Milan_Griffes

De­brief: “cash prizes for the best ar­gu­ments against psychedelics”

Cash prizes for the best ar­gu­ments against psychedelics be­ing an EA cause area

[Question] What grants has Carl Shul­man’s dis­cre­tionary fund made?

• Milan_Griffes 27 Feb 2019 0:23 UTC

  36 points

  in reply to: Max_Daniel's comment on: After one year of ap­ply­ing for EA jobs: It is re­ally, re­ally hard to get hired by an EA organisation

  +1 to not­ing that the cur­rent re­cruit­ment con­figu­ra­tion strongly fa­vors elite (& highly priv­ileged) ap­pli­cants.

[Question] Do we know how many big as­ter­oids could im­pact Earth?

• Milan_Griffes 9 Apr 2019 5:21 UTC

  31 points

  on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  CFAR:

  I’ve got­ten a sense that the staff isn’t in­ter­ested in in­creas­ing the num­ber of in­tro work­shops, that the in­tro work­shops don’t feel par­tic­u­larly ex­cit­ing for the staff, and that most staff are less in­ter­ested in im­prov­ing the in­tro work­shops than other parts of CFAR. This makes it less likely that those work­shops will main­tain their qual­ity and im­pact, and I cur­rently think that those work­shops are likely one of the best ways for CFAR to have a large im­pact.

  ...

  CFAR is strug­gling to at­tract top tal­ent, par­tially be­cause some of the best staff left, and par­tially due to a gen­eral sense of a lack of for­ward mo­men­tum for the or­ga­ni­za­tion. This is a bad sign, be­cause I think CFAR in par­tic­u­lar benefits from hav­ing highly tal­ented in­di­vi­d­u­als teach at their work­shops and serve as a con­crete ex­am­ple of the skills they’re try­ing to teach.

  Why a large, un­re­stricted grant to CFAR, given these con­cerns? Would a smaller grant cat­alyze changes such that the or­ga­ni­za­tion be­comes cash-flow pos­i­tive?

  By the next grant round, I plan to have spent more time learn­ing and think­ing about CFAR’s tra­jec­tory and fu­ture, and to have a more con­fi­dent opinion about what the cor­rect fund­ing level for CFAR is.

  What is go­ing to hap­pen be­tween now & then that will help you learn enough to have a higher-cre­dence view about CFAR?

  Seems like a large, un­re­stricted grant per­mits fur­ther “busi­ness-as-usual” op­er­a­tions. Are “busi­ness-as-usual” op­er­a­tions the best state for driv­ing your learn­ing as a grant-maker?

• Milan_Griffes 4 Jun 2019 22:04 UTC

  28 points

  on: Cash prizes for the best ar­gu­ments against psychedelics be­ing an EA cause area

  Ar­gu­ments have been as­sessed & prizes awarded!

  The win­ners –

  • Most up­voted: Gre­gory_Lewis

  • 2nd-most up­voted: Eliz­a­beth, cross-post­ing Scott Alexan­der’s argument

  • 3rd-most up­voted: Kit

  
  

  And I also paid out a prize to Holly_El­more, who made what seemed to me to be the best coun­ter­ar­gu­ment, though it wasn’t one of the top three most up­voted.

  No fur­ther com­ments or votes on this thread will be con­sid­ered for the as­sess­ment of the prize.

[Link] Thiel on GCRs

• Milan_Griffes 10 Apr 2019 15:14 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: Ben_Kuhn's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  +1

  I think it’s great that the Fund is trend­ing to­wards more trans­parency & a broader set of grantees (cf. Novem­ber 2018 grant re­port, cf. July 2018 con­cerns about the Fund).

  And I re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate the level of care & at­ten­tion that Oli is putting to­wards this thread. I’ve found the dis­cus­sion re­ally helpful.

[Link] “The AI Timelines Scam”

[Question] Lev­er­age Re­search shut­ting down?

• Milan_Griffes 10 Apr 2019 15:54 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: Ben_Kuhn's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  Re­lat­edly, is Oli get­ting com­pen­sated for the work he’s putting in to the Longterm Fu­ture Fund?

  Seems good to move to­wards a regime wherein:

  • The norm is to write up de­tailed, pub­lic grant reports

  • Com­mu­nity mem­bers ask a bunch of ques­tions about the grant decisions

  • The norm is that a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the grant-mak­ing staff fields all of these ques­tions, and is com­pen­sated for do­ing so

• Milan_Griffes 28 May 2019 23:02 UTC

  21 points

  on: Drown­ing chil­dren are rare

  Ben & Alexan­der Gor­don-Brown are hav­ing an in­ter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion in the com­ments of the Com­pass Rose ver­sion of this post.

• Milan_Griffes 17 Apr 2019 23:49 UTC

  21 points

  on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  For ad­di­tional back­ground, here’s a short (& lossy) ar­gu­ment for psychedelics as Cause X:

  • Al­most ev­ery­one in EA holds ei­ther a longter­mist view or a per­son-af­fect­ing view

  • If you hold a longter­mist view & you’re a con­se­quen­tial­ist (as far as I know, most longter­mists are con­se­quen­tial­ist), con­se­quen­tial­ist clue­less­ness seems like a ma­jor the­o­ret­i­cal problem

    • Ba­si­cally, try­ing to as­sess out­comes oc­cur­ring 10,000+ years in the fu­ture breaks the con­se­quen­tial­ism al­gorithm (be­cause we have no visi­bil­ity into these out­comes)

    • Given this the­o­ret­i­cal prob­lem, longter­mist cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion should in­clude “how ro­bust to clue­less­ness is this?” as a ma­jor factor

    • Some x-risk in­ter­ven­tions seem pretty ro­bust to cluelessness

    • Also ro­bust: in­ter­ven­tions that in­crease the set of well-in­ten­tioned + ca­pa­ble people

      • CFAR & Paradigm Academy are aimed at this

      • The psychedelic ex­pe­rience also seems like a plau­si­ble lever on in­creas­ing ca­pa­bil­ity (via re­duc­ing nega­tive self-talk & other men­tal blocks) and im­prov­ing in­ten­tions (via ego dis­solu­tion chang­ing one’s meta­phys­i­cal as­sump­tions)

    • Ergo: un­der a longter­mist view, psychedelic in­ter­ven­tions are plau­si­bly in the same bal­l­park of effec­tive­ness as x-risk in­ter­ven­tions & other in­ter­ven­tions that in­crease the set of well-in­ten­tioned + ca­pa­ble people

  • If you hold a per­son-af­fect­ing view, men­tal health seems like a cause area on par with global poverty (see Michael Plant’s cause pro­file on men­tal health)

    • Psychedelics are show­ing a ton of promise as treat­ment for a bat­tery of chronic men­tal health is­sues (in­clud­ing anx­iety, de­pres­sion, OCD, and ad­dic­tive di­s­or­ders in­clud­ing smok­ing & al­co­holism)

    • Ergo: un­der a per­son-af­fect­ing view, psychedelic in­ter­ven­tions are plau­si­bly in the same bal­l­park of effec­tive­ness as global poverty interventions

  If there’s suffi­cient in­ter­est, I’ll take the time to make the above ar­gu­ment more rigor­ous.

  [Dis­clo­sure: I’m helping out At­man Re­treat as an ad­vi­sor; views are my own]

• Milan_Griffes 4 Aug 2018 1:10 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: TaraMacAulay's comment on: Lev­er­age Re­search: re­view­ing the ba­sic facts

  I don’t think that Lev­er­age, Paradigm or re­lated pro­jects are good use of EA time or money

  Found this sur­pris­ing given the pos­i­tive valence of the rest of the com­ment. Could you ex­pand a lit­tle on why you don’t think Lev­er­age et al. are a good use of time/​money?

[Link] The Schel­ling Choice is “Rab­bit”, not “Stag” (LessWrong post)

• Milan_Griffes 10 Jul 2019 1:34 UTC

  20 points

  on: Why did three GiveWell board mem­bers re­sign in April 2019?

  GiveWell re­cently pub­lished the record­ing from its April 2019 board meet­ing.

  I was hold­ing that this meet­ing would in­clude dis­cus­sion of why the mem­bers re­signed, but I was mis­taken.

  It seems that Rob Re­ich, Brigid Slipka, and Tom Rut­ledge re­signed be­fore this meet­ing, then at the meet­ing the board voted to for­mally re­duce the num­ber of board seats.

  So I’m not sure that there is any pub­li­cly available dis­cus­sion of these res­ig­na­tions, apart from the state­ments GiveWell pub­lished in April.

  (I haven’t listened to the end of the record­ing yet; from the way the con­ver­sa­tion is headed it doesn’t sound like there’s go­ing to be any fur­ther dis­cus­sion about the res­ig­na­tions or board size. Edit: I listened to the rest of the record­ing and this wasn’t dis­cussed.)

• Milan_Griffes 7 May 2019 7:45 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Con­crete Ways to Re­duce Risks of Value Drift and Lifestyle Drift

  There are a lot of peo­ple whose names you can see all over the 80K/​GWWC web­sites from ma­te­rial pro­duced a few years ago, but who are no longer in­volved in EA in any kind of pub­lic ca­pac­ity (and may not be in­volved at all)

  Do you know if any­one’s de­briefed these folks?

  Could be in­ter­est­ing to sys­tem­at­i­cally in­ter­view peo­ple like this, to learn more about why peo­ple dis­tance from EA & to see if any gen­er­al­iz­able trends ap­pear.

[Link] “Why Re­spon­si­ble AI Devel­op­ment Needs Co­op­er­a­tion on Safety” (OpenAI)

• Milan_Griffes 2 Jun 2019 5:11 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Ben_Kuhn's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  Now that the dust has set­tled a bit, I’m cu­ri­ous what Habryka & the other fund man­agers think of the level of com­mu­nity en­gage­ment that oc­curred on this re­port...

  • What kinds of en­gage­ment seemed helpful?

  • What kinds of en­gage­ment seemed un­nec­es­sary?

  • What kinds of en­gage­ment were emo­tion­ally ex­pen­sive to ad­dress?

  • Does it seem sus­tain­able to write up grant­maker rea­son­ing at this level of de­tail, for each grant­mak­ing round go­ing for­ward?

  • Does it seem sus­tain­able to en­gage with ques­tions & com­ments from the com­mu­nity at this level of de­tail, for each grant­mak­ing round go­ing for­ward?