I’m currently researching forecasting and epistemics as part of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.
Ozzie Gooen
Karma: 11,373
Arguably, around FTX, it was better. EA and FTX both had strong brands for a while. And there were worlds in which the risk of failure was low.
I think it’s generally quite tough to get this aspect right though. I believe that traditionally, charities are reluctant to get their brands associated with large companies, due to the risks/downsides. We don’t often see partnerships between companies and charities (or say, highly-ideological groups) - I think that one reason why is that it’s rarely in the interests of both parties.Typically companies want to tie their brands to very top charities, if anyone. But now EA has a reputational challenge, so I’d expect that few companies/orgs want to touch “EA” as a thing.
Arguably influencers are a often a safer option—note that EA groups like GiveWell and 80k are already doing partnerships with influencers. As in, there’s a decent variety of smart YouTube channels and podcasts that hold advertisements for 80k/GiveWell. I feel pretty good about much of this.Arguably influencers are crafted in large part to be safe bets. As in, they’re very incentivized to not go crazy, and they have limited risks to worry about (given they represent very small operations).
I just had Claude do three attempts at what a version of the “Voice in the Room” chart would look like as an app, targeting AI Policy. The app is clearly broken, but I think it can act as an interesting experiment.
Here the influencing parties are laid out in consecutive rings. There are lines connecting connected organizations. There’s also a lot of other information here.
I agree.
I didn’t mean to suggest your post suggested otherwise—I was just focusing on another part of this topic.
Nuanced Models for the Influence of Information
I mainly agree.
I previously was addressing Michael’s more limited point, “I don’t think government competence is what’s holding us back from having good AI regulations, it’s government willingness.”
All that said, separately, I think that “increasing government competence” is often a good bet, as it just comes with a long list of benefits.
But if one believes that AI will happen soon, and that a major bottleneck is “getting the broad public to trust the US government more, with the purpose of then encouraging AI reform”, that seems like a dubious strategy.
(Potential research project, curious to get feedback)
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do quantitative LLM evaluations of the value of various (mostly-EA) projects.We’d have LLMs give their best guesses at the value of various projects/outputs. These would be mediocre at first, but help us figure out how promising this area is, and where we might want to go with it.
The first idea that comes to mind is “Estimate the value in terms of [dollars, from a certain EA funder] as a [probability distribution]”. But this quickly becomes a mess. I think this couples a few key uncertainties into one value. This is probably too hard for early experiments.
A more elegant example would be “relative value functions”. This is theoretically nicer, but the infrastructure would be more expensive. It helps split up some of the key uncertainties, but would require a lot of technical investment.
One option that might be interesting is asking for a simple rank order. “Just order these projects in terms of the expected value.” We can definitely score rank orders, even though doing so is a bit inelegant.
So one experiment I’m imagining is:
We come up with a list of interesting EA outputs. Say, a combination of blog posts, research articles, interventions, etc. From this, we form a list of maybe 20 to 100 elements. These become public.
We then ask people to compete to rank these. A submission would be [an ordering of all the elements] and an optional [document defending their ordering].
We feed all of the entries in (2) into an LLM evaluation system. This would come with a lengthy predefined prompt. It would take in all of the provided orderings and all the provided defenses. It then outputs its own ordering.
We then score all of the entries in (2), based on how well they match the result of (3).
The winner gets a cash prize. Ideally, all submissions would become public.
This is similar to this previous competition we did.
Questions:
1. “How would you choose which projects/items to analyze?”
One option could be to begin with a mix of well-regarded posts on the EA Forum. Maybe we keep things to a limited domain for now (just X-risk), but have cover a spectrum of different amounts of karma.2. “Wouldn’t the LLM do a poor job? Why not humans?”
Having human judges at the end of this would add a lot of cost. It could easily make the project 2x as expensive. Also, I think it’s good for us to learn how to use LLMs for evaluating these competitions, as it has more long-term potential.3. “The resulting lists would be poor quality”
I think the results would be interesting, for a few reasons. I’d expect the results to be better than what many individuals would come up with. I also think it’s really important we start somewhere. It’s very easy to delay things until we have something perfect- then for that to never happen.
Thanks for the responses!
SB-1047 was adequately competently written (AFAICT). If we get more regulations at a similar level of competence, that would be reasonable.
Agreed
Getting regulators on board with what people want seems to me to be the best path to getting regulations in place.
I don’t see it as either/or. I agree that pushing for regulations is a bigger priority than AI in government. Right now the former is getting dramatically more EA resources and I’d expect that to continue. But I think the latter are getting almost none, and that doesn’t seem right to me.
Suppose it turned out Microsoft Office was dangerous. Surely the fact that Office is so embedded in government procedures would make it less likely to get banned?
I worry we’re getting into a distant hypothetical. I’d equate this to, “Given the Government is using Microsoft Office, are they likely to try to make sure that future versions of Microsoft Office are better? Especially, in a reckless way?”
Naively I’d expect a government that uses Microsoft Office to be one with a better understanding of the upsides and downsides of Microsoft Office.
I’d expect that most AI systems the Government would use would be fairly harmless (in terms of the main risks we care about). Like, things a few years old (and thus tested a lot in industry), with less computing power than would be ideal, etc.
Related, I think that the US military has done good work to make high-reliability software, due to their need for it. (Though this is a complex discussion, as they obviously do a mix of things.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this broad topic and am very sympathetic. Happy to see it getting more discussion.
I think this post correctly flags how difficult it is to get the government to change.
At the same time, I imagine there might be some very clever strategies to get a lot of the benefits of AI without many of the normal costs of integration.
For example:The federal government makes heavy use of private contractors. These contractors are faster to adopt innovations like AI.
There are clearly some subsets of the government that matter far more than others. And there are some that are much easier to improve than others.
If AI strategy/intelligence is cheap enough, most of the critical work can be paid for by donors. For example, we have a situation where there’s a think tank that uses AI to figure out the best strategies/plans for much of the government, and government officials can choose to pay attention to this.
Basically, I think some level of optimism is warranted, and would suggest more research into that area.
(This is all very similar to previous thinking on how forecasting can be useful to the government.)
I think you (Michael Dickens) are probably one of my favorite authors on your side of this, and I’m happy to see this discussion—though I myself am more on the other side.
Some quick responses
> I don’t think government competence is what’s holding us back from having good AI regulations, it’s government willingness.
I assume it can clearly be a mix of both. Right now we’re in a situation where many people barely trust the US government to do anything. A major argument for why the US government shouldn’t regulate AI is that they often mess up things they try to regulate. This is a massive deal in a lot of the back-and-forth I’ve seen on the issue on Twitter.
I’d expect that if the US government were far more competent, people would trust it to take care of many more things, including high-touch AI oversight.
> Increasing government dependency on AI systems could make policy-makers more reluctant to place restrictions on AI development because they would be hurting themselves by doing so. This is a very bad incentive.
This doesn’t seem like a major deal to me. Like, the US government uses software a lot, but I don’t see them “funding/helping software development”, even though I really think they should. If I were them, I would have invested far more in open-source systems, for instance.
My quick impression is that a competent oversight and guiding of AI systems, carefully working through the risks and benefits, would be incredibly challenging, and I’d expect any human-lead government to make gigantic errors in it. Even attempts to “slow down AI” could easily backfire if not done well. For example, I think that Democratic attempts to increase migration in the last few years might have massively backfired.
I think this is an important tension that’s been felt for a while. I believe there’s been discussion on this at least 10 years back. For a while, few people were “allowed”[1] to publicly promote AI safety issues, because it was so easy to mess things up.
I’d flag that there isn’t much work actively marketing information about there being short timelines. There’s research here, but generally EAs aren’t excited to heavily market this research broadly. I think there’s a tricky line between “doing useful research in ways that are transparent” and “not raising alarm in ways that could be damaging.”
Generally, there is some marketing on focused AI safety discussions. For example, see Robert Miles or Rational Animations.
[1] As in, if someone wanted to host a big event on AI safety, and they weren’t close to (and respected by) the MIRI cluster, they were often discouraged from this.
Quick thoughts:
I’ve previously been frustrated that “AI forecasting” has focused heavily on “when will AGI happen” as opposed to other potential strategic questions. I think there are many interesting strategic questions. That said, I think in the last 1-2 years things have improved here. I’ve been impressed by a lot of the recent work by Epoch, for instance.
My guess is that a lot of our community is already convinced. But I don’t think we’re the target market for much of this.
Interestingly, OP really does not seem to be convinced. Or, they have a few employees who are convinced of short timelines, but their broader spending really doesn’t seem very AGI-pilled to me (tons of non-AI spending, for instance). I’m happy for OP to spend more money investigating these questions, for reasons of whether OP should spend more money in this area in the future.
It sounds like you have some very specific individuals/people in mind, in terms of parts like “If your intervention is so fragile and contingent that every little update to timeline forecasts matters, it’s probably too finicky to be working on in the first place.” I’m really not sure who you are referring to here.
I’d agree that the day-to-day of “what AI came out today” gets too much attention, but this doesn’t seem like an “AI timelines” thing to me, more like an over-prioritization of recent news.
On ai-2027.com; I see this as dramatically more than answering ”when will AGI happen.” It’s trying to be very precise about what a short-timeline world would look like. This contains a lot of relevant strategic questions/discussions.
There’s a major tension between the accumulation of “generational wealth” and altruism. While many defend the practice as family responsibility, I think the evidence suggests it often goes far beyond reasonable provision for descendants.
To clarify: I support what might be called “generational health” – ensuring one’s children have the education, resources, and opportunities needed for flourishing lives. For families in poverty, this basic security represents a moral imperative and path to social mobility.
However, distinct from this is the creation of persistent family dynasties, where wealth concentration compounds across generations, often producing negative externalities for broader society. This pattern extends beyond the ultra-wealthy into the professional and upper-middle classes, where substantial assets transfer intergenerationally with minimal philanthropic diversion.
Historically, institutions like the Catholic Church provided an alternative model, successfully diverting significant wealth from pure dynastic succession. Despite its later institutional corruption, this represents an interesting counter-example to the default pattern of concentrated inheritance. Before (ancient Rome) and after (contemporary wealthy families), the norm seems to be more of “keep it all for one’s descendants.”
Contemporary wealthy individuals typically contribute a surprisingly small percentage of their assets (often below 5%) to genuinely altruistic causes, despite evidence that such giving could address pressing national and global problems. And critically, most wait until death rather than deploying capital when it could have immediate positive impact.
I’m sure that many of my friends and colleagues will contribute to this. As in, I expect some of them to store large amounts of capital (easily $3M+) until they die, promise basically all of it to their kids, and contribute very little of it (<10%) to important charitable/altruistic/cooperative causes.
Anthropic has been getting flak from some EAs for distancing itself from EA. I think some of the critique is fair, but overall, I think that the distancing is a pretty safe move.
Compare this to FTX. SBF wouldn’t shut up about EA. He made it a key part of his self-promotion. I think he broadly did this for reasons of self-interest for FTX, as it arguably helped the brand at that time.
I know that at that point several EAs were privately upset about this. They saw him as using EA for PR, and thus creating a key liability that could come back and bite EA.
And come back and bite EA it did, about as poorly as one could have imagined.
So back to Anthropic. They’re taking the opposite approach. Maintaining about as much distance from EA as they semi-honestly can. I expect that this is good for Anthropic, especially given EA’s reputation post-FTX.
And I think it’s probably also safe for EA.
I’d be a lot more nervous if Anthropic were trying to tie its reputation to EA. I could easily see Anthropic having a scandal in the future, and it’s also pretty awkward to tie EA’s reputation to an AI developer.
To be clear, I’m not saying that people from Anthropic should actively lie or deceive. So I have mixed feelings about their recent quotes for Wired. But big-picture, I feel decent about their general stance to keep distance. To me, this seems likely in the interest of both parties.
I thought this was really useful and relevant, thanks for writing it up!
I want to flag that the EA-aligned equity from Anthropic might well be worth $5-$30B+, and their power in Anthropic could be worth more (in terms of shaping AI and AI safety).
So on the whole, I’m mostly hopeful that they do good things with those two factors. It seems quite possible to me that they have more power and ability now than the rest of EA combined.That’s not to say I’m particularly optimistic. Just that I’m really not focused on their PR/coms related to EA right now; I’d ideally just keep focused on those two things—meaning I’d encourage them to focus on those, and to the extent that other EAs could apply support/pressure, I’d encourage other EAs to focus on these two.
Going meta, I think this thread demonstrates how the Agree/Disagree system can oversimplify complex discussions.
Here, several distinct claims are being made simultaneously. For example:The US administration is attempting some form of authoritarian takeover
The Manifold question accurately represents the situation
“This also incentivizes them to achieve a strategic decisive advantage via superintelligence over pro-democracy factions”
I think Marcus raises a valid criticism regarding point #2. Point #1 remains quite vague—different people likely have different definitions of what constitutes an “authoritarian takeover.”
Personally, I initially used the agree/disagree buttons but later removed those reactions. For discussions like this, it might be more effective for readers to write short posts specifying which aspects they agree or disagree with.
To clarify my own position: I’m somewhat sympathetic to point #1, skeptical of point #2 given the current resolution criteria, and skeptical of point #3.
Quick thoughts on the AI summaries:
1. Does the EA Forum support <details> / <summary> blocks, for hidden content? If so, I think that should heavily be used in these summaries.
2. If (1) is done, then I’d like sections like:
- related materials
- key potential counter-claims
- basic evaluations, using some table.
Then, it would be neat if the full prompt for this was online, and maybe if there could be discussion about it.
Of course, even better would be systems where these summaries could be individualized or something, but that would be more expensive.
Good point. And sorry you had to go through that, it sounds quite frustrating.
Have you seen many cases of this that you’re confident are correct (e.g. they aren’t lost for other reasons like working on non-public projects or being burnt out)? No need to mention specific names.
I’m sure that very few of these are explained by “non-public projects”.
I’m unsure about burnout. I’m not sure where the line is between “can’t identify high-status work to do” and burnout. I expect that the two are highly correlated. My guess is that they don’t literally think of it as “I’m low status now”, instead I’d expect them to feel emotions like resentment / anger / depression. But I’d also expect that if we could change the status lever, other negative feelings would go away. (I think that status is a big deal for people! Like, status means you have a good career, get to be around people you like, etc)
> I suspect you somewhat underrate how rare it is outside of EA to be highly committed to ~any non-self-serving principles seriously enough to sacrifice significant income and change careers.I suspect we might have different ideologies in mind to compare to, and correspondingly, that we’re not disagreeing much.
I think that a lot of recently-popular movements like BLM or even MAGA didn’t change the average lifestyle of the median participant much at all, though much of this is because they are far larger.But religious groups are far more intense, for example. Or maybe take dedicated professional specialties like ballet or elite music, which can require intense sacrifices.
In ~2014, one major topic among effective altruists was “how to live for cheap.”
There wasn’t much funding, so it was understood that a major task for doing good work was finding a way to live with little money.
Money gradually increased, peaking with FTX in 2022.
Now I think it might be time to bring back some of the discussions about living cheaply.