I am the director of Tlön, a small org that translates content related to effective altruism, existential risk, and global priorities research into multiple languages.
After living nomadically for many years, I recently moved back to my native Buenos Aires. Feel free to get in touch if you are visiting BA and would like to grab a coffee or need a place to stay.
Every post, comment, or wiki edit I authored is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
As Aaron notes, the “Petrov Day” tradition started with a post by Yudkowsky. It is indeed somewhat strange that Petrov was singled out like this, but I guess the thought was that we want to designate one day of the year as the “do not destroy the world day”, and “Petrov Day” was as good a name for it as any.
Note that this doesn’t seem representative of the degree of appreciation for Petrov vs. Arkhipov within the EA community. For example, the Future of Humanity Institute has both a Petrov Room and an Arkhipov Room (a fact that causes many people to mix them up), and the Future of Life Award was given both to Arkhipov (in 2017) and to Petrov (in 2018).
I think Arkhipov’s actions are in a sense perhaps even more consequential than Petrov’s, because it was truly by chance that he was present in that particular nuclear submarine, rather than in any of the other subs from the flotilla. This fact justifies the statement that, if history had repeated itself, the decision to launch a nuclear torpedo would likely not have been vetoed. The counterfactual for Petrov is not so clear.
Thanks for the extended reply. I understand your position much better now.
On a meta note about communication, I think “Substituting non-animal protein with animal protein likely gets you closer to meeting all the Dietary Reference Intakes for vitamins” is more informative, less likely to be misinterpreted, and probably more persuasive than “Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense”. (I offer this as a constructive criticism focused on one relatively minor point of how your post is written rather than as an objection to its substance.)
Unfortunately, the Emacs package that integrates org-mode with Anki is very poorly maintained and I’m no longer using it for that reason. Currently, my approach is to keep the normal deck but document how to use the add-on, both in the GitHub repository and in the EA Forum post announcing the release of the new version.
I have now uploaded a new deck with the relevant figures updated. Would you mind checking it out and telling me if it’s working correctly? I might create a separate post to announce this new version, once I add a bunch of new cards people suggested, but feedback from early testers would be valuable.
That’s pretty cool—thanks for drawing this to my attention.
I thought of adding it to the EA numbers deck, but it looks like this will force users to install the add-on. Do you happen to know if there is a way of setting things up so that the deck works normally if the add-on isn’t installed but provides the extra functionality for users who do have it installed?
It’s on my TODO list. Feel free to leave another comment in a month if I don’t update it (and keep leaving comments until I do).
EDIT (3 June 2023): Done.
Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense.
I agree with many points in this essay but was surprised by this claim. The claim is definitely not true if by “nutrient density” you mean “nutrients per calorie”, which is how that expression is generally understood in the scientific literature. I think this is also the most relevant metric when comparing how much “bang for your buck” you get from eating different types of food: if you approach this as a problem of constrained optimization, where you are optimizing for health and nutrient content is regarded as the measure of healthfulness, energy (as measured in calories) rather than, say, volume or weight is ultimately the constraint you are dealing with.
Perhaps you meant something vaguer by “nutrient density”, like “the degree to which a person’s diet would move closer to meeting their nutritional needs if a portion of this particular food were added to it”. Depending on how this idea is made more precise, the claim that “animal products are incredibly nutrient dense” might become more defensible. But this would need more elaboration and supporting evidence.
EAs are privileged and underrate the need for equity
How do you reconcile this hypothesis with the huge importance EAs assign, relative to almost everyone else, to causes that typically affect even less privileged beings than the victims of injustice and inequity social justice and progressive folk normally focus on (i.e. oppressed people in rich countries and especially in the United States)? I’m thinking of “the bottom billion” people globally, nonhuman animals in factory farms, nonhuman animals in the wild (including invertebrates), digital minds (who may experience astronomical amounts of suffering), and future people (who may never exist). EAs may still exhibit major moral blindspots and failings, but if we do much better than most people (including most of our critics) in the most extreme cases, it is hard to see why we may be overlooking (as opposed to consciously deprioritizing) the most mundane cases.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m no longer working on the Wiki and I’m not sure there’s currently someone designated to approve or provide feedback on the proposals. Maybe @Lizka can comment?
Protesting at leading AI labs may be significantly more effective than most protests, even ignoring the object-level arguments for the importance of AI safety as a cause area. The impact per protester is likely unusually big, since early protests involve only a handful of people and impact probably scales sublinearly with size. And very early protests are unprecedented and hence more likely (for their size) to attract attention, shape future protests, and have other effects that boost their impact.
I thought the recent Hear This Idea podcast episode with Ben Garfinkel was excellent. If you are at all interested in AI governance (or AI safety generally), you probably want to check it out.
I feel pretty strongly against “weird hugboxing” but I think the main negative effect is an erosion of our own epistemic standards and a reduction in the degree to which we can epistemically defer to one another. I want the EA community to consist of people whose pronouncements I can fully trust, rather than have to wonder if they are saying something because it reflects their considered judgment on that topic or instead because they are signaling good faith, “steelmanning”, etc.
Thanks. I hadn’t seen that post, nor most of the arguments against steelmanning that Rob Bensinger mentions. I thought I was expressing a less popular view than now seems to me to be the case. I found it particularly interesting to read that Holden Karnofsky finds it unsatisfying to engage with “steelmanned” versions of his views.
I agree with you that steelmanning in the context of a discussion with others or of interpreting the views of others is importantly different from steelmanning in your own inner monologue, and I think the latter may be justified in some cases. Specifically, I think steelmanning can indeed be useful as a heuristic device for uncovering relevant considerations for or against some view as part of a brainstorming session. This seems pretty different from how steelmanning is typically applied, though.
I liked your comment but disagree with this part:
I welcome attempts to steelman parts of this book[1], or associated works, as I do think it is important for EA to understand and to engage with our critics.
I think “steelmanning” a view is not something we should generally strive to do, and I wish people stopped treating the inclination to “steelman” an opponent as a sign of epistemic virtue. “Steelmanning” is a pretty poor hueristic for many reasons, including that (1) it lacks the resources to distinguish views that may deserve to be steelmanned from views that ought to be dismissed as nonsense; (2) it is an instance of countering a potential bias in one direction with a bias in the opposite direction, which will often result in excessive correction, insufficient correction, or unnecessary correction; and (3) it often impedes understanding and communication, since the “steelmanned” version of a view may bear little resemblance to what its proponent intended.
As superior alternatives to “steelmanning”, I would suggest trying to pass the ideological Turing test, writing a hypothetical apostasy, and being willing to turn disagreements into bets (a practice which, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, “concentrates the mind wonderfully”).
Thank you. Yes, unfortunately there are a number of transcription errors I corrected in the original that still remain in this and the other copies of this article. I just made a note to try to clean this up.
Hi Ubuntu,
I’m not sure if you are already aware of it, but we featured a conversation with Petra in an early issue of our newsletter, where she discusses some of these topics (including probability discounting and its implications for longtermism). I mention it in case it helps clarify some of the claims she makes in the paper.
Thank you, Vasco.
The transcript of this talk has some errors, e.g.:
“bleeding cause of biodiversity” (should be “leading cause of biodiversity”)
“birth of publicly available research” (should be “dearth of publicly available research”)
“Guzhu Institute” (should be “Good Food Institute”)