Maybe the right approach is not “developing” / “creating” this, but shifting the systems that are already partway there. You might have a bigger impact if you were working with Wikipedia to shift it more towards the kind of system you would like, for example.
I really doubt that something like this would be profitable quickly, on the grounds that its utility would be derived from its rigour and… Well, people take a while to notice the utility of rigour.
I am familiar with a few different areas, but I don’t think I have a lot of expertise (hence why I said I’m not in a great position to help).
Kinda blows my mind that this doesn’t have more comments. I’m not really in a great position to help but I have a lot of time I could dedicate to something like this and would be willing to do so if you could point me in the right direction.
I think you are 100% correct and would be interested in helping you with a post about this if you wanted.
Epistemic status is 100% philosophy jargon. Hell, the word “epistemic” or the word “epistemology” is itself philosophy jargon. I only ever hear it from LW people/EAs and people in philosophy departments.
I would like to add to this that there is also just the question of how strong a lot of these claims can be.
Maybe the future is super enormous. And maybe me eating sushi tomorrow night at 6pm instead of on Wednesday could have massive repercussions. But it could also have massive repercussions for me to eat sushi on Friday, or something.
A lot of things “could” have massive repercussions. Maybe if I hadn’t missed the bus last week, Super Hitler wouldn’t have been born.
There are some obvious low-hanging fruits in the world such that they would reduce the risk of catastrophe (say, nuclear disarmament, or the Seed Vault, or something). But there are also a lot of things that seem less obvious in their mechanisms, and which could go radically differently than how the people who outline them seem to think. Interventions to increase the number of liberal democracies on the planet and the amount of education could lead to more political polarization and social instability, for example. I’m not saying it would, but it could. Places that have been on the receiving end of “democratizing” interventions often wind up more politically unstable or dangerous for a variety of reasons, and the upward trend in education and longevity over the past few decades has also been an upward trend in polarization, depression, anxiety, social isolation…
Sure, maybe there’s some existential risk to humanity, and maybe the future is massive, but what reason do I have to believe that my eating sushi, or taking public transit, or donating to one charity over another, or reading some book, is actually going to have specific effects? Why wouldn’t the unintended consequences outweigh the intended ones?
It’s not just skepticism about the potential size of the future, it’s skepticism about the cause-effect relationship being provided by the potential “mugger”. Maybe we’re 100% doomed and nothing we do will do anything because an asteroid is going to hit us in 50 years that we will not be able to detect due to a serendipitous astronomical occurrence, and all of it is pointless. Maybe some omnipotent deity is watching and will make sure we colonize the galaxy. Maybe research into AI risk will bring about an evil AI. Maybe research into AI is pointless because AIs will necessarily be hyperbenevolent due to some law of the universe we have not yet discovered. Maybe a lot of things.
Even with the dedication and careful thought that I have seen many people put into these probabilities, it always looks to me like there aren’t enough variables to be comfortable with any of it. And there are people who don’t think about this in quantitative terms who would find even my hypothetical more comprehensive models to be inadequate.
I think the note on Not Invented Here syndrome is actually amazing and I’m very happy you introduced that concept into this discussion.
If we want to spread those values, I agree with you that learning about competitor philosophies, ideologies, cultures and perspectives (I personally spend a fair bit of time on this) would be important, and that lowering language barriers could be helpful.
Wonderful! What specific actions could we take to make that easier for you (and others like you for whom this would be a worthwhile pursuit)?
Maybe a reading group that meets every week (or month). Or an asynchronous thread in which people provide reviews of philosophical articles or world literature. Or a group of Duolingo “friends” (or some other language-learning app of people’s choice, I have a variety of thoughts on which languages should be prioritized, but starting with something would be good, and Spanish-language EAs seem to be growing in number and organization).
It could also be useful to explore whether there are interventions in cultures that we’re less familiar with that could improve people’s well-being even more than the typical global health interventions that are currently recommended. Perhaps there’s something about a particular culture which, if promoted more effectively, would really improve people’s lives.
Bhutan’s notion of Gross Domestic Happiness, Denmark’s “hygge”, whatever it is that makes certain people with schizophrenia from Africa get the voices to say nice things to them, indigenous practices of farming and sustainable hunting, and maybe the practice of “insulting the meat” just off the top of my head, would probably be good things to make more broadly understood and build into certain institutions. Not to mention that knowledge of cultural features that need to be avoided or handled somewhat (for example, overtly strict beauty standards which harm people in a variety of different cultures).
(Though if we want to improve, say, shrimp welfare in Asia, learning local languages could help us work and recruit more effectively as well as spread values.)
And, very importantly, it could allow you to discover new things to value, new frameworks, new ways of approaching a problem. Every language you learn comes with new intuition pumps, new frames upon which you can hang your thoughts.
Even if you think the vast majority of moral patients are non-human and our priorities should reflect that, there are ways of thinking about animals and their welfare that have been cultivated for centuries by less WEIRD populations that could prove illuminating to you. I don’t know about them, because I have my own areas of ignorance. But that’s the kind of thing that EA could benefit from aggregating somewhere.
I would be very interested in working on a project like that, of aggregating non-EA perspectives in various packages for the convenience of individual EAs who may want to learn about perspectives that are underrepresented in the community and may offer interesting insights.
Thank you! I don’t think it’s necessarily the most pivotal [1] but it is one part that has recently begun having its barrier of entry lowered [2]. Additionally, while reading broadly [3]could also help, the reason why language-learning looks so good in my eyes is because of the stones-to-birds ratio.
If you read very broadly and travel a lot, you may gain more “learning about wild(to you) perspective” benefits. But if you learn a language [4]you are:
1) benefitting your brain,
2) increasing the amount of people in the world you can talk to, and whose work you can learn from,
3) absorb new ideas you may not have otherwise been able to absorb,
4) acquire new intuitions [5].
You can separately do things that will fulfill all four of those things (and even fulfill some of the other benefits that language learning can provide for you) without learning another language. But I am very bad at executive skills, and juggling 4+ different habits, so I generally don’t find the idea of say…
doing 2 crosswords, 2 4x4x4 sudoku a day, and other brain teasers +
taking dance classes or learning a new instrument +
taking communications classes and reading books about public speaking and active listening +
engaging in comparative-translation reading +
ingratiating myself to radically different communities in order to cultivate those modes of thought [6]
...to be less onerous than learning a new language. Especially since language-learning can help and be done concurrently with these alternatives [7].
Language learning is also something that can help with community bonding, which would probably be helpful to the substantial-seeming portion of EAs who are kind of lonely and depressed. It can also help you remember what it is like to suck at something, which I think a lot of people in Rationalist spaces would benefit from more broadly, since so many of them were gifted kids who now have anxiety, and becoming comfortable with failure and iteration is also good for you and your ability to do things in general.
Travelling broadly will probably provide better results to most people, but it also costs a lot of money, even more if you need to hire a translator.
Especially with Duolingo offering endangered languages now.
Say, reading a national award-winning book from every nation in the world.
Or, preferrably, if you learn 2, given that the greatest benefits are found in trilinguals+.
I find that personally, I am more socially conservative in Spanish and more progressive in English, which has allowed me to test ideas against my own brain in a way that most monolinguals I talk to seem to find somewhat alien and much more effortful. Conversely, in French, I am not very capable, and I find that quite useful because it allows me to force myself to simplify my ideas on the grounds that I am literally unable to express the complex version.
+ [whatever else I haven’t thought of yet that would help obtain these benefits]
Music terminology is often in French or Italian, learning languages will just broaden your vocabulary for crossword puzzles, knowing another language is a gateway to communities that were previously closed to you, and you can engage in reading different translations of something more easily if you can also just read it in the original language.
TBH I think that half-joking take should probably be engaged with more seriously (maybe say, pursuing more translations of EA works into Igbo or something), and I’m glad to hear it.
I think you might have misunderstood my comment.
I, as someone who is at least trying to be an EA, and who can speak two languages fluently and survive in 3 more, would “count” as an EA who is not from “Anglosphere West”, and who has read world literature. So yes, I know I exist.
My point is that EA, as a community, should encourage that kind of thing among its members. And it really doesn’t. Yes, people can do it as a personal project, but I think EA generally puts a lot of stock on people doing what are ultimately fairly difficult things (like, self-directed study of AI) without providing a consistent community with accountability that would help them achieve those things. And I think that the WEIRD / Anglosphere West / etc. demographic bias of EA is part of the reason why this seems to be the case.
Yes, it is possible to want a perspective to survive in the future without being particularly well-versed in it. I theoretically would not want Hinduism to go extinct in 50 years and can want that without knowing a whole lot about Hinduism.
That said, in order to know what will allow certain worldviews, and certain populations to thrive, you need to understand them at least a little. And if you’re going to try to maximize the good you do for people, which would include a LOT of people who are not Anglosphere West. If I genuinely thought that Hinduism was under threat of extinction and wanted to do something about it, trying to do that without learning anything about Hinduism would be really short-sighted of me.
Given that most human beings for most of history have not been WEIRD in the Heinrich sense, and that a lot of currently WEIRD people are becoming less so (increase in antidemocratic sentiment, the affordability crisis and rising inequality) it is reasonable to believe that the future people EA is so concerned with will not be particularly WEIRD. And if you want to do what is best for that population, there should be more effort put into ensuring they will be WEIRD in some fashion[1] or into ensuring that EA interventions will help non-WEIRD people a meaningful amount in ways that they will value. Which is more than just malaria nets.
And like… I haven’t seen that conversation.
I’ve seen allusions to it. But I haven’t really seen it. Nor have I seen EA engage with the “a bunch of philosophers and computer scientists got together and determined that the most important thing you can be is a philosopher or computer scientist” critique particularly well, nor have I seen EA engage very well with the question of lowering the barriers of entry (which I also received a fairly unhelpful response to when I posited it, which boiled down to “well you understand all of the EA projects that you’re not involved in and create lower barriers of entry for all of them”, which again comes back to the problem that EA creates a community and then doesn’t seem to actually use it to do the things communities are good for..?).
So I think it’s kind of a copout to just say “well, you can care in this theoretical way about perspectives you don’t understand”, given that part of the plan of EA, and the success condition is to affect those people’s lives meaningfully.
Not to mention the question of “promoting” vs “understanding”.
Should EA promote, iunno, fascism, on a community level? Obviously not.
Should EA seek to understand fascism, and authoritarianism more broadly, as a concerning potential threat that has arisen multiple times and could arise yet again with greater technological and military force in the future? Fucking definitely.
The closest thing to this is the “liberal norms” political career path as far as I’m aware, but I think both paths should be taken concurrently and that OR is inclusive, yet the second is largely neglected.
Just regarding this bit: “MacAskill, Ord and others seem to me to have advocated a highly pluralistic future in which humanity is able to reflect on its values.”
I have posited, multiple times, in different EA spaces, that EAs should learn more languages in order to be better able to think, better able to understand perspectives further removed from that which they were raised in, healthier (trilinguals are massively protected against dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc), etc.
And the response I have received has been broadly “eh” or at best “this is interesting but I don’t know if it’s worth EAs time”.
I have not seen any EA “world literature” circles based around trying to expand their horizons to perspectives as far from their own as possible. I have not seen any EA language learning groups. I have not seen any effort put towards using the EA community (that is so important to build!) in order to enable individual EAs to become better at understanding radically different perspectives, etc.
So like… Iunno, I don’t buy the “it’s not a problem we’re mostly wealthy white guys” argument. It seems to me like a lot of EAs don’t know what they don’t know, and don’t realize the axes along which they could not-know-things on top. They don’t behave the way people who are genuinely invested in a more pluralistic vision of the future would behave. And they don’t react positively to proposals that aim to improve that.
I don’t think the “Volunteer” section features any of the things that are like what I’m thinking about. And the same is true of anything that would reasonably fit on the board.
Like, here are some things I think people who are just starting out could easily help with:
Spell-checking
Citation-finding
Cross-referencing
Signal-boosting
Data entry
Cleaning up images, text, etc.
Centralizing some bits of information
Off the top of my head. Things a twelve-year-old could do. Things someone can do when they’re a little bit drunk. Things tired people who like the idea but are trying to throw this in between their two jobs or something can do. Low barrier of entry. Easy. Individual tasks you can finish in an hour.
Here are some things when you filter for volunteer:
Write entire articles for this magazine you are not eligible to write for!
Help us design and pursue creative impact litigation for animals and help us RUN A WHOLE NON-PROFIT
“Analysis and communications” but don’t worry, [you don’t NEED to have in-depth knowledge of biosecurity and pandemics! ]<- Intimidating to the insecure anxious person, who seems rather common around here
An internship to the Office of the Secretary of Defense / Washington Headquarters Services.
An accountability buddy system for people who are largely independently pursuing upskilling in the realm of AI safety
Independent AI Safety Distillation, in which you’re basically a science communicator but about AI.
Research, Communications, Operations, or Resilience jobs.
Writer a newsletter.
A fairly vague fellowship that seems like it’s supposed to be prestigious and hard to get but the application is kind of weird so I’m not sure what to think about this one but it’s a 1-year commitment, which is part of my point here.
Help coordinate locally around effective giving projects, work closely with fellow ambassadors, undergo training.
I could go on. The next ten are not radically different from the first ten. All of these things are big commitments. Most of them are basically jobs. Which is, to my understanding, what the board is for, right? So that makes sense. None of these are a thing a person could do to “test the waters” for 20 minutes every night for a week, or every other thursday.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is the wiki, insofar as people can edit it. It seems to be well-maintained, and doesn’t have an easily-available “this article is a stub, you can help by expanding it” shortlist. That would be an obvious low-hanging-fruit here.
Maybe after I’ve spent more time here, I can more reasonably do something like that myself, but it seems like something that requires a much more comprehensive understanding of current ongoing projects than I have, and a much more “inside” view so to speak. A lot of these tasks seem to be getting done by having people whose job it is to do them, given the proliferation of personal assistant / executive assistant stuff going on. But once again, those are jobs, there isn’t exactly a pipeline in which you can get involved by slowly increasing the extent of your participation, beyond maybe making arguments here.
I’m comfortable doing that, because I like arguing and am not very invested in this community yet. But that’s because I got lucky. If I was more anxious and insecure, I probably would not be interacting, and as there is no clear and obvious way of participating on the smaller scale, I would not be able to “build up to” interacting.
I have seen a few different posts here that boil down to “but what if I’m not a genius? :( ” and many of the answers are kind of silly (“you might secretly be a genius!”, “have hope, you can find a genius and do things to free up their time!”). The steelman of it is the argument from comparative advantage iirc, but that argument has this problem (which EA seems to have just in general too?) of demanding a lot of initiative on the part of people who are just starting out, have no idea how anything works, may feel overwhelmed by information, etc.
There should be a list, somewhere, of tasks. Simple things like any data entry/tagging for a project that can be reasonably outsourced to internet randos, spell or grammar checking for something, little internal research surveys new members can fill out, source-finding for some claims, cleaning up images, signal-boosting, etc.
There are a lot of relatively small tasks that are relatively easy to crowdsource, that people who are trying to participate but don’t know how could be funneled towards while they get involved, such that they can see themselves clearly helping, very quickly, without having to be geniuses or do six hundred hours of reading.
This can in turn
facilitate identity-building (people care more about a thing when they have participated in it)
enable people who are insecure and anxious (which seems to be a fairly common affliction among EAs) to accumulate fairly easy evidence in their favour
familiarize people with currently-existing projects
lower the barrier of entry for new projects (if you can count on some people helping you, it will seem less daunting to start), which will help speed up iteration
create a clear direction for people who are anxious about their intellect to start with, so they’re not adrift/overwhelmed by information/etc.
actually free up time, for the people whose time is better spent not doing those tasks, which is what the original point about the comparative advantage was.
Seems like a fairly low-hanging fruit.
If this already exists, it should be made more obviously available to people, and “what if I’m not smart?” posts should have redirection towards it as a default response.
Thanks!
Re: specific languages, I think there’s a few ways to think about it.
In terms of “best for your brain” re:dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc:
I think the more different the better. So if your first language is synthetic, you should go with an analytic language and vice versa. In that same vein of thought, any language that has another alphabet and/or an entirely alternative writing system would be better too. Honourable mention also for sign languages, which combine additional motor skill practice on top of the linguistic and visual processing brain workout, and also everyone should know a bit of sign language anyway, because sometimes places are really loud or your throat is sore and it’s hard to talk.
So, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Javanese, ASL, etc.
-
In terms of trying to intellectually “weaponize” languages:
Any language that can be very easily and comfortably associated with a specific mode of thought. E.g. If you were very interested in reading a lot of communist philosophy in the original Russian, and wanted to create a “communist “mode in your brain, or if you were very interested in learning to think more about theology and metaphysics (I personally think a lot of old metaphysics philosophical takes are going to start becoming much more useful in the near future with the rise of AI and hyperglobalization) and wanted to read a lot of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, or old Catholic philosophy in Latin, Islamic philosophy in Arabic, etc.
The priority there is a language that has a very rich “backlog” of the thing you want to work with intellectually.
So that would be things like Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, etc.
One interesting note about the “mode” thing is that this is the one place where a language being dead might actually be a plus. But studying a dead language has its own drawbacks and is usually more demanding.
-
In terms of trying to avoid being WEIRD / blinded by your own WEIRD-ness:
Native/Indigenous languages. Most languages considered “native”, and most languages that are predominantly spoken by populations that did not have a lot of industrialization 50 years ago generally, will still have a lot of the affectations, vocabulary, and other interesting features of their recent history, and will have a lot of stories, sayings, and associated modes of thought that are non-WEIRD.
So, Navajo, Cherokee, Igbo, Cree, Quechua, Maori, etc.
A lot of them are simply going to be missing the words for a lot of things, which means that in the process of translating something, you’ll have to reverse-engineer what the thing in question is and what you should call it, which I think is generally really good for intellectual rigour.
Long time lurker first time poster here. I want to make this a bigger post, but also am not sure if I will be a good fit in this environment, so instead of sitting down and getting all my citations in a row, I’ll just do this to test the waters.
Knowing 3 languages can stave off dementia, if you want to live longer and have a more useful healthspan it’s a relatively easy intervention that is also just generally good for you.
A lot of the things you can do to learn a new language (joining a club, moving to a new country, etc) are probably good for you anyway.
It creates redundancy networks. This one I don’t actually have a lot of evidence for yet, but I suffer from debilitating migraines and at one point I got one so bad that I went literally non-verbal. My ability to communicate in English was shot. My ability to communicate in Spanish and French was not. While I haven’t tracked down the research, I also know that polyglots supposedly have better outcomes when they receive, say, traumatic head injuries.
Learning a new language, and practicing learning new vocabulary generally, is a good way to strengthen your ability to code-switch, which is important both in general social terms and in terms of becoming comfortable with terminology when specializing in an area of study.
A lot of philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, focuses on what ends up being linguistic analysis with extra steps. I have a degree in philosophy, and I have found that it is very frequently illuminating, when taking apart an argument, to just translate it into another language.
Similarly, while the sapir-worf hypothesis is certainly true in the weak form and certainly kind of useless in the strong form, language can create modes of thought. I find, for example, due to the way I was raised, that I can “activate” a more conservative set of gut instincts by thinking in Spanish. The answer is not necessarily that Spanish is a “more conservative” language, but that when I learned Spanish and I built up intuitions about the world in Spanish, I was surrounded by more conservative people. I think this is actually a super useful thing, and am trying to do it “on purpose” by learning additional languages specifically to read a certain type of literature / research, in order to shape specific intuitions about that in that language. Being able to turn on and off gut-level intuitions by changing the language you operate in seems to me to be an invaluable skillset, both to be able to properly understand arguments and to be able to communicate with different audiences even when you’re operating on the same language.
Reading things in the original language is very nice, and a lot of translations to English suck the soul out of things.
Being able to read rarer works, works that are untranslated, older works, etc. is a good thing generally for anyone who wants to broaden their intellectual horizons.
A lot of EA stuff feels very attached to English and english-language modes of thinking. When I see the growing amount of EA things in Spanish, one thing I notice is the visceral disdain and disinterest with which I experience it, in contrast to the English versions where it feels more “normal” and less “annoying” to me. I think that in general, a lot of the way that EAs approach the world is very atomized, structured, etc, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s not, however, super persuasive to most people who don’t already think in that way. Understanding the different gut-level reactions and being better able to communicate ideas inside a non-English-speaking context is important and will be more important in the future.
EAs are very WEIRD in the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” sense.
If
EAs care about the welfare of humanity in general, and care about preference-satisfaction, quality of life, etc.
AND
most of people for most of history have not had the features that EAs have, had different priorities, think in different terms, etc.
THEN
I think it’s kind of obvious that EAs have to have some massive blind spots, perhaps ones I share and am therefore not able to properly articulate, in the same way that if Buddhist monks or Pagans or some other relatively small population that shares a lot of traits within itself but not a lot of traits with the human population at large, would have some pretty massive blind spots.
And since EAs are trying to put themselves in positions to make decisions that could alter the course of humanity and could affect billions of people far into the future, having some sort of check on those blind spots in the form of learning a language and culture that is not WEIRD would be a good thing.
I’ll edit this into a bigger post with citations or something if anyone actually cares / thinks this is worth engaging with.
Hi,
I have a BASc in Philosophy and Psychology. I’m still trying to figure out how I could do anything useful here, so maybe someone could help me out.
I’m 27 years old, and currently work in an after-school program teaching children music. I tend to have a talent for accelerated learning (I am currently teaching piano, violin, guitar, ukulele and drums, and have now been teaching at least two of those instruments for as long or longer than it took me to learn them to a level where I can teach them). That’s sadly coupled with a lack of consistent emotional investment, though, so I have not been able to successfully capitalize on it.
I got 94th percentile on Verbal in the GRE and a perfect 6 in writing, but a 30th percentile on quant (it bothers me personally that a score that would have been an A- in most educational contexts I’ve experienced, or perhaps a B+ in some of the more rigorous ones in absolute terms was so low, as I think that’s misleading, but that is the nature of the skew in the distribution I guess). I had a 3.6 GPA in my last 2 years and a 3.3 GPA cummulative. All from a relatively unremarkable university. I am also disabled in such a way that I cannot count on my own reliability for prolonged periods of time, which makes everything harder, but because I’m “so smart” (according to the people around me) it seems rather wasteful that I haven’t found anything I can have a higher impact on thus far.
This means that, when dealing with 80,000 hours, etc, I find it rather hard to see what is actually applicable to me. I find it rather unlikely that I will get into a “top 20 school”, for example, which is a fairly recurrent pattern in all of the academic paths (which professors told me over and over that I should pursue during my undergrad).
This is not a way of despairing (“Oh no! Can I even make the world better if I don’t have a perfect score on one unnecessarily expensive test?!”) but instead a personal angle through which I can bring up that:
1.) I don’t believe that 80,000 hours provides actually useful advice to people who are not exoribitantly high achievers (or at least, it hasn’t provided it for me thus far and I’ve been checking it out on and off for like 7 years at this point).
2.) I do believe that people here can provide such advice, so it would be nice if I could receive some.
On top of that, I’ve been nursing a notion that it might be a good idea to make “rationality”, “futurism” or even “emotional resilience” summer camps for children, and if anybody is interested in a project like that, please let me know.