I am the director of Tlön, an organization that translates content related to effective altruism, existential risk, and global priorities research into various languages.
Every post, comment, or Wiki edit I authored is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Another option is to let people with a voting power of n cast a vote of any strength between 1 and n. This may be somewhat challenging from a UI perspective, though.
I think many people have a voting power of 9. I do, and I know many people with more karma than me.
That seems like a fully general counterargument against relying on medical diagnoses for anything. There are always facts that confirm a diagnosis, and then the diagnosis itself. Presumably, it is often helpful to argue that the facts confirm the diagnosis instead of simply listing the facts alone. I don’t see any principled reason for eschewing diagnoses when they are being used to support the conclusion that someone’s testimony or arguments should be distrusted.
It seems reasonably clear that there are certain psychiatric disorders such that people would be justified in refusing to engage with, or dismiss the claims of, those who suffer from them. I think the epistemically sound norm would be to ask those who argue that someone suffers from such a disorder to provide adequate evidence for the allegation.
See also Anders’s more personal reflections:
I have reached the age when I have seen a few lifecycles of organizations and movements I have followed. One lesson is that they don’t last: even successful movements have their moment and then become something else, sclerotize into something stable but useless, or peter out. This is fine. Not in some fatalistic “death is natural” sense, but in the sense that social organizations are dynamic, ideas evolve, and there is an ecological succession of things. 1990s transhumanism begat rationalism that begat effective altruism, and to a large degree the later movements suck up many people who would otherwise have been recruited by the transhumanists.
FHI did close before its time, but it is nice to know it did not become something pointlessly self-perpetuating. As we noted when summing up, 19 years is not bad for a 3-year project. Indeed, a friend remarked that maybe all organisations should have a 20-year time limit. After that, they need to be closed down and recreated if they are still useful, shedding some of the accumulated dross.
The ecological succession of organizations and movements is not all driven by good forces. A fresh structure driven by interested and motivated people is often gradually invaded by poseurs, parasites and imitators, gradually pushing away the original people (or worse, they mutate into curators, gatekeepers and administrators). Many ideas develop, flourish, become explored and then forgotten once a hype peak is passed – even if they still have merit. People burn out, lose interest, form families and have to change priorities, or the surrounding context make the movement change in nature. Dwindling activist movements may suffer “core collapse” as moderate members drift off while the hard core get more radical and pursue ever more extreme activism in order to impress each other rather than the world outside.
FHI did not do any of that. If we had a memetic failure, it was likely more along the lines of developing a shared model of the world and future that may have been in need for more constant challenge. That is one reason why I hope there will be more organizations like FHI but not thinking alike – places like CSER, Mimir, FLI, SERI, GCRI, and many others. We need the focus of a strongly connected organization to build thoughts and systems of substance but separate organizations to get mutual critique and diversity in approaches. Plus, hopefully, metapopulation resilience against individual organizational failures.
Why do you keep referring to Ives Parr as “Ives Parr”? I don’t know if that is his real name or a nom de plume, but in either case it is the name Ives Parr has chosen to use, and I think you should respect that choice; enclosing his name in scare quotes seems disrespectful.
There is a list by Sandberg here. (The other items in that post may also be of interest.)
There is now a dedicated FHI website with lists of selected publications and resources about the institute. (Thanks to @Stefan_Schubert for bringing this to my attention.)
I have taken the liberty of reinstating the images and removing the notice. @Mark Xu, I assume you are okay with this?
the result of a PR-management strategy which seems antithetical to the principles of Effective Altruism to me
This view has been asserted many times before, but to my knowledge, it has never been explicitly defended. Why is it antithetical to the principles of effective altruism to be concerned with the reputational damage certain decisions can cause, when such damage can often severely impact one’s ability to do good?
In a comment explaining his decision to seek funding for the Wytham Abbey project, Owen Cotton-Barratt expresses a similar view. Owen writes that it is “better to let decisions be guided less by what we think looks good, and more by what we think is good.” But, to state the obvious, deciding based on what is good will sometimes require giving a lot of weight to how good the decision will look to others, because those perceptions are among the circumstances affecting the impact of our actions.
There may be a more sophisticated justification for the decision procedure to never, or almost never, allow PR concerns to influence one’s decision-making. Empirically, this doesn’t look true to me, though. For better or worse, we live in a world where PR “scandals” can harm people or movements involved in them to an extreme degree. I think we should take notice of this fact, and act accordingly.
In particular, superforecasters are generally more sceptical of such short AI timelines.
Note that this is true only of some subset of superforecasters. Samotsvety’s forecasters (many of whom are superforecasters) have shorter timelines than both domain experts and general x-risk experts:
| P(AGI by 2030)[4] | P(AGI by 2050) | P(AGI by 2100) | P(AGI by this year) = 10% | P(AGI by this year) = 50% | P(AGI by this year) = 90% | |
| mean: | 0.31 | 0.63 | 0.81 | 2026 | 2041 | 2164 |
| stdev: | 0.07 | 0.11 | 0.09 | 1.07 | 8.99 | 79.65 |
| 50% CI: | [0.26, 0.35] | [0.55, 0.70] | [0.74, 0.87] | [2025.3, 2026.7] | [2035, 2047] | [2110, 2218] |
| 80% CI: | [0.21, 0.40] | [0.48, 0.77] | [0.69, 0.93] | [2024.6, 2027.4] | [2030, 2053] | [2062, 2266] |
| 95% CI[5]: | [0.16, 0.45] | [0.41, 0.84] | [0.62, 0.99] | [2023.9, 2028.1] | [2024, 2059] | [2008, 2320] |
| geomean: | 0.30 | 0.62 | 0.80 | 2026.00 | 2041 | 2163 |
| geo odds[6]: | 0.30 | 0.63 | 0.82 |
I guess most people sympathetic to existential risk reduction think the extinction risk from AI is much higher that those from other risks (as I do). In addition, existential risk as a fraction of extinction risk is arguably way higher for AI than other risks, so the consideration you mentioned will tend to make AI existential risk even more pressing? If so, people may be more interested in either tackling AI risk, or assessing its interactions with other risks.
Yes, this seems right.
As a semi-tangential observation: your comment made me better appreciate an ambiguity in the concept of importance. When I said that this was an important consideration, I meant that it could cause us to significantly revise our estimates of impact. But by ‘important consideration’ one could also mean a consideration that could cause us to significantly alter our priorities.[1] “X-risks to all life v. to humans” may be important in the first sense but not in the second sense.
Perhaps one could distinguish between ‘axiological importance’ and ‘deontic importance’ to disambiguate these two notions.
I agree that in the absence of specific examples the criticism is hard to understand. But I would go further and argue that the NB at the beginning is fundamentally misguided and that well-meaning and constructive criticism of EA orgs or people should very rarely be obscured to make it seem less antagonistic.
I would like someone write a post expanding on X-risks to all life v. to humans. Despite the importance of this consideration, it seems to have been almost completely neglected in EA discussion.
If I were to write on this, I’d reframe the issue somewhat differently than the author does in that post. Instead of a dichotomy between two types of risks, one could see it as a gradation of risks that push things back an increasing number of possible great filters. Risks to all life and risks to humans would then be two specific instances of this more general phenomenon.
Thanks for the clarification.
Yes, I agree that we should consider the long-term effects of each intervention when comparing them. I focused on the short-term effects of hastening AI progress because it is those effects that are normally cited as the relevant justification in EA/utilitarian discussions of that intervention. For instance, those are the effects that Bostrom considers in ‘Astronomical waste’. Conceivably, there is a separate argument that appeals to the beneficial long-term effects of AI capability acceleration. I haven’t considered this argument because I haven’t seen many people make it, so I assume that accelerationist types tend to believe that the short-term effects dominate.
I was trying to hint at prima facie plausible ways in which the present generation can increase the value of the long-term future by more than one part in billions, rather than “assume” that this is the case, though of course I never gave anything resembling a rigorous argument.
I do agree that the “washing out” hypothesis is a reasonable default and that one needs a positive reason for expecting our present actions to persist into the long-term. One seemingly plausible mechanism is influencing how a transformative technology unfolds: it seems that the first generation that creates AGI has significantly more influence on how much artificial sentience there is in the universe a trillion years from now than, say, the millionth generation. Do you disagree with this claim?
I’m not sure I understand the point you make in the second paragraph. What would be the predictable long-term effects of hastening the arrival of AGI in the short-term?
I think it remains the case that the value of accelerating AI progress is tiny relative to other apparently available interventions, such as ensuring that AIs are sentient or improving their expected well-being conditional on their being sentient. The case for focusing on how a transformative technology unfolds, rather than on when it unfolds,[1] seems robust to a relatively wide range of technologies and assumptions. Still, this seems worth further investigation.
Indeed, it seems that when the transformation unfolds is primarily important because of how it unfolds, insofar as the quality of a transformation is partly determined by its timing.
Recently, an OP grantee spent 5 hours of staff time opening this Chase Platinum Business Checking account which swept into this JPMorgan US Treasury Plus Money Market Fund.
I tried to open a Chase Platinum Business Checking account for a 501(c)(3) that I created recently, but it appears that they are not available for nonprofits. If one selects “Corporation” in the dropdown menu on the left, one is forced to select either “S-Corporation” or “C-Corporation” in the dropdown menu on the right, neither of which, I believe, is appropriate for a nonprofit.
Separately, I successfully opened a Wise Business account, but it has two drawbacks: (1) three months ago, Wise “temporarily” deactivated Business cards; and (2) their interest feature is unavailable for non-US-based customers (like me).
Other options mentioned in the post or comments are also, unfortunately, not suitable for my case: e.g. Mercury is not available for nonprofits, and Monzo is only available for UK-based businesses.
I would be grateful for any recommendations.
Alternatively, you could make the downvote button reduce votes by one if the vote count is positive, and vice versa. For example, after casting a +9 on a comment by strongly upvoting it, the user can reduce the vote strength to +7 by pressing the downvote button twice.