OscarD🔸

Karma: 2,123

OscarD🔸 15 Mar 2026 19:22 UTC
12 points
4 ∶ 0
on: GHD discussion here is slowly dying
While I don’t work in GHD, I still enjoy reading GHD content on the Forum and on Substack. I agree that interesting questions in GHD are far from solved, but I wonder if a lot of the low-hanging intellectual fruit has been picked (your number 5)? I wasn’t around in early GiveWell days but I imagine that would have been an amazing time to be thinking about GHD and coming up with lots of new approaches and ideas. I haven’t found GiveWell’s research to be that surprising or interesting lately for instance (vibes-based, I don’t engage that closely with them anymore).
I would be keen to hear more from CE charities about what things they are learning and what questions they are facing!
Re your solution #2, I think I probably wouldn’t want the Forum team to show ‘favouritism’, but the decline of GHD curated posts is interesting, and maybe that should change.

OscarD🔸 15 Mar 2026 13:51 UTC
16 points
2 ∶ 0
on: [Linkpost] Should we make grand deals about post-AGI outcomes?
I think the type of early deal that would be most valuable is where the US and China both agree to produce a joint ‘consensus’ ASI aligned to ‘the good’. In more detail:
- The US and China, as you note, are unsure who will win, and would be better off making a deal to preserve some minimum amount of future influence. But I think I am more worried than you about the costs of continued multipolarity into space colonisation. You write “Even having two alternative systems might open up the possibility for comparison, healthy competition, and moral trade.” War, threats, and unhealthy (e.g., burning the cosmic commons) competition also seem like important possibilities here.
- Instead, I think having a joint superintelligence that coordinates using our cosmic endowment would be better, with some amount of influence within the ‘moral parliament’ of the ASI for each of the US and China.
- Just that would be preferable to dividing up the universe into two camps I think—it is easier to do moral trades within one agent acting under moral uncertainty than coordinating between two agents.
- A better version, though, could involve the US and China agreeing on some core moral precepts, or just a moral reflection process, and then jointly designing a moral curriculum for the proto-ASI including plenty of Western and Chinese texts, and letting the ASI do as it sees fit. Presumably both sides genuinely believe they are right and that an appropriate moral training process for the AI will lead to liberalism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics. So this exploits the two sides having different credences (where as you note your proposed deals are possible even if both sides have the same credences). This creates a larger surplus for posisble agreements.
- Of course, agreeing to create a joint ASI could also have big nearer term benefits, e.g. avoiding racing and slowing down AI progress and investing more in safety.
This proposal is clearly very far outside the overton window currently, but I don’t think this is that much worse on feasibility than your proposed great power resource-sharing deals. It also solves the enforcement challenge as well which is convenient since we might have needed to create such a consensus AI to enforce a different sort of deal.
I am tentatively excited about this proposal, but I expect there isn’t much to do to further it until the relevant parties are taking things more seriously.

OscarD🔸 14 Mar 2026 13:42 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: quinn’s Shortform
I’m fairly sympathetic to that, but it also feels like one needs to draw a line somewhere and where they have currently drawn it seems not unreasonable to me. Though another place to draw the line kind of on the opposite extreme which could also work is just anyone who supports effective giving and is planning to donate/salary sacrifice a lot of their money. Maybe the worry is that is too fuzzy and diluting the core 10% message though.
fyi @Luke Moore 🔸

OscarD🔸 13 Mar 2026 16:24 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: quinn’s Shortform
The relevant GWWC FAQ is here and there was also a more detailed discussion here.

OscarD🔸 12 Mar 2026 20:59 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The joys of cash benchmarking
Great article! I sometimes find myself explaining cash benchmarking to people and why some charities still beat cash, and this will be a useful thing to link to going forwards :)

OscarD🔸 10 Mar 2026 8:02 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Mox is the largest AI Safety community space in San Francisco. We’re fundraising!
Seems great! Insofar as you feel comfortable saying, why isn’t this (fully) funded by cG?

OscarD🔸 7 Mar 2026 17:16 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Effective Altruism Will Be Great Again
Reasonable if you don’t want to publicly go into internecine tensions, but the obvious question seems to be how you see this relating to principles-first EA, which is, on its face, a similar idea.

OscarD🔸 4 Mar 2026 22:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: NickLaing’s Quick takes
That is encouraging! Scott’s post linking to various prediction markets for Antrhopic’s implied valuations was also heartening.

OscarD🔸 24 Feb 2026 21:17 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
Good point re communal values of the forum, seems right.
Ah, maybe I interpreted the original question differently to what you intended. SInce you said it is not about ‘post quality’ I was trying to put that aside and imagine AI-written posts that are better than human-written posts, and I think in that case I would be happy to read them. But I agree that currently I am turned off by AI writing and far prefer people write themselves in most cases. I suppose I was answering the question more in principle, i.e. if an AI-written post was amazing I would be comfortable with it, but currently they are not. So for me it is more a quality issue than fundamentally and AI-written issue (except for the communal/sentimental aspects, which I agree have value).

OscarD🔸 24 Feb 2026 18:05 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 1
on: How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
Currently, I think AI writing isn’t good enough to be better than good human users of the Forum, but I think this will quickly change, and I want to prioritise ideas and impact over who wrote the final words. I expect it will be longer before AIs are at the frontier of doing EA research and cuase-prioritization, so I think posts with only AI ideas will be bad for a longer time to come. But posts with human ideas written up well by an AI I could well imagine being better quality than most Forum writer’s posts within a year or two.
I feel differently if someone is writing something to me personally, if someone writes me a poem or a birthday card or something that has sentimental value, then AI writing reduces that. But the Forum I see as primarily content-value rather than sentimental value.

OscarD🔸 24 Feb 2026 18:01 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Moral public goods are a big deal for whether we get a good future
Nice post! Overall, I am quite sympathetic to this case. One skepticism I have is that the sorts of agents that are scope-sensitive in their ethics (and therefore linear in consensium) are probably also the ones who are fairly altruistic and therefore don’t over-weight their own interests extremely, so would fund consensium (or rather hedonium, or their preferred impartial good) regardless of what others do. It feels like you either get that welfare in distant galaxies is a huge deal, or you don’t.

OscarD🔸 14 Feb 2026 17:18 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_Althaus’s comment on: How good would a CCP-dominated AI future be?
Interesting! (And troubling—well above the lizardman constant.) It would be interesting to do some qualitative follow-up on this, maybe with having these consistently retributivist people chat with an LLM instructed to do qualitative data collection and gently nudge them towards more suffering-averse views to see how deeply held or changeable those beliefs are.

OscarD🔸 27 Jan 2026 4:55 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: arvomm’s comment on: Digital Consciousness Model Results and Key Takeaways
Yep, that all makes sense, and I think this work can still tell us something, just it doesn’t update me too much given the lack of compelling theories or much consensus in the scientific/philosophical community. This is harsher than what I actually think, but directionally, it has the feel of ‘cargo cult science’ where it has a fancy Bayesian model and lots of numbers and so forth, but if it all built on top of philosophical stances I don’t trust then it doesn’t move me much. But that said it is still interesting e.g. how wide the range for chickens is.

OscarD🔸 26 Jan 2026 4:11 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Will we get automated alignment research before an AI Takeoff?
Most areas of capabilities research receive a 10x speedup from AI automation before most areas of safety research
The biggest factors seem to me to be feedback quality/good metrics and AI developer incentives to race

OscarD🔸 26 Jan 2026 4:01 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Digital Consciousness Model Results and Key Takeaways
Nice! It strikes me that in figure 1, information is propagating upward, from indicator to feature to stance to overall probability, and so the arrows should also be pointing upward.
I think the view (stance?) I am most sympathetic to is that all our current theories of consciousness aren’t much good, so we shouldn’t update very far away from our prior, but that picking a prior is quite subjective, and so it is hard to make collective progress on this when different people might just have quite different priors for P(current AI consciousness).

OscarD🔸 23 Dec 2025 9:37 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Suggestions for Individual Donors from Coefficient Giving Staff – 2025
Why does METR not receive cG money?

OscarD🔸 23 Dec 2025 9:31 UTC
31 points
18 ∶ 0
on: Thoughts on my relationship to EA (and please donate to PauseAI US)
I have Thoughts about the rest of it, which I am not sure whether I will write up, but for now: I am sad for your Dad’s death and glad you got to prioritise spending some time with him.
I expect there is a fair bit we disagree about, but thanks for your integrity and effort and vision.

OscarD🔸 19 Dec 2025 16:54 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lukas Finnveden’s comment on: Rerunning the Time of Perils
Perhaps the main downside is people may overuse the feature and it encourages people to spend time making small comments, whereas the current system nudges people towards leaving fewer more substantive comments and less nit-picky ones? Not sure if this has been an issue on LW, I don’t read it as much.

OscarD🔸 18 Dec 2025 5:00 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Rerunning the Time of Perils
I think the value of work on climate change isn’t very impacted by this analysis, since it seems almost certianly solved post-ASI, so climate-driven catastrophic setbacks will generally occur pre-ASI and so not increase the total number of times we need to try to align ASI. Whereas nukes are less certainly solved post-ASI, given we may still be in a multipolar war-like world.

OscarD🔸 18 Dec 2025 4:58 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Rerunning the Time of Perils
In Appendix A.1, it’s not clear to me that an absolute reduction is the best way of thinking about this. Perhaps it is more natural to think in relative reductions? I suppose some interventions could probably best be modelled as absolute reductions (e.g. asteroid or supervolcano itnerventions perhaps) and others as relative reductions (doubling the amount of resources spent on alignment research?).