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.
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
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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 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.
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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.
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?”: