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.
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.
In my view, Bostrom’s email would have been offensive in the 90s and it is offensive now, for good reason.
Agree.
Bostrom’s apology is defensively couched—emphasising the age of the email, what others wrote on the listserv, that it would be best forgotten, that fear that people might smear him. I think that is cowardly and shows a disappointing lack of ownership of his actions.
I think these details are important context. I disagree with the final sentence.
When you are willfully disengaged from the empathy that underlies common decency
I don’t see grounds for describing Bostrom in such harsh terms.
Personal view: the Wytham project is good. The lack of announcement and other proactive comms about it was a significant unforced error.
P.S. If you don’t like the Bernard Williams stuff, I’d love to hear your quick thoughts on why.
He is a divisive figure, especially in Oxford philosophy circles. But Parfit was correct to take him seriously.
His book “Ethics & The Limits of Philosophy” is often recommended as the place to start.
My take: perhaps the more principled among us should make room for more messy fudges in our thought. Cluster thinking, bounded commensurability and two-thirds utilitarianism for the win.
Title:
Bernard Williams: Ethics and the limits of impartiality
Author:
peterhartree
URL:
Why it’s good:
Derek Parfit saw Bernard Williams as his most important antagonist. Parfit was obsessed with Williams’ “Internal & External Reasons” paper for several decades.
My post introduces some of Bernard Williams’ views on metaphilosophy, metaethics and reasons.
What are we doing when we do moral philosophy? How should this self-understanding inform our practice of philosophy, and what we might hope to gain from it?
According to Williams:
Moral philosophy is about making sense of the situation in which we find ourselves, and deciding what to do about it.
Williams wants to push back against a “scientistic” trend in moral philosophy, and against philosophers who exhibit “a Platonic contempt for the the human and the contingent in the face of the universal”. Such philosophers believe that:
if there were an absolute conception of the world, a representation of it which was maximally independent of perspective, that would be better than more perspectival or locally conditioned representations of the world.
And, relatedly:
that offering an absolute conception is the real thing, what really matters in the direction of intellectual authority
Williams thinks there’s another way. It may not give us everything we want, but perhaps it’s all we can have.
If the post leaves you wanting more, I got into related themes on Twitter last night, in conversation with The Ghost of Jeremy Bentham after some earlier exegetical mischief. Scroll down and click “Show replies”.
Title:
EA’s brain-over-body bias, and the embodied value problem in AI alignment
Author:
Geoffrey Miller
URL:
Why it’s good:
Embodied cognition is a hot topic in cognitive science. Are AI safety people overlooking this?
From Geoffrey’s introduction:
Evolutionary biology and evolutionary medicine routinely analyze our bodies’ biological goals, fitness interests, and homeostatic mechanisms in terms of how they promote survival and reproduction. However the EA movement includes some ‘brain-over-body biases’ that often make our brains’ values more salient than our bodies’ values. This can lead to some distortions, blind spots, and failure modes in thinking about AI alignment. In this essay I’ll explore how AI alignment might benefit from thinking more explicitly and carefully about how to model our embodied values.
Big, if there’s something to it. But the piece received one three word comment...
Title:
Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?
Author:
Peter McLaughlin
URL:
Why it’s good:
McLaughlin highlights a problem for people who want to say that scale matters, and also avoid the train to crazy town.
It’s not clear how anyone actually gets off the train to crazy town. Once you allow even a little bit of utilitarianism in, the unpalatable consequences follow immediately. The train might be an express service: once the doors close behind you, you can’t get off until the end of the line.
As Richard Y. Chappell has put it, EAs want ‘utilitarianism minus the controversial bits’. Yet it’s not immediately clear how the models and decision-procedures used by Effective Altruists can consistently avoid any of the problems for utilitarianism: as examples above illustrate, it’s entirely possible that even the simplest utilitarian premises can lead to seriously difficult conclusions.
Tyler Cowen wrote a paper on this problem in 1996, called ’What Do We Learn from the Repugnant Conclusion?’. McLaughlin’s post opens with an excellent summary.
The upshot:
For any moral theory with universal domain where utility matters at all, either the marginal value of utility diminishes rapidly (asymptotically) towards zero, or considerations of utility come to swamp all other values.
Uh oh!
Can you say why?
I’ve just edited my comment to replace “appear” with “come across as” because maybe the original phrasing makes the point sound more focused on physical appearance than I intended.
Anecdotally, in November I noticed that “being someone who regularly wears EA t-shirts” was somewhat predictive of “being very upset by the FTX blow up”. Obviously the merch won’t be causing the upset, but the decision to wear merch may be part of a pattern of relating that leaves some people in a less than ideal position.
Merch helps EAs express themselves and fosters a sense of community. It can also help EAs recognize each other within the same setting or act as a conversation-starter at a function. But most importantly, it’s fun!
How confident are you that encouraging members of the EA community to wear EA merch is a good idea?
I’ve not thought about this much but my inside view is somewhat against EA merch.
Some ways that merch might backfire:
Merch may encourage some individuals towards excessive identification with EA as a body of ideas or as a community.
The merch, or the people who wear the merch, may come across as low status, off-putting or otherwise unattractive.
Merch may contribute to unhelpful perceptions of EA (e.g. as a youth movement).
People may unwittingly wear merch in contexts where it undermines their goals (e.g. damages their credibility).
SBF might wear your merch.
Personally, I have a strong aversion to the idea of people wearing EA merch (I’m somewhat negative for startup merch and somewhat positive about band merch). I’m not sure where this comes from and how much to weigh it.
I’ve briefly discussed this with 5-10 people over the years. On a personal level, several shared my strong aversion to EA merch, while several others were neutral or strongly positive. I don’t recall anyone having a confident overall view about whether merch should be encouraged.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this, and especially your own steelman of the case that merch is, in fact, best discouraged.
If I thought about this more I guess that I’d end up moderately opposed to merch that uses the EA logo but neutral and relaxed about merch that is more oblique. Several of the items on your store are in the latter category and seem nicely done to me.
Brian Tomasik (2018) claims that pork, beef and meat cause far less animal suffering per meal than farmed fish, eggs, and chicken.
If he’s right, then even if we hold the total consumption of animal protein constant, it’d be good to shift consumption towards beef (or pork), and away from chicken (or farmed fish).
Working with beef producers to improve regulations around chicken welfare—and presumably raise the price of chicken—would probably lead people to reduce some chicken meals with beef meals (e.g. “this chicken burger is expensive… I’ll have a beef burger instead”). This could be another important mechanism for reducing total harm—in addition to reducing average suffering per chicken meal, and somewhat reducing total meat consumption.
(I’m only considering animal welfare here. An all-things-considered take would factor in environmental issues, public health, and so on…)
I think Bostrom 1996 deserves criticism for (ii).
He may deserve criticism for (i) as well.