QubitSwarm99

• QubitSwarm99Sep 26, 2022, 11:22 PM

  3 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Stewart’s comment on: NASA will re-di­rect an as­ter­oid tonight as a test for plane­tary defence (link-post)

  Impact successful—so exciting!

• QubitSwarm99Sep 26, 2022, 9:58 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Stress Ex­ter­nal­ities More in AI Safety Pitches

  Without thinking too deeply, I believe that this framing, i.e. one in line with AI developers are gambling with the fate of humanity for the sake of profit, and we need to stop them/​ensure that their efforts don’t have catastrophic effects, for AI risk could serve as a conversational cushion for those who are unfamiliar with the general state of AI progress and with the existential risk poorly aligned AI poses.

  Those unfamiliar with AI might disregard the extent of risk from AI if approached in conversation with remarks about how not only it is non-trivial that humanity might be extinguished by AI, but many researchers believe this event is highly likely to occur, even in the next 25 years. I imagine such scenarios are, for them, generally unbelievable.

  The cushioning could, however, lead to people trying to think about AI risk independently or to them searching for more evidence and commentary online, which might subsequently lead to them to the conclusion that AI does in fact pose a significant existential risk to humanity.

  When trying to introduce the idea of AI risk to someone who is unfamiliar with it, it’s probably a good idea to give an example of a current issue with AI, and then have them extrapolate. The example of poorly designed AI systems being used by corporations for click-through, as covered in the introduction of Human Compatible, seems good to use in your framing of AI safety as a public good. Most people are familiar with the ills of algorithms designed for social media, so it is not a great step to imagine researchers designing more powerful AI systems that are deleterious to humanity via a similar design issue but at a much more lethal level:

  They aren’t particularly intelligent, but they are in a position to affect the entire world because they directly influence billions of people. Typically, such algorithms are designed to maximize click-through, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is to change the user’s preferences so that they become more predictable. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable in which items they click on.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 26, 2022, 8:15 PM

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: NASA will re-di­rect an as­ter­oid tonight as a test for plane­tary defence (link-post)

  I’ve been keeping tabs on this since mid-August when the following Metaculus question was created:

  The community and I (97%, given NASA’s track record of success) seem in agreement that it is unlikely DART fails to make an impact. Here are some useful Wikipedia links that aided me with the prediction: (Asteroid impact avoidance, Asteroid impact prediction, Near Earth-object (NEO), Potentially hazardous object).

  There are roughly 3 hours remaining until impact (https://​​dart.jhuapl.edu/​​); it seems unlikely that something goes awry, and I am firmly hoping for success.

  While I’m unfamiliar with the state of research on asteroid redirection or trophy systems for NEOs, DART seems like a major step in the correct direction, one where humanity faces a lower levels of risks from the collision of asteroids, comets, and other celestial objects with Earth.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 25, 2022, 2:45 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: “Cot­ton Gin” AI Risk

  While it is my belief that the there is some wider context missing from certain aspects of this post (e.g., what sorts of AI progress are we talking about, perhaps strong AI or transformative AI?- this makes a difference), the analogy does a fair job at illustrating that the intention to use advanced AI to engender progress (beneficial outcomes for humanity) might have unintended and antithetical effects instead. This seems to actually encapsulate the core idea of AI safety /​ alignment, roughly that a system which is capable of engendering vasts amounts of scientific and economic gains for humanity need not be (and is unlikely to be) aligned with human values and flourishing by default and thus is capable of taking actions that may cause great harm to humanity. The Future of Life’s page on the Benefits and Risk of AI comments on this:

  The AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving its goal: This can happen whenever we fail to fully align the AI’s goals with ours, which is strikingly difficult.

  Needless to comment on this further, but the worst outcomes possible from unaligned AI seem extremely likely to exceed unemployment in severity.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 25, 2022, 1:53 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA fo­rum con­tent might be de­clin­ing in qual­ity. Here are some pos­si­ble mechanisms.

  I agree with the overall premise of this post that, generally speaking, the quality of engagement on the forum, through posts or comments, has decreased, though I am not convinced (yet) that some of the points made by the author as evidence for this are completely accurate. What follows are some comments on what a reduced average post quality of the forum could mean, along with a closing comment or two.

  If it is true that certain aspects of EAF posts have gotten worse over time, it’s worth examining exactly which aspects of comments and posts have degraded, and I think, in this regard, this post will be /​ has been helpful. Point 13 does claim that the degradation of the average quality of the forum’s content may be an illusion, but HaydnBelfield’s comment that “spotting the signal from the noise has become harder” seems to be stronger evidence that the average quality has indeed decreased, which is important as this means that people’s time is being wasted sorting through posts. This can be solved partially by subscribing only to the forum posters who produce the best content, but this won’t work for people who are new to the forum and produce high quality content, so other interventions or approaches should be explored.

  While the question of how “quality” engagement on forum should be measured is not discussed in this post, I imagine that in most people’s minds engagement “quality” on this site is probably some function of the proportion of different types of posts (e.g., linkposts, criticisms, meta-EA, analyses, summaries, etc...), the proportion of the types of content of posts (e.g., community building, organizational updates, AI safety, animal welfare, etc...), and the epistemics of each post (this last point might be able to integrated with the first point). The way people engage with the forum, the forum’s optics, and how much impact is generated as a result of the forum existing are all affected by the average quality of the forum’s posts, so there seems to be a lot at stake.

  I don’t have a novel solution for improving the quality of forum’s posts and comments. Presently, downvotes can be used to disincentivize certain content, comments can be used to point out epistemic flaws to the author of a post and to generally improve the epistemics of a discussion, high quality posters can create more high quality posts to alter the proportion of posts that are high quality, and forum moderators can disincentivize poor epistemic practices. In the present state of the forum, diffusing or organizing contest posts might make it easier to locate high quality posts. Additionally, having one additional layer of moderated review for posts created by users with less than some threshold of karma might go a long way in increasing the average quality of post’s made on the forum (e.g., that the Metaculus moderation team reviews its questions seems to help maintain the epistemic baseline of the site—of course, there are counterexamples, but in terms of average quality, extra review usually works, though it is somewhat expensive).

  The forum metrics listed in Miller’s comment seem useful as well for getting a more detailed description of how engagement has changed over the years as the number of forum posters has changed.

  As for the points themselves, I will comment that I think point (4) should be fleshed out in more detail—what are some examples here. Also, I think point 7 and 11 can be merged, and that more attention should be diverted to this. There can be inadvertent and countervalue consequences of welcoming the reduction in strength of people’s conversational filters on the forum. As such, moderators should consider these things more deeply (they may have weighed the pros and cons of taking actions to incentivize more engagement on the forum, and determined that this is best for the long term potential of the forum and EA more generally, but I do not know of the existence of such efforts).

  Thank you Thomas Kwa for contributing this take to the forum; I think it could lead to an increase in some people’s threshold for posting and might lead to forum figures searching for ways to organize similar posts (e.g., creating a means to organize contest spam) and move the average post quality upwards.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 22, 2022, 8:21 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What re­grets have you had re­gard­ing past dona­tions?

  I took the Giving What We Can Pledge about 2 years ago, so I don’t have much data to work off of, but in sum, I think the first year around I should have hedged my donations a bit more—I donated exclusively to Global Health and Development and feel that this was somewhat rash, but plan to diversify more this year and come up with better rationales for why X% of my donations goes to a particular cause or organization. Also, thank you for asking this question, as it might lead to somewhat more care being taken in donating.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 22, 2022, 4:16 AM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ex­is­ten­tial risk

  Below I consider changes for this Wiki page.

  The sentence

  “Existential risks include natural risks such as those posed by asteroids or supervolcanoes as well as anthropogenic risks like mishaps resulting from synthetic biology or artificial intelligence.”

  is insufficient in my view in capturing what existential risks humanity faces. I believe that having the list of existential risks covered in Bruce E. Tonn’s Anticipation, Sustainability, Futures and Human Extinction on the EAF Existential Risk Wiki would be substantially more helpful to EAF readers than the above sentence.

  Some or all of Tonn’s explanations can be replaced or supplemented with updated and/​or more comprehensive information. If those on this forum studied in existential risk choose to do away with most of Tonn’s descriptions I still believe that whatever is left of risk framework below would still be a useful development for this Wiki page.

  Here is the list of existential risks in Tonn’s book, without their explanations:

  I Anthropogenic: current, preventable

  • Nuclear war

  • Climate change

  • Disease

  II Coupled human–environment systems: current,
  preventable

  • Significant loss of biodiversity

  • Agricultural systems failure

  • Significant reduction in natural resources

  • Exceed key planetary boundaries

  III Human reproduction: emerging, preventable

  • Infertility due to chemicals

  • Unintended consequences of medical advances

  • Dysgenics

  • Voluntary extinction

  IV Risks to humanness: emerging, preventable

  • Evolution to posthumanism

  • Humans uploaded

  V Advanced technology: emerging, preventable

  • Non-friendly Super-AIs

  • Technological Singularity

  VI Natural terrestrial risks: anytime, unpreventable

  • Super volcanoes

  • Extreme ice age

  • Anoxic events

  VII Solar system: anytime, unpreventable

  • Collisions with near-earth objects

  • Energy output from the sun

  • Carrington class ejection from the sun

  • Gamma ray burst

  • Near earth super or hypernova

  • Rogue black hole

  VIII Extraterrestrial civilizations: anytime, unpreventable

  • Alien invasion

  • Destruction by aliens from afar

  • Other interventions by Godlike Creators

  • Other unknowns

  IX Universe scale: very long term, unpreventable

  • Vacuum phase transition

  • Collision with Andromeda Galaxy

  • Expansion of the universe due to heat death

  • Collapse of the universe due to gravitational attraction

  Of course, to understand some of these risk classifications adequately the context provided by Tonn in the book is needed. One of Tonn’s explanations for the first risk category captures this idea:

  This list leaves out several major risks to humanity that by themselves do not threaten humans with extinction. Bioterrorism involving the release of deadly microorganisms is one such threat. Unfortunately, this risk is increasing because of the increasing effectiveness of relatively low-cost, Do-
  It-Yourself (DIY) kits and instructions available over the internet. More generally, the risk is increasing that weapons of mass destruction will be developed and deployed by non-state actors. I am not arguing that these potential global catastrophic risks be ignored by any means. From the perspective of human extinction, though, they could play an important role in a series of events that could lead to human extinction (See the Singular Chain of Events Scenario at the end of Chapter 4).

  So, many of these existential risks might better be classified as extreme risk or GCRs, or as events that greatly increase the chance of something else resulting in extinction (a chain event) shortly after (on a geological time scale). Should Tonn’s listing be incorporated into this Wiki page, I think providing explanations next to each risk and perhaps nest to each risk category as well would be a good approach. If given permission by the community, I would begin by inserting this framework as you see it now and then would (1) link each risk to its Wikipedia page or flagship paper; (2) would provide an explanation for each risk and risk category, sometimes including the same sources as Tonn; and (3) would optimize for brevity in doing (1) and (2).

  Other than covering the actual existential risks listed on this Wiki page, I think copying some parts of the LessWrong Wiki concept page for Existential Risk (see https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​tag/​​existential-risk) would be a good idea. The highest priority action I can think of would be including Bostrom’s 2012 classifications of existential risks, which would coincide well with Tonn’s risk framework, in my opinion.

  Bostrom² proposes a series of classifications for existential risks:

  • Bangs—Earthly intelligent life is extinguished relatively suddenly by any cause; the prototypical end of humanity. Examples of bangs include deliberate or accidental misuse of nanotechnology, nuclear holocaust, the end of our simulation, or an unfriendly AI.

  • Crunches—The potential humanity had to enhance itself indefinitely is forever eliminated, although humanity continues. Possible crunches include an exhaustion of resources, social or governmental pressure ending technological development, and even future technological development proving an unsurpassable challenge before the creation of a superintelligence.

  • Shrieks—Humanity enhances itself, but explores only a narrow portion of its desirable possibilities. As the criteria for desirability haven’t been defined yet, this category is mainly undefined. However, a flawed friendly AI incorrectly interpreting our values, a superhuman upload deciding its own values and imposing them on the rest of humanity, and an intolerant government outlawing social progress would certainly qualify.

  • Whimpers—Though humanity is enduring, only a fraction of our potential is ever achieved. Spread across the galaxy and expanding at near light-speed, we might find ourselves doomed by ours or another being’s catastrophic physics experimentation, destroying reality at light-speed. A prolonged galactic war leading to our extinction or severe limitation would also be a whimper. More darkly, humanity might develop until its values were disjoint with ours today, making their civilization worthless by present values.

  I do not have much more to say for now regarding this Wiki page.

  Please share your thoughts on these proposed edits. If people support them, I will make them. If people support them conditional on some further changes, I will make the update the edits and then make them.

  Thank you for reading this!

  Also, pinging @Pablo given the extent of his contributions to the EAF Wiki pages.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 22, 2022, 2:46 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Math­e­mat­i­cal Cir­cuits in Neu­ral Networks

  Given that you have just published this on the forum, I have not yet finished watching the video, but it is playing in the background on 1.5x speed.

  Your project is valuable to me since I am not up-to-date with my knowledge of the state of interpretability research and suspect that your project and manner of explanations will help slightly in this regard. Beyond the value, interpretability is simply interesting. I would very likely watch more video explanations of this nature on topics in AI Safety, interpretability, alignment, etc… which leads me to my question: Do you intend to continue to upload videos like the one you’ve uploaded today?

  I really wish more EAs included video explanations /​ tutorials to supplement their work.

  Thank you for posting this on the forum, and especially for creating the video.

• QubitSwarm99Sep 21, 2022, 8:11 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Bioethics

  Hello, I recently received my undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Neuroscience, and have lately been doing work at the intersection of forecasting and deep learning. I am very interested in safeguarding humanity from X-risks and GCRs, especially GCBRs, and have been working with Rumtin Sepasspour of CSER to expand and automate some aspects of gcrpolicy.com. Biosecurity and bioethics are topics I would like to learn more about, both in relation to extreme risks but also to better understand how some emerging technologies (e.g., genome editing) in biology might affect humanity in the near and long term.

[Question] Up­dates on FLI’S Value Align­ment Map?

• QubitSwarm99Aug 31, 2022, 8:29 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Epistemic sta­tus: an ex­plainer and some thoughts

  Thank you for posting this; with respect to the first footnote, I think that even if the post is missing some parts or is slightly miscalibrated, having it on the forum might nonetheless help raise the forum’s epistemic standards.

  Some considerations:

  • I find Epistemic Status notes more useful when the author includes the extent to which they researched or thought about something, which you mentioned under The effort you put into this post and into making its claims very precise. It might also be useful to include statements concerning roughly what fractions of sources of evidence referenced in their post they skimmed and what fraction they engaged with deeply.

  • This point at the end of your post—we often less-than-critically accept the conclusions of a post (especially if it’s by someone who has some expertise or status) - could probably be elaborated on in its own paragraph; additionally, briefly addressing what people should take away /​ how people should update their beliefs in the Epistemic Status note might help with this.

  In my view, Epistemic Status falls under the category of “general transparency”. I highly recommend the Reasoning Transparency, which you list in Further Reading, and want to quote what I consider to be a highly valuable and highly relevant part of the Motivation section :

  • How trustworthy are you?

  • How/​why is this post important?

  • Who would you recommend read this post?

  • What are your priors?

  • How much external review has this post undergone?

  • What is your epistemic confidence?

  • What types of support does this post’s claims use?

  • What shortcuts did you take?

  • What are this post’s major inadequacies?

  • How did you update your beliefs after writing this?

  • How should I update my beliefs after reading this?

  • Did you contribute anything notable by creating post?

  In my own writing, I try to employ the following “canned transparency” list, which overlaps with both your list of valuable information to include under Epistemic Status and the above list from Reasoning Transparency. Of course, not all of these will be useful to include for every post; more speculative posts might benefit most from a simple Epistemic Status—the list below is geared more towards reports, reviews, and essays.
  

  • Why does this essay exist?

    • 1-2 sentences about why there is a need for this writing or why the topic deserves attention

  • Who is this post for?

    • 1 sentence explaining the author’s opinion for which people /​ communities would benefit (find interesting, improve research, find insightful) most from reading this

  • How good is this essay?

    • 1-3 sentences about the time spent writing, claim-robustness of, evidence incorporated in this essay, including shortcuts

  • This essay’s claims?

    • 1-2 sentences on the types of claims made in the essay

  • What is my confidence?

    • 1-2 sentences on the confidence you have in the claims you’ve made

  • Can you trust me?

    • 1-2 sentences on your qualifications, your track record, and your expertise

  • What are my priors?

    • 1 sentence on what you believed about the topic before writing this post /​ essay /​review

  • My updated beliefs?

    • 1 sentence on how you updated your beliefs

  • My sense of where you should update?

    • 1 sentence on how you believe others should or might update their beliefs

  • My contribution?

    • 1 sentence on what, if any, contribution you believe you made in the space you are writing in

  These are more of a blueprint towards a standard transparency block at the beginning of substantive posts or reviews, so I am open to edits /​ other people’s thoughts on the comprehensiveness /​ utility of this listing.

• QubitSwarm99Jul 11, 2022, 7:47 PM

  17 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: 300+ Flash­cards to Tackle Press­ing World Problems

  This is great. I think coordinated sharing of Anki /​ other flashcards should be a norm /​ done more frequently.

  Any chance you can share the sources for these notes, if the sources are easily accessible to you? I’d be interested in examining them, but it’s okay if you don’t have them, given that most people usually do not to have all the sources to their cards immediately accessible.

  Just saw the sources in Anki! Thank you.

• QubitSwarm99Jul 11, 2022, 6:40 PM

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: My EA Failure Story

  Stories of this nature are sobering to hear; thank you for posting this—each post like this gets people in the community mentally closer to seeing the base rate of success in the EA community for what it is.

  Your writing is enjoyable to read as well—I would read more of it.

  Controlling for overconfidence, I’m sorry that your expectations were failed with the last EA job you applied for. My brain doesn’t usually like to accept such things.

  The expected value of letting go and building a mental foundation that is simple, peaceful, want-free, etc… is positive. Generally speaking, most of the time, my life is actually pretty good. The baseline is good. When negative thoughts enter, I usually just repeat in my internal monologue “your mind is producing negative thoughts, all is actually well”, and this usually calms me and actually makes me more content, probably by distracting me from the negative thoughts and images and by increasing my levels of gratitude. It seems to me that your situation would benefit doing something like this. Take it 1 step at a time.

  Have a nice day.

• QubitSwarm99Jun 17, 2022, 7:14 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­test: 250€ for trans­la­tion of “longter­mism” to German

  Any updates on this? I’m interested to see your thoughts on all these good responses.

• QubitSwarm99Jun 17, 2022, 4:59 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: [Linkpost] World Men­tal Health Re­port: Trans­form­ing Men­tal Health for All

  Thank you for sharing this. For some reason, a lot of WHO’s reports usually escape my radar.

[Brief] Sim­ple Method for EA Com­mu­nity Build­ing Post-College

• QubitSwarm99Jun 14, 2022, 1:46 AM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What Is Most Im­por­tant For Your Pro­duc­tivity?

  Thank you for posting this.

  I want to direct more attention to Decreasing Anxiety. If these observations and pieces of advice were weighted, I would expect reducing one’s anxiety to be near or at the top.

  Many environments and activities within the EA-sphere (e.g., research or grant-making) are quite stressful, and operating continually in these environments can lead to burnout or the consequences of anxiety.

  Here is a simple reminder of the activities that are fundamental for flourishing (and for reducing anxiety) as a human:

  • Exercising each day

  • Getting enough and good sleep

  • Drinking enough water

  • Talking /​ socializing with (hopefully friendly) people

  • Eating nutritionally diverse foods

  • Actually getting your work done (see Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting)

  Though seemingly obvious, many people in Western civilization (especially the USA) routinely fail at these things.

[Question] Model­ing hu­man­ity’s ro­bust­ness to GCRs?

• QubitSwarm99Jun 3, 2022, 2:57 PM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Un­flat­ter­ing rea­sons why I’m at­tracted to EA

  I admit, some of these apply to me as well. I would be interested in reading further on the phenomenon, which I can’t seem to find a term for, of “ugly intentions (such as philanthropy purely for status) that produce a variety of good outcomes for self and others, where the actor knows that this variety of good outcomes for others is being produced but is in it for other reasons”.

  Your post reminds me of some passages from the chapter on charity in the book The Elephant in the Brain (rereading it now to illustrate some points), and could probably be grouped under some of the categories in the final list. I would recommend this reading this book, generally speaking.

  Intro.

  What Singer has highlighted with this argument is nothing more than simple, everyday human
  hypocrisy—the gap between our stated ideals (wanting to help those who need it most) and our
  actual behavior (spending money on ourselves). By doing this, he’s hoping to change his readers’
  minds about what’s considered “ethical” behavior. In other words, he’s trying to moralize.
  

  Our goal, in contrast, is simply to investigate what makes human beings tick. But we will still
  find it useful to document this kind of hypocrisy, if only to call attention to the elephant. In
  particular, what we’ll see in this chapter is that even when we’re trying to be charitable, we
  betray some of our uglier, less altruistic motives.

  Warm Glow

  Instead of acting strictly to improve the well-being of others, Andreoni theorized, we do charity in part because of a selfish psychological motive: it makes us happy. Part of the reason we give to homeless people on the street, for example, is because the act of donating makes us feel good, regardless of the results.

  
  Andreoni calls this the “warm glow” theory. It helps explain why so few of us behave like effective altruists. Consider these two strategies for giving to charity: (1) setting up an automatic monthly payment to the Against Malaria Foundation, or (2) giving a small amount to every panhandler, collection plate, and Girl Scout. Making automatic payments to a single charity may be more efficient at improving the lives of others, but the other strategy—giving more widely, opportunistically, and in smaller amounts—is more efficient at generating those warm fuzzy feelings. When we “diversify” our donations, we get more opportunities to feel good.

  ...

  • Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched.

  • Peer pressure. Our giving responds strongly to social influences.

  • Proximity. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally.

  • Relatability. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/​or stories) and give less in response to numbers and facts.

  • Mating motive. We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive.

  This list is far from comprehensive, but taken together, these factors help explain why we donate so inefficiently, and also why we feel that warm glow when we donate. Let’s briefly look at each factor in turn.

  Simler and Hanson then cover each of the listed entities in greater depth.

• QubitSwarm99Jun 3, 2022, 12:49 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Lit­tle (& effec­tive) altruism

  Thank you Parmest for writing this post. Shared reflections and experiences such as this one seem to occur somewhat infrequently on the EAF, and I appreciate your perspective.

  Some things came to my when reading this.

  A post that you may find enjoyable and insightful is Keeping Absolutes in Mind. Here, Michelle Hutchinson writes about altruistic baselines:

  In cases like those above, it might help to think more about the absolute benefit our actions produce. That might mean simply trying to make the value more salient by thinking about it. The 10% of my income that I donate is far less than that of some of my friends. But thinking through the fact that over my life I’ll be able to do the equivalent of save more than one person from dying of malaria is still absolutely incredible to me. Calculating the effects in more detail can be even more powerful – in this case thinking through specifically how many lives saved equivalent my career donations might amount to. Similarly, when you’re being asked to pay a fee, thinking about how many malaria nets that fee could buy really makes the value lost due to the fee clear. That might be useful if you need to motivate yourself to resist paying unnecessary overheads (though in other cases doing the calculation may be unhelpfully stressful!).

  which I believe is in line with your idea that local altruism, or the baseline altruism most people unfamiliar with EA think of when they imagine “altruism”, is still absolutely good even if it’s less good relative to other actions, and might support or drive other, more “macro-scale” altruistic action.

  After days of reflection, I understood what the problem was with me. The big talks on the forum had overshadowed my modesty. This was a profound and important realization for me. I recognized that a sudden jump to the big things was not making me an altruistic human being. Even if I would have managed to make contributions, I would never have become a part of EA.

  In most instances, I suspect lowering the bar for noticing, recognizing, or being cognizant of altruistic deeds probably will not detract significantly from the expected effectiveness of the most altruism deeds, so at minimum it wouldn’t hurt to care more about and help those around you in whatever ways possible and would likely improve

  Again, thank you for sharing these thoughts.