I founded the Network for EA Support & Training (NEST) to revitalize in-person EA groups by training community builders to better understand and communicate the many ideas and perspectives in EA. Previously, I ran programs at the Institute for Law & AI, worked on the one-on-one advising team at 80,000 Hours in London and as a patent litigator at Sidley Austin in Chicago.
Mjreard
Karma: 2,803
Building Ideas-First EA
The fundamental thing happening here is that the opportunity cost of an exceptionally talented person taking advice aimed at the average person is vastly higher than the inverse, so people give advice that ensures the exceptionally talented lean into ambition and build these fields, even if many non-exceptional people will try and fail.
People are not good at self-assessment in both directions and the more you caveat and qualify your advice, the less it gets through, so this is the bet to make.
However correct or compelling these critiques turn out to be,[1] I want to praise the incredibly constructive framing here. Most ‘criticism’ on the Forum does not evince 1) the conviction that the underlying problem is still extremely important, 2) the resolve to continue making progress on it, and 3) the trust that actors will update on evidence/arguments. Wonderful.
- ^
FWIW, my summary of the discourse is:
The evidence on shrimp stunning does seem terrifyingly thin
The cage-free controversy is comparatively well studied (but still too little), and very sensitive to assumptions about inputs to quality of life
Meat alternative uptake is a known issue. The question is how long we should keep trying things before deciding the theory of change is fundamentally flawed (much longer, imo!)
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I’m also excited about organizers writing their own syllabi. People have different perspectives on what’s most fundamental to EA and what the most important framings are. You should facilitate the reading group you’d be excited to join!
To that end, I’ve [started to] put together some seminal EA content here, from which people can draw.
This is somewhat at odds with fast-launching a fellowship, but if people want to take the time to modestly modify their off-the-shelf options, there is time to do that between launching the application and your first session.
Yep. And my plan for doing that is to make specific claims about specific people, projects, and positions and let the vibes be a downstream consequence of that rather than talking about the vibes themselves at a high level.
I am being a hypocrite right here in this comment though.
The most charitable explanation of the tension here is that people just disagree with you about what is most impactful. I appreciate your transparency in considering whether aesthetics and nostalgia for a previous era of EA might be driving your unease.
Ultimately, it is better to debate the merits of specific interventions than general vibes. I think even the Anthropic folks would agree that, e.g., moving to SF is purely instrumental to some more specific theory of change that may or may not have merit.
I think having some non-EA housemates would lead to talking about EA *more* because you’d have to give more context and field more questions on what you’ve been up to. I find EA-like topics come up relatively rarely in my all-rat house.
like weekly house meetings or monthly brunch
Hoping you accidently mixed up the frequency of these two events
Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate ✅
Guy who played Mark Zuckerberg in the movie ✅
Actual Mark Zuckerberg when?
I appreciate the effort and ambition you’re putting into this and endorse you doing the kind of outreach you’re most excited about. That said, I doubt this is nearly as valuable as it looks on paper, so groups shouldn’t default to replicating it.
So what we have here is a pledge that says that when you enter the workforce and have a steady income, you will donate 1% of your income to charities that you care about.
[emphasis added]
Based on this and the absence absence of meaningful follow up, I’d guess these pledges are worth ~5% of 300 high-touch pledges.
It seems like people are going to get an email from GWWC at some point in the future (maybe not even that?) which may or may not successfully remind them of this brief interaction, which may or may not motivate them to click through to the site, which is quite unlikely to convince anyone to donate to a highly effective charity.
Shifting some portion of your efforts to follow up seems like the right move. Getting one real EA 1% pledger up to 5% would be worth 80 of these pledges for example and seems doable.
I avoided opening this post because I was worried it’d be a sort of “we’re entitled to Anthropic’s money” vibe I’ve gotten from some other posts, but I’m happy to have been proven wrong. This is a very clear outline of the present problem(s) EA/AIS are facing with creating projects that are worth funding.
I would have predicted the positive press and basically think this would “work” today if these conditions were met:
charismatic criminal (art thieves! maybe hackers like anonymous)
ransom made to a powerful, disliked entity (governments, specific well-known billionaires)
For a well-known cause that’d widely regarded as worthy (hurricane/typhoon relief, childhood cancer research, etc.)
I agree you on the overall downsides though. This sets a bad precedent that will be misused by many and burn a ton of social trust that is ultimately more important.
Seems like AGI will lead to ASI and ASI will show us more valuable ways to use all the land and matter that currently support animal suffering. The ways we use those probably won’t involve animals or suffering at all.
Good breakdown. I agree on 2 & 3 being promising too. One of the first event models I came up with for my project was EA reading + sermon-or-constructive debate related to the reading. It’s not cultish if there are no rites/titles/statements of faith/garb/iconography.
I mean defending America from Donald Trump and his forces who are currently waging war against America.
We might just fully agree. I don’t think there were ever career-long professional benefits to EA for people specializing in specific cause areas that outweigh those at cause-specific conferences (but please come teach community builders/members/young people about your work at EAG).
I think EA has always been for:
figuring out where you want to specialize, and
building/maintaining your knowledge and motivation around the world’s needs generally
The first is professionally relevant early in your career (or for generalists looking to lateral), but not so much later. The latter is personal/social/intellectual and perhaps a broad way that a specialist can give back by helping people working on the first thing.
If it is settled that AI is the thing to do, maybe point one has become irrelevant. I dispute this,[1] but less so than point two, which I think has strong independent value.
It may also be helpful context that I personally am not an expected utiltity maximizer. I’m doing my project because I want people to engage with EA arguments and then do what they want to do with them, as opposed to doing what I want them to do in a more superficial sense.
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For example, it may just be critical to understand what else might be ITN in the world to understand why AI is important, or to think clearly about what its implications for welfare are. If those other problems aren’t really in the room or fully explored, it’s easy to miss crucial considerations. Similarly, what do we mean by “AI” and “settled?” Lots of EA epistemology can help here. Relatedly, the moral context of everything happening in the world can provide motivation that might otherwise be lacking.
At the core of my project is the idea that people can disagree and still cooperate.
I agree with you that the people who currently control the talent infrastructure that flows from CG, i.e. CEA and 80k, have for the most part become uninterested in views on cause prio that don’t buy into the TAI hypothesis. They are not however, completely uninterested. As you say, they invite people working on global health, animals, and other causes to EAG; they support groups which discuss and invite speakers on these topics.
I understand that this is not much support in material terms compared to AI and this does stack the deck against non-AI causes for people making EA career choices. The question is what you want to do with it.
For my part, I am choosing to leverage that small amount of support to strengthen free-ranging discourse about how to do the most good. The bar may be higher for non-AI projects and people to get CG funding as they emerge from this discourse, but I don’t think it is insurmountable. Further, I hope people who engage with my project will use it as a launching pad to reach out to non-CG funders and non-”EA” collaborators for their non-AI projects.
Both of these will be more challenging, but I personally resolve to support people doing what they endorse doing based on how thoughtful and ambitious they are, where I measure neither of those things in terms of how much they agree with me or my funders in substance. It’ll be tough re bias, but idk, liberalism conquered the world last century, maybe it’ll do it again this century.
We’re looking at this more differently than I thought. The question “how does EA meet the needs of people with different worldviews” is strange to me. EA should be the place you go to *form* your worldview, by learning about and comparing different perspectives. Whatever has caused this framing to seem tricky/unnatural is the thing I’m pushing back against.
I have a similar take on TAI skepticism, with some added (perhaps excessively charitable) concerns around how economic value gets created in the first place and what hurdles there are between current AI systems and creating that value.
Yes. I am at-all interested in outcomes such that I will regard myself as having failed a sanity check if very few people go on to do ambitious, impactful work after engaging with my events/programs/groups. But I am very bound to being permissive about what counts here. Thoughtfulness about high impact is the bar, not my EV calculation of impact.
To put it in the form of a critique, I think too many community building programs adopt metrics like “number of participants who go into roles at AIM, MATS, GovAI, etc.” and that this is too prescriptive and discourages people from really forming their own world models in an EA context.
My metric is whether I’m impressed with the pushback I get on my takes when I go into these spaces or whether I’m learning new and plausibly very important things about big problems.
Limiting to US universities is mostly a me and Sarah consideration. We’re American and it’s good to focus. I thought about European universities early on, but they were physically and culturally too far away for our high-touch approach.