Now: Independent study; Radio Bostrom; Parfit Archive.
New: ✨ Comment Helper for Google Docs. ✨
Previously: 80,000 Hours (2014-15; 2017-2021) Worked on web development, product management, strategy, internal systems, IT security, etc. Read my CV.
Also: Inbox When Ready; The Valmy.
Thanks for sharing.
Tyler Cowen is another figure who takes utilitarianism and longtermism seriously, but not too seriously. See:
Good idea. Are you planning to make this happen? What steps will you take next?
My quick thought is:
Email Tyler. List a few people you think are worth reaching out to.
If Tyler is keen, help him do the work.
It’d probably be worth releasing it in English as well, for an Anglosphere audience.
Tyler released Stubborn Attachments on Medium a year or two before it was published by Stripe Press. He could do the same for this book, with some big caveats at the start, along the lines that he made in the podcast.
If you don’t plan to do something like (1) and (2) please DM me on Twitter. I’d probably be up for it, but I’m not sure I’d have time to product manage / significantly help Tyler after the initial setup.
I could fairly easily create an audiobook version. The TYPE III AUDIO AI narration pipeline is coming together nicely.
I see “clearly expressing anger” and “posting when angry” as quite different things.
I endorse the former, but I rarely endorse the latter, especially in contexts like the EA Forum.
Let’s distinguish different stages of anger:
The “hot” kind—when one is not really thinking straight, prone to exaggeration and uncharitable interpretations, etc.
The “cool” kind—where one can think roughly as clearly about the topic as any other.
We could think of “hot” and “cold” anger as a spectrum.
Most people experience hot anger from time to time. But I think EA figures—especially senior figures—should model a norm of only posting on the EA Forum when fairly cool.
My impression is that, during the Bostrom and FLI incidents, several people posted with considerably more hot anger than I would endorse. In these cases, I think the mistake has been quite harmful, and may warrant public and private apologies.
As a positive example: Peter Hurford’s blog post, which he described as “angry”, showed a level of reasonableness and clarity that made it, in my mind, “above the bar” to publish. The text suggests a relatively cool anger. I disagree with some parts of the post, but I am glad he published it. At the meta-level, my impression is that Peter was well within the range of “appropriate states of mind” for a leadership figure to publish a message like that in public.
Thank you for this.
Strong contender for “top 10 EA Forum posts of 2023, according to Peter Hartree”.
A number of recent proposals have detailed EA reforms. I have generally been unimpressed with these—they feel highly reactive and too tied to attractive sounding concepts (democratic, transparent, accountable) without well thought through mechanisms.
[...]
Why more democratic decision making would be better has gone largely unargued. To the extent it has been, “conflicts of interest” and “insularity” seem like marginal problems compared to basically having a deep understanding of the most important questions for the future/global health and wellbeing.
Agree. Mood affiliation is not a reliable path to impact.
This post is much too long and we’re all going to have trouble following the comments.
It would be much better to split this up and post as a series. Maybe do that, and replace this post with links to the series?
Context: I’ve worked in various roles at 80,000 Hours since 2014, and continue to support the team in a fairly minimal advisory role.
Views my own.
I agree that the heavy use of a poorly defined concept of “value alignment” has some major costs.
I’ve been moderately on the receiving end of this one. I think it’s due to some combination of:
I take Nietzsche seriously (as Derek Parfit did).
I have a strong intellectual immune system. This means it took me several years to get enthusiastically on board with utilitarianism, longtermism and AI safety as focus areas. There’s quite some variance on the speed with which key figures decide to take an argument at face value and deeply integrate it into their decision-making. I think variance on this dimension is good—as in any complex ecosystem, pace layers are important.
I insisted on working mostly remotely.
I’ve made a big effort to maintain an “FU money” relationship to EA community, including a mostly non-EA friendship group.
I am more interested in “deep” criticism of EA than some of my peers. E.g. I tweet about Peter Thiel on death with dignity, Nietzsche on EA, and I think Derek Parfit made valuable contributions but was not one of the Greats.
Some of my object-level views have been quite different to those of my peers over the years. E.g. I’ve had reservations about the maximisation meme ever since I got involved, along the lines of those recently expressed by Holden.
I mostly quit 80,000 Hours in autumn 2015, mainly due to concerns about strategy, messaging and fit with my colleagues. I took on a 90% time role again in 2017, for roughly 4 years.
I have some beliefs and traits that some people find suggestive of a lack of moral seriousness (e.g. I’m into two-thirds utilitarianism; I don’t lose sleep over EA/LT concerns; I’m fairly normie by EA standards).
There are some advantages to the status quo, and I don’t have a positive proposal for improving this.
If someone at 80K or CEA wants to pay me to think about it for a day, I’d be up for that. Maybe I’ll do it anyway. I hesitate because I’m not sure how tractable this is, and I would not be surprised if, on further reflection, I came to think the status quo is roughly optimal at current margins.
In the original emails and the latest apology, he has done less to distance himself from racism than to endorse it.
In what ways do you think the 2023 message endorses racism? Is there a particular quote or feature of it that stands out to you?
The apology contains an emphatic condemnation of the use of a racist slur:
I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
The 1996 email was part of a discussion of offensive communication styles. It included a heavily contested and controversial claim about group intelligence, which I will not repeat here. [1] Claims like these have been made by racist groups in the past, and an interest in such claims correlates with racist views. But there is not a strict correlation here: expressing or studying such claims does not entail you have racist values or motivations.
In general I see genetic disparity as one of the biggest underlying causes of inequality and injustice. I’ve no informed views or particular interests in averages between groups of different skin colour. But I do feel terrible for people who find themselves born with a difficult hand in the genetic lottery (e.g. a tendency to severe depression or dementia). And so I endorse research on genetic causes of chronic disadvantage, with the hope that we can improve things.
[1] This comment by Geoffrey Miller provides a bit more context on why Bostrom may have chosen this particular example.
When someone’s actions are criticised, they are often criticised for several different things. They may wish to apologise for some of these things, while explaining and defending others.
I think Bostrom 1996 deserves criticism for (ii).
He may deserve criticism for (i) as well.
While I appreciate posts like this, which speak about the importance of epistemic integrity, it seems to miss the fact that applauding someone for not lying is great but not if the belief they’re holding is bad.
It is suggestive that you describe the belief as “bad” rather than “wrong”,”incorrect” or “false”.
It’s fine to criticise people for (i) holding beliefs that are wrong, or for (ii) expressing beliefs that are probably best not expressed in a given context (whether they are true or false).
But it’s important to separate, as best we can, claims about (a) whether a particular belief is true from claims about (b) whether holding that belief has good consequences, or (c) correlates with good moral character.
This post would be better if it made this distinction more clearly.
Agree. At a meta-level, I was disappointed by the seemingly panicked and reactive nature of the statement. The statement is bad, and so, it seems, is the process that produced it.
(If you want to visit the domain but not have it saved in your Chrome omnibar, just open an Incognito window.)
Thanks for the heads up.
From memory: I tried to register this domain 4-5 years ago, but it was already taken. 80,000 Hours does own 800000hours.org, 80000hours.com, and several other variations.
Please also feel free to give us feedback on this thread and approach. This is the first time we’ve tried this in response to events that dominate Forum discussion. You can give feedback by commenting on the thread.
Seems good to me, especially as a “quick experiment”.
I shared some related thoughts on Chris Leong’s recent thread: Should the forum be structured such that the drama of the day doesn’t occur on the front page?
In spirit I think the answer is “yes”.
That said, a bad implementation could easily be worse than the status quo. Some obvious risks are:
It could seem like (and/or actually be) an unhelpful form of suppressing debate.
External critics will probably characterise it as such, no matter how well the relevant tradeoffs are struck.
There may be various other valuable functions (e.g. a read on community mood, a venue to let off steam) that significantly offset the cost of distraction.
I don’t have quick thoughts on what a good implementation would look like, beyond:
(a) The general view that it should exploit “the power of defaults”.
(b) Maybe look at what Hacker News does. From memory, their algorithm attempts to detect politically charged topics and emerging flame wars.
(c) On the posting side, perhaps there could be a “want to take a break before posting?” prompt, or even an enforced delay. This might increase the quality of debate without much downside risk. I have noticed social media platforms experimenting with UI features along these lines.
Thank you for posting this.
I roughly share the views you expressed here.
As you intended, the post is a valuable counterbalance to some of the other discussion.
Some context:
Bostrom’s problematic email was written in 1996.
Bostrom claims to have apologised for the email back in 1996, within 24 hours after sending it. If that’s right, then the 2023 message is his second apology.
I am disappointed that the CEA statement does not include these details.
The conversation touches on a couple of blog posts by Holden, especially:
EA is about maximisation, and maximisation is perilous
Worldview diversification
Future-proof ethics