with a given tag. This feature is built into popular blog-building platforms like Hugo (through Hugo “taxonomies”); I have no idea how hard it would be to implement in the LW/EA forum software. But the ability to filter to posts relating to AI, wild-animal suffering, community building, cause prioritization, etc. seems to be an important feature for making forum posts on a given topic remain relevant long after they have fallen off the Latest Posts list.
Thanks for posting this. Posts introducing books or other bodies of work not explicitly about EA or an EA cause area, but that introduce or explain relevant ideas from disparate disciplines, seem valuable and I would like to see more.
I see, thanks for the explanation!