https://www.yieldandspread.org/ comes to mind :)
MvK🔸
Karma: 623
ERA’s Theory of Change
Hi bethhw!
Thanks for taking the time to write up this post. Many of us have gone through similar things and can relate to the struggle you are experiencing.
Regarding the “I can’t do anything about it” part:
I see this meme a lot in the AI safety community. I think it’s a function of a) the underlying complexity of the problem and b) the reverance we have for some of the people working on this, with a dash of c) “my academic background is completely irrelevant” and d) “it’s too late for me to build the skills I need to contribute” thrown in there.
I won’t argue against a) and b) - the problem IS hard and the people working on it ARE often very impressive with regards to their intellectual chops.
But c) and d) are a completely different story, and I want to push back hard against them. People routinely underestimate how many different skills a given field can benefit from. AI Safety needs cognitive scientists, STEM people, historians, activists, political scientists, artists, journalists, content editors, Office Managers, educators, finance specialists, PAs- if you truly think your background is irrelevant, send me a DM and I’m happy to take bets on whether I can find a position that would benefit from your skillset. ;-)
(Anecdotally, I used to be a teacher, and I’m now working on case studies for AI Standards, field-building and Research Management. It turned out people really appreciate it when you can explain something in clear terms, organize processes well and help others to engage with important but thorny ideas.)
On building skills: The field is so young and nascent that literally nobody is “on the ball” and while this is deeply concerning from an x-risk perspective, it is good news for you—there is a limited number of key concepts and models to understand. For many people, it’s is not too late to learn about these things and to build skills, and there are many resources and programs to support this.Last but not least: Reach out to me if you’d like to discuss your options or just want to talk to a kind voice. I’d be happy to. :)
If you find reading criticism from the last group demotivating and “bad faith”, try this podcast with the great Habiba Banu on EA and the Left:
I think it does a great job pointing out both agreements and disagreements between EA and the Left.
“Respondents low in engagement were also slightly more likely to have heard of EA via the Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten blog and via podcasts. (...) As we have discussed in previous reports, these differences are likely, in large part, explained by which sources have recruited more EAs more or less recently, since these newer EAs are less likely to be highly engaged.”
Is this statement not contradicted by the fact that SSC/ACX has decreased in importance with regards to attracting new members? i.e. shouldn’t we expect these people to be more involved since they have been, on average, part of the movement for longer?
It’s a bit more complicated, as I understand (from Wikipedia):
“In 1998, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2009, the United States Congress voted whether to ban all human cloning, both reproductive and therapeutic (Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act). Divisions in the Senate, or an eventual veto from the sitting President (George W. Bush in 2005 and 2007), over therapeutic cloning prevented either competing proposal (a ban on both forms or on reproductive cloning only) from being passed into law. On 10 March 2010, a bill (HR 4808) was introduced with a section banning federal funding for human cloning. Such a law, if passed, would not have prevented research from occurring in private institutions (such as universities) that have both private and federal funding. However, the 2010 law was not passed.
There are currently no federal laws in the United States which ban cloning completely. Fifteen American states (Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, North Dakota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Virginia) ban reproductive cloning and three states (Arizona, Maryland and Missouri) prohibit use of public funds for such activities.
Ten states, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey and Rhode Island, have “clone and kill” laws that prevent cloned embryo implantation for childbirth, but allow embryos to be destroyed.”
In global comparisons like this (https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~neal/temp/ST Policy/index/SCBooklet/World.pdf), the US is routinely classified as not having a complete ban on human cloning.
Hi mikbp! While it’s possible that some people downvoted because of the spelling mistake (which I think shouldn’t happen), I was inclined to downvote, too, mainly because when I clicked on the post I was hoping to find some details on why this is an important problem, how long my hair needs to be, how long a donation takes, what good my hair donation could do, upsides and downsides etc. Your post seems more like a call to action and maybe could have been a shortform instead! 😉
Also, from a fellow non-native speaker to another: There are many Websites and online Tools that will proofread your texts (grammar, spelling, etc.), maybe you want to play around with them a bit? I think this could really help to improve your writing and make it more appealing and understandable to other forum users! :)
Incident reporting for AI safety
I think this does a great job of introducing the concept of a charter city to audiences with little prior exposure to these ideas.
That said: I know this is for a YouTube video and I might just be too immersed in academic/research culture and hedging, but this feels a little too much like an advertisement to me.As a report by RethinkPriorities points out, there’s a number of reasons to think Charter Cities are not the most effective way to alleviate poverty:
Lack of tractability, mostly caused by difficulties of coordination between many stakeholders
Indirect effects might be huge, but are hard to measure: “We could not find a comprehensive argument for the value of these indirect benefits being large.”[1]
Nearest empirical analogue (SEZs) seem to only marginally outperform host countries
Large development cost
You choose one example of a Charter city that could be deemed to be a success, but omit mentioning those that are widely considered “failures”. According to the aforementioned RP report, Paul Romer—who you mention—turned away from the idea because of these failures in Honduras and Madagascar (a conclusion you may agree or disagree with, but that maybe deserves to be mentioned).
I will happily concede that some of these failures can be explained away by certain political circumstances rather than by flaws inherent to the concept of charter cities, but if the goal of this is to inform, not to persuade, I would love to see some of those limitations mentioned in the video. I say this less as an argument against charter cities, but as an argument for carefully considering the circumstances under which charter cities do or don’t work.Furthermore, there are many debates about whether charter cities will end poverty[2] or exacerbate social inequality and threaten social cohesion[3], but they are absent from this video, which mostly seems to rely on the perspective of advocates for charter cities.
Hi Ben! With the benefit of hindsight, I realise we could’ve been more clear on what “leakage” means in this context, given that the topic matter might suggests we are talking about lab leaks. We’re not! In our model, lab leak rates would only factor into our estimate of how many deaths will be caused by DURC in the future. Leakage in the CEA refers to the risk that new guidelines in academic communities might be “leaky” in that researchers might choose to migrate to other jurisdictions, countries or privately owned labs (though few of these exist on the BSL levels we are most concerned with) or worse yet, move their research underground. Hence, our CEA discounts the estimate of how many lives could be saved by including this possibility.
I can see this work extremely well for some tasks like reading and meetings, but significantly less so for stuff like typing. What’s your experience with those types of tasks? Is walking on a treadmill disrupting these a lot or make them substantially more difficult? Or do you exclusively write and respond to emails when you’re sitting down?
This tool comes to mind!
I’m guessing Felix meant to say “This”
You’re right—my comment is addressing an additional problem. (So I maybe should’ve made it a standalone comment)
As far as your second point is concerned—that’s true, unless we will face risk (again, and possibly more) at a later point. I agree with you that “crying wolf-effects” matter less or not at all under conditions where a problem is solved once and for all (unless it affects the credibility of a community which simultaneously works on other problems which remain unsolved, as is probably true of the EA community).
There’s an additional problem that people who sound the alarms will likely be accused by some of “crying wolf” regardless of the outcome:
World A) Group X cries wolf. AI was not actually dangerous, nothing bad happens. Group X (rightly) gets accused of crying wolf and loses credibility, even if AI gets dangerous at some future point.
World B) Group X cries wolf. AI is actually dangerous, but because they cried wolf, we manage the risk and there is no catastrophe. Seeing the absence of a catastrophe, some people will accuse group X of crying wolf and they lose credibility.
Thanks for writing this Amber! 2 quick points on the “comparing oneself negatively/being star-struck” theme:
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It is so easy to forget that sometimes we are the people that other people look up to in that way (“Ohhhh, it’s Amber Dawn, I see her comments so much on the Forum, she must really know a lot and be quite courageous, too”). It’s also worth remembering that as long as we only look upwards, there is always someone smarter/more experienced/more powerful, all the way up to that one person that gets to actually enjoy the conference without these nagging thoughts. Except, wait! Plot twist: They probably think that way about someone else at the conference.
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Somewhat ironically, if you are someone who suffers from this, going to conferences can actually help! You’ll see Nobel prize winners lose their train of thought in a public speech. You’ll see billionaires tripping over their own feet. You’ll see CEOs ask students for directions to their speaker’s lounge. You’ll see if only briefly that they are also human, after all.
(or, in the slightly less elegant but undeniably more succinct words of a former colleague of mine: “These people sht and pss just like we do”)
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I think this is mostly true, but doesn’t seem to take into account that it is possible (I claim) and not unlikely (I speculate) that people develop a passion for something while they work on it. So I would still want people to try their hand at things that might not intuitively seem super appealing to them, ideally with cheap tests and iterative depth.
LEEP (https://leadelimination.org/) comes to mind, although they are still a very young organisation so less established than bigger organisations in this space. Their cost-effectiveness looks great, though, if that’s what you mostly care about. They advocate for policies to limit the exposure to toxic lead (e.g. in paint).
Hi Jonathan! I currently work for ERA as a Research Manager. While nothing is certain in this world, I would say there is a very good chance we will be running this or a highly similar program again next summer. :)
I still get this: “The private share link you tried to reach is not available. The owner of this base may have unshared or deleted it. Please contact them if you need access.”