AI safety + community health
pete
Karma: 498
The “Career progression and earning potential” section was so difficult to read; I know the point is to raise awareness about expectation-setting and not viewing men as default, but the point that sticks in my mind is the old “having kids is a career killer.”
As a woman on the fence about having kids, the thought of literally making the world worse (not saving 6.8 lives) for something that would also damage my career is...so awful. Calling this information to others’ attention needs to be done with care to avoid the sort of “women are less valuable EAs according to math” conclusion. I know this isn’t the conclusion, and I know we care about the same problem (women doing well in EA). But I found this post profoundly discouraging.
Replying to this because I don’t think this is a rare view, and I’m concerned about it. Met someone this week who seemed to openly view cults as a template (flawed, but useful) and was in the process of building a large compound overseas where he could disseminate his beliefs to followers who lived onsite. By his own admission, he was using EA as a platform to launch multiple(?) new genuine religions.
In light of the Leverage Research incident, we should expect and keep an eye out for folks using the EA umbrella to actually start cults.
It’s also important to note that with many (I think 86% at last survey) EAs being nonreligious, it can be relatively easy for EA to play that role in people’s lives. The cultural template is there, and it’s powerful.
Huge GWWC fan here—excited to do exactly this!
Strong upvote—I found your perspective really fresh:
”The most likely case to me is that if AI x-risk is solved or turns out not to be a serious issue, and we just keep facing x-risks in proportion to how strong our technology gets, forever. Eventually we draw a black ball and all die.”Lots of us are considering a career pivot into AI safety. Is it...actually tractable at all? How hopeful should we be about it? No idea.
Thank you for running the survey and sharing the results—super valuable to the community.
While raising young children, how much of the time did you feel happy vs. frustrated? Did you feel able to think clearly?
(I don’t think these are the most important considerations about having kids, but I’m curious.)
Worth noting that celebrating this day is one of my very favorite things about EA. Cheers, everyone!
I’d be curious to learn about CEA’s content moderation strategy re: preparing for significant participation growth on the Forum after What We Owe the Future has been published. The Forum’s user experience is going to change, and other communities have already experienced this. We shouldn’t be taken by surprise.
I had no idea what a shortform really was, so following this post
One to add to the list: a highly critical review from Salon (also by Emile Torres) here: https://www.salon.com/2022/08/20/understanding-longtermism-why-this-suddenly-influential-philosophy-is-so/
For personal spending, it should just be guidelines / recommendations that people can follow at will. For EA orgs’ money, it can be more like “we usually don’t comp first class plane tickets, talk to us if your situation is different”
You make good points here. EA can’t scale without hard conversations about resources—and we also can’t scale if every financial decision is also a cause prioritization decision AND an assessment of our own expected future contribution. That’s impossible and nuts.
Let’s borrow from the private sector some good heuristics about money (transportation rules of thumb, ex: coach for flights under 5hrs and business class for 5hr+, or literally anything like that). Get smart finance people, have them set policies, and then let the rest of us stay accountable but otherwise not think about it.
Many EAs think there’s a large chance of extinction by 2100, so it’s a qualified optimism at most. Not to rain on your parade—I feel optimism that EA exists and it’s my own optimism that drew me to EA.
Techno pessimism is trendy, snark is trendy, climate doomerism is trendy. There’s also a time honored tradition of using newspaper comment boards specifically for complaining, which predates digital papers (see: letters to the editor). I’d be hard pressed to find anything that moves far off that base rate.
That said, I expected 60⁄40 positive to negative. This is a super helpful way to see sentiment at a glance and I’d be so excited to see a compilation extended across other articles (ex: the negative Salon piece) and maintained over time.
Fantastic post—look forward to sharing it with others in the future!
One note: is it possible to update the designers summary? “Making things look pretty”may not communicate the value of their work, which is often highly nuanced and strategic.
I like this take. Seems like this fits in a broader discussion of how rigorously we should try to line up actions with principles, ex: going vegan, not flying for climate, or more extreme things like going zero waste
Strong upvote. Great post.
What makes communities more (or less) successful at cultivating self-compassion? What are “red flags” that groups can identify when culture may be tilting towards passively or actively encouraging self-criticism?
Good luck—hope you find someone :)