PeterSlattery

Karma: 3,337

Researcher at MIT FutureTech helping with research, communication and operations and leading the AI Risk Repository. Doing what I consider to be ‘fractional movement building’.

Previously a behavior change researcher at BehaviourWorks Australia at Monash University and helping with development a course on EA at the University of Queensland.

Co-founder and team member at Ready Research.

Former movement builder for the i) UNSW, Sydney, Australia, ii) Sydney, Australia, and iii) Ireland, EA groups.

Marketing Lead for the 2019 EAGx Australia conference.

Founder and former lead for the EA Behavioral Science Newsletter.

See my LinkedIn profile for more of my work.

Leave (anonymous) feedback here.

PeterSlattery 13 Nov 2024 14:18 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 1
on: Consider donating to whoever helped you
I like this idea, but wonder if CEA or another organization should take the lead on running something like this? Making donations to other people or informal groups is interpersonally and logistically complicated. For instance, people will often refuse a donation if offered it (or when their bank account is requested), and taking money from a person may feel like an obligation, or be misinterpreted. It could work better if they instead donate money to an org who allocates it for a person and contacts them to receive it (and donates it if they don’t accept). That organization could also have a database of credible people/groups doing work and a general donation option for people who just want to fund movement building of a certain type.

More generally, I’d like to see more effort to proactively identify and fund people who are doing good movement/community building work. Examples: Talent scout type roles at CEA and some sort of community scan (e.g., a question in the annual community survey and post conferences about anyone who was exceptionally helpful) or input process (e.g., a form where you can notify CEA that someone was particularly helpful in a relevant way).

This could also help address certain oversights. For instance, in my experience, someone can have a lot of positive impact in many regional areas without getting noticed or appropriately supported, which can significantly reduce their impact. Catherine Low and Luke Freeman were once examples of such people.

PeterSlattery 28 Oct 2024 13:00 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jamie Elsey’s comment on: British public perception of existential risks
Ok, I plan to share the PDF, so let me know when it is good to go!

PeterSlattery 26 Oct 2024 12:32 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 0
on: British public perception of existential risks
Thanks! Do you want this shared more widely?

Note that I estimate that putting these findings on a reasonably nice website (I generally use Webflow) with some nice interactive embedded (Flourish is free to use and very functional at the free tier) would take between 12-48 hours of work. You could probably reuse a lot of the work in the future if you do future waves.

I am also wondering if someone should do a review/meta-analysis to aggregate public perception of AI and other risks? There are now many surveys and different results, so people would probably value a synthesis.

PeterSlattery 10 Oct 2024 12:27 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: PeterSlattery’s Quick takes
I am curious to better understand why people disagree here.

PeterSlattery 10 Oct 2024 0:04 UTC
26 points
9 ∶ 2
on: PeterSlattery’s Quick takes
I really like the vote and discussion thread. In part because I think that aggregating votes will improve our coordination and impact.
Without trying to unpack my whole model of movement building; I think that the community needs to understand itself (as a collective and as individuals) to have the most impact, and this approach may really help.

EA basically operates on a “wisdom of wise crowds” principle, where individuals base decisions on researchers’ and thinkers’ qualitative data (e.g., forum posts and other outputs)

However, at our current scale, quantitative data is much easier to aggregate and update on.
For instance, in this case, we are now seeing strong evidence that most people in EA think that AW is undervalued (as seems will be the case) relative to global development. Also who thinks what in relation to that claim and why. This is extremely useful for community and individual decision-making. It would never be captured in the prior system of coordinating via posts and comments.

Many people may/will act on or reference this information when they seek funding, write response posts, or choose a new career option. In a world without the vote, and just forum posts, these actions might otherwise not occur.

In short, very keen on this and to see more of this.

PeterSlattery 8 Oct 2024 20:22 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Low confidence, but my intuition is that animal welfare is more neglected and would have a better ROI in terms of suffering reduced.

PeterSlattery 18 Sep 2024 21:08 UTC
31 points
20 ∶ 8
on: Is “superhuman” AI forecasting BS? Some experiments on the “539″ bot from the Centre for AI Safety
Thank you for this. I really appreciate this in-depth analysis, but I think it is unnecessarily harsh and critical in points.

E.g., See: Hendrycks has it backwards: In order to have a real, scientific impact, you have to actually prove your thing holds up to the barest of scrutiny. Ideally before making grandiose claims about it, and before pitching it to fucking X. Look, I’m glad that various websites were able to point out the flaws in this paper. But we shouldn’t have had to. Dan Hendrycks and CAIS should have put in a little bit of extra effort, to spare all the rest of us the job of fact checking his shitty research.

PeterSlattery 11 Sep 2024 18:22 UTC
13 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: JulianHazell’s comment on: Stepping down from GWWC: So long, and thanks for all the shrimp
I will second the claim that Luke is exceptional, even amongst other exceptional people. He has a rare ability to simultaneously be incredibly impressive, warm, humble, caring, hardworking and productive.

PeterSlattery 10 Sep 2024 13:40 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: t6aguirre’s comment on: MIT FutureTech are hiring for a Technical Associate role
Hey! Yes, this is related to MIT/US immigration challenges and not something we can easily fix, unfortunately. We do sometimes hire people remotely. If you would like to express interest working with/for us, then you can submit a general expression of interest here.

PeterSlattery 10 Sep 2024 10:52 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: MIT FutureTech are hiring for a Technical Associate role
Feel free to comment again if you have more specific questions, and I will do my best to answer. I may also ask HR to add more information about the position.

PeterSlattery 10 Sep 2024 10:50 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: rileyharris’s comment on: MIT FutureTech are hiring for a Technical Associate role
Thanks for the feedback, Riley. Sorry for the confusion. See the not very detailed job description on the MIT careers page. Probably the best and quickest way to apply is to make a submission here—just select the Junior Research Scientist/Technical Associate position (if that is the only one of interest).

PeterSlattery 9 Sep 2024 20:03 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
on: AI forecasting bots incoming
“From there, we asked it to compute the probabilities of 177 events from Metaculus that had happened (or not happened) since.
Concretely, we asked the bot whether Israel would carry out an attack on Iran before May 1, 2024. We compared the probabilities it arrived at to those arrived at independently by crowds of forecasters on the prediction platform Metaculus. We found that FiveThirtyNine performed just as well as crowd forecasts.”

Just to check my understanding of the excerpt above, were all the 177 events used in evaluation related to Israel attacking Iran?

PeterSlattery 4 Sep 2024 19:59 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Peter Wildeford’s Shortform
Quick response—the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?

There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.

From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.

In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.

PeterSlattery 4 Sep 2024 19:48 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Peter Wildeford’s Shortform
Just wanted to quickly say that I hold a similar opinion to the top paragraph and have had similar experiences on terms of where I felt I had most impact.

I think that the choice of whether to be a researcher or do operations is very context dependant.

If there are no other researchers doing something important your competitive advantage may be to do some research because that will probably outperform the counterfactual (no research) and may also catalyze interest and action within that research domain.

However if there are a lot of established organizations and experienced researchers, or just researchers who are more naturally skilled than you already involved in the research domain, then you can often have a more significant impact by helping to support those researchers or attract new researchers.

One way to navigate this is to have a what I call a research hybrid role where you work as researcher but allocate some flexible amount of time to more operations / field building activities depending on what seems most valuable.

PeterSlattery 9 Aug 2024 18:02 UTC
29 points
10 ∶ 2
on: FarmKind’s Illusory Offer
I haven’t encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers, and I’m not aware of any evidence that offering donation matching has worse impacts than not having it, either in terms of total dollars donated or in attempts to increase donations to effective charities.

However, I haven’t been actively looking for that evidence—is there something that I’ve missed?

PeterSlattery 6 Aug 2024 16:42 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Case-control survey of EAGx attendees finds no behavioural or attitudinal changes after six months
Fair. Perhaps during the post event survey you could ask people who have attended previous events if they want to report any significant impacts from those past events? Then they can respond as relevant.

PeterSlattery 6 Aug 2024 16:40 UTC
22 points
3 ∶ 4
on: On Owning Our EA Affiliation
Thanks for writing this. I just wanted to quickly respond with some thoughts from my phone.

I currently like the norm of not publicly affiliating with EA but its something I’ve changed my mind about a few times.

Some reasons

I think EA succeeds when it is no longer a movement and simply a general held value system (i.e., that it’s good to do good and try to be effective and to have a wide moral circle). I think that many of our insights and practices are valuable and underused. I think we disseminate these most effectively when they are unbranded.

This is why: Any group identity creates a brand and opportunities for attacking the brand of that group and doing damage by association.

Additionally, if you present as being in a group then you are either classed as ingroup or outgroup. Which group your in overwhelmingly affects people’s receptiveness to you and your goals. For many people EA presents as a threatening outgroup which makes them feel judgement and pressure.

Many people who might be receptive to the idea of counterfactural or cost effectiveness related reasoning if it has a neutral source but unreceptive to it if they believe it comes from effective altruism.

I think most people care about progress on salient issues not effective altruism in the abstract. People are much more likely to be interested in philosophy which helps them to achieve a goal of reducing animal suffering or mental health issues or AI risks than figuring out how to be more effective at doing good.

What I think we should do

I think we should say things like I have been influenced by effective altruism, or reading doing good better really changed my mind about X but I think we should avoid presenting as EAs.

This seems consistent with my other behaviour. I don’t call myself a feminist, consequentialist, animal welfare activist or longtermist etc, but these are all ideas/values which influenced me a lot.

I previously discussed the idea of fractional movement building and I think that that is still probably the best approach for EA to have more impact via influence on others. Basically you work on a thing that you think is important (e.g., a cause area) and allocate some fraction of your time to try to help other people to work on that thing or other things which are EA aligned.

So rather than being an EA affiliated movement builder you might be researcher trying to understand how to have some type of positive impact (e.g. reducing risks from AI) and navigating the world with that as your superficial identity. You can still organise events and provide support with that identity and personal brand and there no brand risk or association to worry about. You can mention your EA interest where relevant and useful.

And to be clear I think that people who are clearly ea-affiliated are doing good work and mostly aren’t at any risk of major career damage etc. I just think that we might be able to achieve more if we worked in ways that they pattern matched better to more widely accepted and unbranded routes to impact (e.g., researcher or entrepreneur etc) than to activist/movement building type groups which are more associated with bad actors (e.g. cults and scams)

Of course these are not strong beliefs and I could easily change them as I have before.

PeterSlattery 5 Aug 2024 11:40 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Case-control survey of EAGx attendees finds no behavioural or attitudinal changes after six months
Thank you for this. I really appreciate this research because I think the EA community should do more to evaluate interventions (e.g., conferences, pledges, programs etc) considering the focus on cost-effectiveness etc. Especially repeat interventions. I also like the idea of having independent evaluations.
- Having said that, good evaluations are very hard to do and don’t always offer a comparatively good ROI in expectation as compared to other uses of resources.
- I think CEA are doing a very good job with conferences now, and feel pretty confident that the EA conference provides a lot of value. However, I am weakly in favor of it being evaluated more.
- From my personal experience attending conferences, I’d like to suggest two considerations
  - First, 6 months is probably too short a timeframe to measure conference impact—many of my most valuable changes in behavior (e.g., starting new projects/collaborations, or providing (and getting) support/advice) occurred years after the conference where I met someone for the first time.
  - Second, I think that most of the conferences impacts come from network related behaviors and these don’t seem to be well captured. Many if not most of my higher impact actions only occurred because of people I met at EA Conferences.

PeterSlattery 17 Jul 2024 18:07 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: defun 🔸’s comment on: Thoughts on this $16.7M “AI safety” grant?
Thanks. My impression is that they are using ‘Guest author’ on their blog post to differentiate who works for Epoch or is external. As far as I can tell, that usage implies nothing about the contribution of the authors to the paper.

PeterSlattery 17 Jul 2024 17:35 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: defun 🔸’s comment on: Thoughts on this $16.7M “AI safety” grant?
This seems misleading. Some of the authors are from Epoch, but there are authors from two other universities on the paper.
Also, where does it say that he is a guest author? Neil is a research advisor for Epoch and my understanding is that he provides valuable input on a lot of their work.