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.
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.
Thanks for the post.
I’ve decided to donate $240 to both GovAI and MIRI to offset the $480 I plan to spend on ChatGPT Plus over the next two years ($20/month).
These amounts are small.
Let’s say the value of your time is $500 / hour.
I’m not sure it was worth taking the time to think this through so carefully.
To be clear, I think concrete actions aimed at quality alignment research or AI policy aimed at buying more time are much more important than offsets.
Agree.
By publicly making a commitment to offset a particular harm, you’re establishing a basis for coordination—other people can see you really care about the issue because you made a costly signal
...
I won’t dock anyone points for not donating to offset harm from paying for AI services at a small scale. But I will notice if other people make similar commitments and take it as a signal that people care about risks from commercial incentives.
Honestly, if someone told me they’d done this, my first thought would be “huh, they’ve taken their eye off the ball”. My second would be “uh oh, they think it’s a good idea to talk about ethical offsetting”.
I think it’s worth pricing in the possibility of reactions like this when reflecting on whether to take small actions like this for the purpose of signalling.
+1 to Geoffrey here.
I still think of EA as a youth movement, though this label is gradually fading as the “founding cohort” matures.
It a trope that the youth are sometimes too quick to dismiss the wiser counsel of their elders.
I’ve witnessed many cases where, to my mind, people were (admirably) looking for good explicit arguments that they can easily understand, but (regrettably) forgetting that things like inferential distance sometimes make it hard to understand the views of people who are wiser or more expert than you are.
I’m sure I’ve made this mistake too. That said: my intellectual style is fairly slow and conservative compared to many of my peers, and I’m often happy to trust inarticulate holistic judgements over apparently solid explicit arguments. These traits insulate somewhat me from this youthful failure mode, though they expose me to similarly grave errors in other directions :/
The CLTR Future Proof report has influenced UK government policy at the highest levels.
E.g. The UK “National AI Strategy ends with a section on AGI risk, and says that the Office for AI should pay attention to this.
If you think the UN matters, then this seems good:
On September 10th 2021, the Secretary General of the United Nations released a report called “Our Common Agenda”. This report seems highly relevant for those working on longtermism and existential risk, and appears to signal unexpectedly strong interest from the UN. It explicitly uses longtermist language and concepts, and suggests concrete proposals for institutions to represent future generations and manage catastrophic and existential risks.
What matters is just whether there is a good justification to be found or not, which is a matter completely independent of us and how we originally came by the belief.
This is a good expression of the crux.
For many people—including many philosophers—it seems odd to think that questions of justification have nothing to do with us and our origins.
This is why the question of “what are we doing, when we do philosophy?” is so important.
The pragmatist-naturalist perspective says something like:
We are clever beasts on an unremarkable planet orbiting an unremarkable star, etc. Over the long run, the patterns of thought we call justified are those which are adaptive (or are spandrels along for the ride).
To be clear: this perspective is compatible with having fruitful conversations about the norms of morality, scientific enquiry, and all the rest.
I took the Gell-Mann amnesia interpretation and just concluded that he’s probably being daft more often in areas I don’t know so much about.
This is what Cowen was doing with his original remark.
From Moral Tribes:
Deep pragmatism seeks common ground. Not where we think it ought to be, but where it actually is.
With a little perspective, we can reflect and reach agreements with our heads, despite the irreconcilable differences in our hearts.
We all want to be happy. None of us wants to suffer. And our concern for happiness and suffering lies behind nearly everything else that we value, though to see this requires some reflection.
We can take this kernel of personal value and turn it into a moral value by adding the essence of the Golden Rule: your happiness and your suffering matter no more, and no less, than anyone else’s.
Finally, we can turn this moral value into a moral system by running it through the outcome-optimizing apparatus of the human prefromal cortex. This yields a moral philosophy that no one loves but that everyone “gets”—a second moral language that members of all tribes can speak.
Deep pragmatism is utilitarianism in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham is often misread as a narrow-minded moral realist. But he is best read as a political pragmatist: not seeking a metaphysical principle, but rather a practical principle—something most of us can agree on—upon which to build a stable polity.
Joshua Greene’s book, Moral Tribes, presents a compelling EDA. He doesn’t bother directly arguing against the philosophical objections to EDA.
In general I think Moral Tribes is a must-read for those who are interested in evolutionary psychology, moral philosophy and especially utilitarianism.
Among other things, Greene argues that utilitarianism needs a rebrand. His suggestion: deep pragmatism.
EDAs are a problem for non-naturalistic moral realists in the British tradition (e.g. Sidgwick, Parfit). Some people think they’re a problem for naturalistic moral realists too.
I’ve read ~10 philosophy papers that try to defend non-naturalistic moral realism against EDAs.
More than half of these defences have the following structure:
(P1) Metaethical claim about moral truth.
(P2) EDAs are incompatible with (P1).
(P3) Conclusion: EDAs are false.
A typical metaethical claim for (P1):
(P1*) The normative and the descriptive are fundamentally different (bangs table).
According to me, we should just accept EDAs and reject dubious versions of (P1).
The conversation touches on a couple of blog posts by Holden, especially:
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.