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: 2,943
If someone on the Forum team has an automated way of making these each their own event or otherwise advertising them as such, that’d be very helpful!
College EA Meetups Everywhere: Times & Places
College EA Meetups Everywhere: Call For Organizers
As a sometimes-helper and sometimes-hater of you videos, I can certify that this one was real good. Gripping from start to finish and did a nice job illustrating the kinds of headwinds people trying to put goodness first will face when trying to intervene in AI.
And just as a piece of art, the way you changed frames from the board drama play-by-play to the flashbacks was masterful.
Very excited to see you two in particular doing this! I’m happy to facilitate a cohort or help with whatever else you need.
I think your suggestion about talented people’s ability to triage advice is at least partially true. A problem with it is that a smart response to bad or inapplicable advice is to stop listening to the advice-giver entirely. So you only get a few chances to make contact and you shouldn’t spend them on the lower-value content.
Thanks Vasco. Conceptually was very helpful in generating my original list. I think the other lists have value, but are more more observational heuristics that might explain many micro issues, but not really help you make sense of the world and how things work overall.
Thank you so much Raymond these are great. All Tier 1 and 2 concepts I failed to include. And thank you for catching a typo in the sheet!
Thank you Jen! And we might just take you up on that...
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.
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!)
- ^
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?
This post elides a distinction between reputation as process and reputation as an ~instrumental goal.
I think reputations are (properly) earned by *how* you do what you do, not *what* you choose to do. As (I think) Claude says: emails not returned and invitations not extended. It matters to have a reputation for being honest, attentive, forthright, transparent, diligent, fair, etc. If your reputation consciously consists more in “doing things that are popular,” that is one of several roads to losing yourself.
People mock EAs for caring about shrimp and insects and viciously attack them for prioritizing future generations. Hiring a much-maligned ex-con because they are the best fit for a role is far lower stakes than those things, but it is still a substantive decision; the kind of thing where if you let “what will others think?” dictate your decision (independent of whether their objections have object-level merit), there’s no principled reason you would refuse to abandon some important moral constituency on the same grounds if you thought the ends justified the means. Another important reputation to maintain is “will not be cowed out of their beliefs by mere social pressure.”
More importantly, if people knew that you were taking popularity into account for its own sake in deciding what to do, this would and should *hurt* your reputation. Honesty about what you would do on the object level is a virtue.
There should be unpopular EAs and unpopular EA orgs. We should not try to be a monolith managing each other to manage other people’s impressions of EA as a whole.