Peter Wildeford

Karma: 20,191

Peter Wildeford 26 Mar 2026 14:18 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: AGI & Animals: Discussion Thread
No

Peter Wildeford 25 Mar 2026 16:22 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 1
on: AGI & Animals: Discussion Thread
There are two ways to interpret this claim.

One is to interpret this claim as causal—“the things that cause AGI to go well for humans also cause AGI to go well for animals”.

In general, my concern here is something like “AGI gets aligned primarily based on 2025-era human values by imitation learning and doesn’t magically converge on my ideal philosophy”. I think what happens to animals after that would be fairly contingent on human moral evolution.

Another is to interpret the claim as evidentiary—“what happens to animals conditional only on things going well for humans by any means?” In this sense, we likely do have ensuing transformative economic growth and rapid technological advancement, which likely shifts society away from factory farming. Especially as society becomes primarily digital and/or spacefaring, factory farming likely is not economically suited for that. Though I think this is far from guaranteed.

I’m hedging between both these interpretations, which is why I end up somewhere in the middle.

Peter Wildeford 28 Feb 2026 20:13 UTC
60 points
35 ∶ 1
on: CEA’s response to sexual harassment
Wow, this situation is fucked up. You should never have had to go through all of this. I’m deeply disturbed by how this was handled.

Peter Wildeford 13 Feb 2026 9:58 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: alesziegler’s comment on: alesziegler’s Quick takes
Hi—thanks for this comment. As someone working on export control policy, let me give you my perspective.

Firstly, an important precondition for a cooperative pause is leverage. You don’t get China to agree to a mutual pause by first giving away your main strategic advantage. You get them to agree by making the alternative to be “a race they’re losing”, which is worse than cooperation. Export controls are thus part of what creates the conditions for being able to pause. If you equalize compute access first, China has no reason to agree to a pause because they’d be in a great position to race.

This is basic negotiation theory. You don’t just disarm and hand over your weapons before the arms control treaty; you disarm as part of the treaty.

More critically, export controls are already priced in. The US has maintained semiconductor restrictions on China since October 2022, tightening them in 2023 and again in 2024, before loosening them late last year. The core diplomatic costs of these controls have already been paid. Easing controls now doesn’t recoup that trust. China won’t say “oh great, all is forgiven”. But easing controls does give away the strategic advantage those controls purchased.

I’d also dispute that placing chip export controls on a state makes them a “pariah state”. Restricting dual-use technology exports to strategic competitors is completely normal behavior among non-pariah states. Similarly to how we might restrict F-35 technology, nuclear technology, satellite components, rocket launch components, etc., to many countries.

Peter Wildeford 11 Jan 2026 1:47 UTC
65 points
17 ∶ 0
on: Donating Everything: Update
Hi! I’m a long time effective altruist (14+ years) and utilitarian/utilitarian-adjacent. This is a sweet and earnest post—you’re clearly bright and I admire your dedication at such a young age. You’re right to recognize that burnout isn’t utilitarian, but I worry that your “donate everything / camper van” framing is premature and probably wrong.

At age ¹⁴⁄₁₅, the highest-EV move is almost always building optionality, not making binding commitments to extreme frugality. You’re right to maximize income, but I think you’re thinking too much about this in terms of “save money” and not enough in terms of “earn more money”. Your comparative advantage at 14 is completely unknown. You might become a researcher, policy person, entrepreneur, or earn-to-give—these all have very different optimal life strategies. And your ability to find and execute on the best path, and do that path well, will certainly lead to higher impact in the long-run than self-sacrificing immensely right now. I think moving into an apartment or a house is compatible with being a utilitarian. For example, Peter Singer lives in a house, as did a lot of other historical utilitarians.

Also… “Living alone would cause a huge debt of social interaction, causing me to die earlier” is… technically true but also a somewhat alienating way to think about relationships? Friends aren’t just longevity inputs. Be careful not to instrumentalize everything—that path leads to feeling disconnected and often to abandoning the whole framework.

Advice I’d give:
- Read 80,000 Hours carefully—they’ve thought hard about sustainable high-impact careers.
- Don’t plan the camper van. Plan to learn, explore, and keep options open. You can donate 20% of your income without giving up everything.
- AP Calc will be fine if you’re doing well now.

Peter Wildeford 31 Dec 2025 22:38 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The Most Neglected Intervention in Effective Altruism: Electoral Reform
Hi. Thanks for writing this. I find electoral reform to be a genuinely interesting cause area, and I appreciate the effort to apply EA frameworks to it. I have a few concerns with the framing and some factual details:

On neglectedness: The claim that this is “the most neglected intervention in EA” doesn’t match the track record. The Center for Election Science has received over $2.4M from Open Philanthropy, $100K from EA Funds, and $40K+ from SFF. 80,000 Hours has a problem profile on voting reform calling it a “potential highest priority area” and did a full podcast episode with Aaron Hamlin. There’s also a dedicated EA Forum topic page, and another post appeared today advocating for CES funding. This doesn’t mean additional funding isn’t warranted, but framing this as EA’s “most neglected” area overstates the case.

On the theory of change: The post seems to conflate two distinct interventions: (1) running congressional candidates on electoral reform platforms to “prevent authoritarian consolidation” in 2026, and (2) actually implementing approval voting + top-four primaries long-term. The “$125M protects $400B” framing treats these as equivalent, but they’re quite different propositions. The 20% success probability is asserted without justification, and it’s unclear what “success” means… winning midterms? Passing state initiatives? Both?

I’d also find it helpful to understand the mechanism better: how does “50 congressional candidates running on electoral reform” prevent authoritarianism? Most swing voters care about bread-and-butter issues like affordability and healthcare—the claim that approval voting advocacy serves as an effective “organizing principle” would benefit from more evidence or argument.

Some factual corrections: The post advocates for approval voting but cites Alaska as evidence. Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, not approval voting. It’s also worth noting that the repeal measure in Alaska barely failed (50.1% to 49.9%) despite being outspent 100:1 - which cuts both ways on tractability. And while the post mentions Fargo’s approval voting was banned by the North Dakota legislature, this seems like an important cautionary tale about scaling that deserves more attention.

I appreciate you sharing but I’d just encourage tightening up the claims and being more precise about what evidence supports which interventions and what your suggested interventions are doing.

Peter Wildeford 9 Dec 2025 14:00 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Peter Wildeford featured on the Daily Show about the risks from AI
Correct!

Peter Wildeford 6 Dec 2025 15:11 UTC
42 points
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Peter Wildeford featured on the Daily Show about the risks from AI
Ronnie had a bit of a script but also improvised a lot. I had no script, no knowledge of Ronnie’s script, and was very blind to the whole thing. But we did many takes, so I was able to adapt accordingly.

Peter Wildeford 12 Nov 2025 4:23 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 0
on: The overall cost-effectiveness of an intervention often matters less than the counterfactual use of its funding
See also “A Model Estimating the Value of Research Influencing Funders” that comes to a similar conclusion

Peter Wildeford 11 Nov 2025 17:28 UTC
15 points
0 ∶ 3
on: Cause prio cruxes in 2026?
This may be less fun but, for completeness, I want to present an alternative perspective—I think I know exactly how I’d spend it and don’t have any particular questions. Feel free to send the $20M over whenever works best.

Peter Wildeford 13 Sep 2025 0:03 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Marginally More Effective Altruism
You might like “A Model Estimating the Value of Research Influencing Funders” which makes a similar point, but quantitatively

Peter Wildeford 31 Aug 2025 21:37 UTC
41 points
9 ∶ 0
on: Chip Production Policy Won’t Matter as Much as You’d Think
Hi David—I work a lot on semiconductor/chip export policy, so very important to think about the strategy here.

My biggest issue is that “short vs. long” timelines is not a binary. I agree that under longer timelines, say post-2035, China likely can significantly catch up on chip manufacturing. (Seems much less likely pre-2035.) But I think the controls logic matters really strongly for timelines 2025-2035 and still might create a larger strategic advantage post-2035.

Who has the chips still matters, since it determines whether the country has enough compute to train their own models, run any models, and provision cloud providers. You treat “differential adoption” and “who owns chips” as separate when they’re deeply interconnected. If you control chip supply, you inherently influence adoption patterns. There would be diffusion of AI of course, but it would be much more likely to come from the US given chip controls, and potentially the AI would remain on US cloud under US control.

Furthermore, if you grant that AI can accelerate AI development itself, a 2-3 year compute advantage could be decisive… and not just in “fast take-off recursive self-improvement” but even in mundane ways where better AI leads to better chip design tools, better compiler optimization better datacenter cooling systems, and better materials science for next-gen chips.

You’re right that it is impossible to control 100% of the chips, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to control enough of the chips enough of the time to create a structural advantage. Maintaining a 10-to-1 compute advantage of the US over China will mean that even if we had AI parity, we’d still have 10x more AI agents than China. And we’d likely have better AI per agent as well.

For example, consider the same Russian oil example you discuss—yes, there’s significant leakage to India and China and these controls aren’t perfect, but Russia’s realized prices have stayed ~$15-20/barrel below Brent throughout 2024-2025 - forcing Russia to accept steep discounts while burning cash on shadow fleet operations and longer shipping routes.

And chips are much easier to control than oil right now. Currently, OpenAI can buy one million NVIDIA GB300s to power Stargate, but China and Russia can’t even come close. Chinese chips are currently much weaker in both quantity and quality, and this will persist for awhile as China lacks the relevant chipmaking equipment and likely will for some time—the EUV tech that prints chips at nanometer scale took decades to develop and is arguably the most advanced technology ever made. You seem to have some all-or-nothing thinking here or think that we can’t possibly block enough chips to matter, but we already have significantly reduced China’s compute stock and you even have people like DeepSeek’s CEO mentioning that chip controls are their biggest barrier. Chinese AI development would certainly be different if China could freely buy one million GB300s as well.

The key thing is that semiconductor manufacturing isn’t a commodity market with fungible goods flowing to equilibrium. You’re treating this as a standard economic problem where market forces inevitably equalize and assume a lot of frictionless markets—but neither of these seem true. The chip supply chain has unique characteristics with extreme manufacturing concentration, decades-long development cycles, and tacit knowledge that make it different. Additionally, network effects in AI development could create lock-in before economic pressure equalizes access. Moreover, American/Western AI and chip development isn’t going to freely flow to China because the US government would continue to stop that from happening as a matter of national security. Capital does flow, but this technology cannot flow quickly, freely, or easily.

It’s also not easy to just arbitrarily make up for chip disadvantage with energy advantage. It’s very difficult to train frontier AI models on ancient hardware. DeepSeek has been trying hard all year to train their model on Huawei chips and still haven’t succeeded. It doesn’t matter how cheap you make energy if chips remain a limiting factor. Arguably, TSMC’s lead over SMIC has grown, not shrunk, over the past decade despite massive Chinese investment.

All told, I think that China is at a significant AI disadvantage over the next decade or more and this is due to reasonably effective (albeit imperfect) chip controls. Ideally we would make the chip controls even better and stronger to press that advantage further (I have ideas on how), but that’s a different conversation from the strategic wisdom of the controls in the first place.
What links here?
- AI #132 Part 2: Actively Making It Worse by Zvi (LessWrong; 5 Sep 2025 11:50 UTC; 28 points)

Peter Wildeford 9 Aug 2025 16:01 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A reflection on EA Global London: 2025
Congrats! I also thought it was great.

Sorry for the slightly off-topic question but I noticed EAG London 2025 talks are uploaded to YouTube but I didn’t see any EAG Bay Area 2025 talks. Do you know when those will go up?

Peter Wildeford 1 Aug 2025 15:00 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: EffectiveAdvocate🔸’s comment on: Notes on “Managing to Change the World”
I still stand by the book and I attribute a lot of my historical failures in management to not implementing this book well enough (especially the part about creating clarity around goals).

Peter Wildeford 19 Jul 2025 16:36 UTC
40 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Peter Wildeford’s Shortform
If you’re considering a career in AI policy, now is an especially good time to start applying widely as there’s a lot of hiring going on right now. I documented in my Substack over a dozen different opportunities that I think are very promising.

Peter Wildeford 14 Jul 2025 13:56 UTC
81 points
17 ∶ 1
on: Is EA still ‘talent-constrained’?
Thank you for sharing your perspective and I’m sorry this has been frustrating for you and people you know. I deeply appreciate your commitment and perseverance.

I hope to share you a bit of perspective from me as a hiring manager on the other side of things:

Why aren’t orgs leaning harder on shared talent pools (e.g. HIP’s database) to bypass public rounds? HIP is currently running an open search.

It’s very difficult to run an open search for all conceivable jobs and have the best fit for all of them. And even if you do have a list of the top candidates for everything, it’s still hard to sort and filter through that list without more screening. This makes HIP a valuable supplement but not a replacement.

~

I also think it would be worth considering how to provide some sort of job security/benefit for proven commitment within the movement

‘The movement’ is just the mix of all the people and orgs doing their own thing. Individual orgs themselves should be responsible for job security and rewarding commitment—the movement itself unfortunately isn’t an entity that is capable of doing that.

~

I know one lady who worked at a top EA org for eight years; she’s now struggling to find her next position within the movement, competing with new applicants! That seems like a waste of career capital.

Hopefully her eight years gives her a benefit against other applicants! That is, the career capital hasn’t been ‘wasted’ at all. But it still makes sense to view her against other applicants who may have other skills needed for the role—being good at one role doesn’t make you a perfect automatic fit for another role.

~

Moreover, I would avoid the expensive undertaking of a full hiring round until my professional networks had been exhausted. After all, if you’re in my network to begin with, you probably did something meritorious to get there.

While personal networks are a great place to source talent they’re far from perfect—in particular while personal networks are created by merit they are also formed by bias and preferencing ‘people like us’. A ‘full hiring round’ is thus more meritocratic—anyone can apply, you don’t need to figure out how to get into the right person’s network first.

~

You might like this article: Don’t be bycatch.

Peter Wildeford 10 Jul 2025 18:05 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: hmijail’s comment on: hmijail’s Quick takes
I think you should get the LLM to give you the citation and then cite that (ideally after checking it yourself).

Peter Wildeford 30 Jun 2025 15:25 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective

At least in my own normative thought, I don’t just wonder about what meets my standards. [...] I think the most important disagreement of all is over which standards are really warranted.

Really warranted by what? I think I’m an illusionist about this in particular as I don’t even know what we could be reasonably disagreeing over.

For a disagreement about facts (is this blue?), we can argue about actual blueness (measurable) or we can argue about epistemics (which strategies most reliably predict the world?) and meta-epistemics (which strategies most reliably figure out strategies that reliably predict the world?), etc.

For disagreements about morals (is this good?), we can argue about goodness but what is goodness? Is it platonic? Is it grounded in God? I’m not even sure what there is to dispute. I’d argue the best we can do is argue to our shared values (perhaps even universal human values, perhaps idealized by arguing about consistency etc.) and then see what best satisfies those.

~

On your view, there may not be any normative disagreement, once we all agree about the logical and empirical facts.

Right—and this matches our experience! When moral disagreements persist after full empirical and logical agreement, we’re left with clashing bedrock intuitions. You want to insist there’s still a fact about who’s ultimately correct, but can’t explain what would make it true.

~

It’s interesting to consider the meta question of whether one of us is really right about our present metaethical dispute, or whether all you can say is that your position follows from your epistemic standards and mine follows from mine, and there is no further objective question about which we even disagree.

I think we’re successfully engaging in a dispute here and that does kind of prove my position. I’m trying to argue that you’re appealing to something that just doesn’t exist and that this is inconsistent with your epistemic values. Whether one can ground a judgement about what is “really warranted” is a factual question.

~

I want to add that your recent post on meta-metaethical realism also reinforces my point here. You worry that anti-realism about morality commits us to anti-realism about philosophy generally. But there’s a crucial disanalogy: philosophical discourse (including this debate) works precisely because we share epistemic standards—logical consistency, explanatory power, and various other virtues. When we debate meta-ethics or meta-epistemology, we’re not searching for stance-independent truths but rather working out what follows from our shared epistemic commitments.

The “companions in guilt” argument fails because epistemic norms are self-vindicating in a way moral norms aren’t. To even engage in rational discourse about what’s true (including about anti-realism), we must employ epistemic standards. But we can coherently describe worlds with radically different moral standards. There’s no pragmatic incoherence in moral anti-realism the way there would be in global philosophical anti-realism.

Peter Wildeford 27 Jun 2025 11:33 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
You’re right that I need to bite the bullet on epistemic norms too and I do think that’s a highly effective reply. But at the end of the day, yes, I think “reasonable” in epistemology is also implicitly goal-relative in a meta-ethical sense—it means “in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality.” The difference is that this goal is so universally shared, so universal across so many different value systems, and so deeply embedded in the concept of belief itself that it feels categorical.

You say I’ve “replaced all the important moral questions with trivial logical ones,” but that’s unfair. The questions remain very substantive—they just need proper framing:

Instead of “Which view is better justified?” we ask “Which view better satisfies [specific criteria like internal consistency, explanatory power, alignment with considered judgments, etc.]?”

Instead of “Would the experience machine be good for me?” we ask “Would it satisfy my actual values / promote my flourishing / give me what I reflectively endorse / give me what an idealized version of myself might want?”

These aren’t trivial questions! They’re complex empirical and philosophical questions. What I’m denying is that there’s some further question—“But which view is really justified?”—floating free of any standard of justification.

Your challenge about moral uncertainty is interesting, but I’d say: yes, you can hedge across different moral theories if you have a higher-order standard for managing that uncertainty (like maximizing expected moral value across theories you find plausible). That’s still goal-relative, just at a meta-level.

The key insight remains: every “should” or “justified” implicitly references some standard. Making those standards explicit clarifies rather than trivializes our discussions. We’re not eliminating important questions—we’re revealing what we’re actually asking.

Peter Wildeford 26 Jun 2025 1:18 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
You raise a fair challenge about epistemic norms! Yes, I do think there are facts about which beliefs are most reasonable given evidence. But I’d argue this actually supports my view rather than undermining it.

The key difference: epistemic norms have a built-in goal—accurate representation of reality. When we ask “should I expect emeralds to be green or grue?” we’re implicitly asking “in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality, what should I expect?” The standard is baked into the enterprise of belief formation itself.

But moral norms lack this inherent goal. When you say some goals are “intrinsically more rationally warranted,” I’d ask: warranted for what purpose? The hypothetical imperative lurks even in your formulation. Yes, promoting happiness over misery feels obviously correct to us—but that’s because we’re humans with particular values, not because we’ve discovered some goal-independent truth.

I’m not embracing radical skepticism or saying moral questions are nonsense. I’m making a more modest claim: moral questions make perfect sense once we specify the evaluative standard. “Is X wrong according to utilitarianism?” has a determinate, objective, mind-indpendent answer. “Is X wrong simpliciter?” does not.

The fact that we share deep moral intuitions (like preferring happiness to misery) is explained by our shared humanity, not by those intuitions tracking mind-independent moral facts. After all, we could imagine beings with very different value systems who would find our intuitions as arbitrary as we might find theirs.

So yes, I think we can know things about the future and have justified beliefs. But that’s because “justified” in epistemology means “likely to be true”—there’s an implicit standard. In ethics, we need to make our standards explicit.