I am the director of Tlön, an organization 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.
Cool. I’d be interested in tentatively providing this search for free on EA News via the OpenAI API, depending on monthly costs. Do you know how to implement it?
Very interesting. I’d personally appreciate a full post.
The board’s behavior was grossly unprofessional
You had no evidence to justify that claim back when you made it, and as new evidence is released, it looks increasingly likely that the claim was not only unjustified but also wrong (see e.g. this comment by Gwern).
Does anyone know where I can find something like that?
You can take a look at the ‘Further reading’ section of criticism of effective altruism, the articles so tagged, and the other tags starting with “criticism of” in the ‘Related entries’ section.
I’m not sure how to react to all of this, though.
Kudos for being uncertain, given the limited information available.
(Not something one cay say about many of the other comments to this post, sadly.)
I still tend to agree the expected value of the future is astronomical (e.g. at least 10^15 lives), but then the question is how easily one can increase it.
If one grants that the time of perils will last at most only a few centuries, after which the per-century x-risk will be low enough to vindicate the hypothesis that the bulk of expected value lies in the long-term (even if one is uncertain about exactly how low it will drop), then deprioritizing longtermist interventions on tractability grounds seems hard to justify, because the concentration of total x-risk in the near-term means it’s comparatively much easier to reduce.
Hi Vasco,
I can see the above applying for some definitions of time of perils and technological maturity, but then I think they may be astronomically unlikely.
What do you think about these considerations for expecting the time of perils to be very short in the grand scheme of things? It just doesn’t seem like the probability of possible future scenarios decays nearly fast enough to offset their greater value in expectation.
Semi-tangential question: what’s the rationale for making the reactions public but the voting (including the agree/disagree voting) anonymous?
Here’s an article by @Brian_Tomasik enumerating, and briefly discussing, what strike me as most of the relevant considerations for and against publishing in academia.
The ‘citability’ consideration also applies to Wikipedia, which requires that all claims be supported by “reliable sources” (and understands that notion quite narrowly). For example, many concepts developed by the rationalist and EA communities cannot be the subject of a Wikipedia article merely because they have not received coverage in academic publications.
There are a handful of bottlenecks and a number of ways to decompose this problem. To get started on subproblems, one of us (Ethan) is working on a list of suggestions, which we will backlink here.
@eca, did you end up writing this list?
I don’t understand your underlying model of human psychology. Sam Bankman-Fried was super-rich and powerful, but is now the kind of person no one would touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole. If the claim is that humans tend to like super-rich and powerful people even after they become disgraced, that seems false based on informal evidence.
In any case, from what I know about Bankman-Fried and his actions, the claim that he did not knowingly steal customer money doesn’t strike me as obviously false, and in line with my sense that much of his behavior is explained by a combination of gross incompetence and pathological delusion.
Effective Altruism News also offers this: just click ‘Run this search externally’ after typing your search query. We currently index ~350 sites.
Thanks for the feedback! Although I am no longer working on this project, I am interested in your thoughts because I am currently developing a website with Spanish translations, which will also feature a system where each tag is also a wiki article and vice versa. I do think that tags and wiki articles have somewhat different functions and integrating them in this way can sometimes create problems. But I’m not sure I agree that the right approach is to map multiple tags onto a single article. In my view, a core function of a Wiki is to provide concise definitions of key terms and expressions (as a sort of interactive glossary), and this means that one wants the articles to be as granular as the tags. The case of “AI safety” vs. “AI risk” vs. “AI alignment” seems to me more like a situation where the underlying taxonomy is unclear, and this affects the Wiki entries both considered as articles and considered as tags. But perhaps there are other cases I’m missing.
Tagging @Lizka and @Amber Dawn.
But if they both use microdooms, they can compare things 1:1 in terms of their effect on the future, without having to flesh out all of the post-agi cruxes.
I don’t think this is the case for all key disagreements, because people can disagree a lot about the duration of the period of heightened existential risk, whereas microdooms are defined as a reduction in total existential risk rather than in terms of per-period risk reduction. So two people can agree that AI safety work aimed at reducing existential risk will decrease risk by a certain amount over a given period, but one may believe such work averts 100x as many microdooms as the other because they believe the period of heightened risk is 100x shorter.
“the attainment of capabilities affording a level of economic productivity and control over nature close to the maximum that could feasibly be achieved.” (Nick Bostrom (2013) ‘Existential risk prevention as global priority’, Global Policy, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 19.)
Loneliness in a house share situation depends entirely on whether your housemates are good, and there is no guarantee that your co-workers are good housemates just because they are EA.
The most plausible version of this argument is not that someone will be a good housemate just because they are EA. It is that banning or discouraging EA co-living makes it more difficult for people to find any co-living arrangement.
Thanks for the update: I have retracted the relevant part of my previous comment.
Talking with some physicist friends helped me debunk the many worlds thing Yud has going.
Yudkowsky may be criticized for being overconfident in the many-worlds interpretation, but to feel that you have “debunked” it after talking to some physicist friends shows excessive confidence in the opposite direction. Have you considered how your views about this question would have changed if e.g. David Wallace had been among the physicists you talked to?
Also, my sense is that “Yud” was a nickname popularized by members of the SneerClub subreddit (one of the most intellectually dishonest communities I have ever encountered). Given its origin, using that nickname seems disrespectful toward Yudkowsky.
The Summary of posts in the sequence alone was super useful. Perhaps the RP team would like to include it, or a revised version of it, in the sequence introduction?