Now: TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: 80,000 Hours (2014-15; 2017-2021) Worked on web development, product management, strategy, internal systems, IT security, etc.
Before that: My CV.
Side-projects: Inbox When Ready; Radio Bostrom; The Valmy; Comment Helper for Google Docs.
Back in March I asked GPT-4:
I recently graduated from medical school but I’m worried that being a doctor in the rich world is not very impactful, because there are already lots of doctors and I can’t help that many people every year by providing primary care. Would 80,000 Hours say that this is a legitimate concern? What might they suggest for someone in my position?
The answer (one shot):
Yes, 80,000 Hours might consider your concern as legitimate. While being a doctor is a valuable and impactful profession, it’s true that in the rich world, there are already many doctors providing primary care. However, there are several ways you can increase your impact as a medical professional, and 80,000 Hours might suggest the following options:
Specialize in a high-impact area: Some medical specialties have a higher potential for impact than others. For example, you could specialize in infectious diseases, pandemic preparedness, or global health, areas where your expertise can make a considerable difference.
Global Health: Consider working in low-income or underserved regions where there is a more significant shortage of medical professionals. Your skills and expertise can have a more considerable impact in these areas.
Medical research: You could focus on research that addresses pressing global health issues, such as finding new treatments or improving existing ones for various diseases. Medical research can have a significant long-term impact on many lives.
Public health and policy: Engage in public health work, such as designing and implementing health programs or advocating for evidence-based policies. This can have a broader systemic impact on healthcare and health outcomes.
Effective altruism: Use your medical career to earn a good income, and then donate a significant portion of it to effective charities or causes. This approach is sometimes referred to as “earning to give.” By supporting high-impact organizations, you can indirectly contribute to addressing global problems.
Health-related advocacy: Use your medical expertise to raise awareness of important global health issues, advocate for policy changes, or support interventions that can have a large-scale impact.
It’s essential to consider your interests, strengths, and values when choosing a path. Remember that you can always change directions or pivot throughout your career. For more tailored advice, you can consult 80,000 Hours’ resources or engage with their community.
I didn’t give it any other text as context, just the prompt above.
Congratulations on making it to 5 years, and thank you for the work you’ve done so far.
Could you give us a sense of the inputs that lead to these outputs? In particular, I’d be interested to know:
Total expenditure.
Total years of staff labor (full-time equivalent).
The application form is short and includes the following questions:
What are the most important technical projects the UK government needs to do within the next few months to advance AI safety?
What do you want to be doing to drive those projects forward?
Ideally this link post would point to the episode page on Dwarkesh’s website, which includes a transcript.
Thanks! Now fixed.
Thanks Michael! This was a strange oversight on our part—now fixed.
Great question. If authors include image captions we read them, but I think we’re skipping the image alt texts at the moment. We actually wrote the code to read alt texts but I think we forgot to ship it in this first release. This was a mistake on our part—we’ll fix it this week or next.
Thanks. It’s a nice idea. At some point we might enable authors (or listeners!) to select their favourite voices. This would increase our costs quite a lot (see my reply to Nathan) so I doubt we’ll do this before end 2023, unless we find evidence of strong demand.
Thanks! We looked into randomising between a couple voices a while ago. To my surprise, we found that all the voice models on our text-to-speech service (Microsoft Azure) perform somewhat differently. This means our quality assurance costs would go up quite a lot if we start using several voices.
I’d also guess that once listeners become familiar with a particular voice, their comprehension improves and they’re able to listen faster. I have some anecdotal evidence of this, but I’m pretty unsure how big of a deal it is.
Thanks! I would have liked to do this, but in our quick tests the UK female voice models provided by our text-to-speech service (Microsoft Azure) were quite buggy. We frequently experiment with the latest voice models on Azure and other platforms, so I expect we’ll find a good UK female option in the coming months.
Would you prefer an US English narrator?
Agree vote if “yes”, disagree vote if “no”.
For anyone who is considering the course: TYPE III AUDIO is making audio narrations for the Alignment and Governance courses. The series is due to launch later this month, but some 50+ episodes are already available.
Moderators should delete this post IMO.
(I made these webpages a couple days after the FTX collapse. Buying domains is cheaper than therapy…)
Thoughts on “maximisation is perilous”:
(1) We could put more emphasis on the idea of “two-thirds utilitarianism”.
(2) I expect we could come up with a better name for two-thirds utilitarianism and a snappier way of describing the key thought. Deep pragmatism might work.
Thank you (again) for this.
I think this message should be emphasized much more in many EA and LT contexts, e.g. introductory materials on effectivealtruism.org and 80000hours.org.
As your paper points out: longtermist axiology probably changes the ranking between x-risk and catastrophic risk interventions in some cases. But there’s lots of convergence, and in practice your ranked list of interventions won’t change much (even if the diff between them does… after you adjust for cluelessness, Pascal’s mugging, etc).
Some worry that if you’re a fan of longtermist axiology then this approach to comms is disingenous. I strongly disagree: it’s normal to start your comms by finding common ground, and elaborate on your full reasoning later on.
Andrew Leigh MP seems to agree. Here’s the blurb from his recent book, “What’s The Worst That Could Happen?”:
Did you know that you’re more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That’s fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely.
Hi Lia. I think the RSS links above are correct.
To confirm, the RSS links are as follows:
EA Forum Podcast (Curated & Popular)
EA Forum Podcast (All audio)
Does this help?