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Rasool
Karma: 1,040
Try Impact Books:
https://impactbooks.store/
Sorry I don’t know who runs it or any other information
Yikes
At the end of the book, Jensen berates his biographer for asking too many questions about AI safety. In Stephen Witt’s final interview with him, Jensen unleashed “twenty minutes” of “uncontained, omni-directional, and wildly inappropriate” shouting. The anger was sparked when Witt showed him a 1964 Arthur C. Clarke video predicting future AI systems that will “out-think their makers.” Witt asked whether humanity was prepared for the potential risks that could arrive in such a world. Jensen was not happy:
“This cannot be a ridiculous sci-fi story,” he said. He gestured to his frozen PR reps at the end of the table. “Do you guys understand? I didn’t grow up on a bunch of sci-fi stories, and this is not a sci-fi movie. These are serious people doing serious work!” he said. “This is not a freaking joke! This is not a repeat of Arthur C. Clarke. I didn’t read his fucking books. I don’t care about those books! It’s not– we’re not a sci-fi repeat! This company is not a manifestation of Star Trek! We are not doing those things! We are serious people, doing serious work. And – it’s just a serious company, and I’m a serious person, just doing serious work.”
Another horse analogy from an Anthropic researcher:
https://x.com/andy_l_jones/status/1998060552565002721
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1998060552565002721.html
Elon Musk strongly agrees with this on the Dwarkesh podcast:
Elon Musk
…
I somewhat disagree with the AI companies that are C-corp or B-corp trying to generate profit as much, as possible or revenue as much as possible, saying they’re labs.
They’re not labs. A lab is a sort of quasi-communist thing at universities. They’re corporations. Let me see your incorporation documents. Oh, okay. You’re a B or C-corp or whatever.
…
Dwarkesh PatelWhat’s xAI’s plan to stay on the compute ramp up that all the labs are doing right now? The labs are on track to spend over $50-200 billion.
Elon Musk
You mean the corporations? The labs are at universities and they’re moving like a snail.
Dwarkesh Patel
They’re not spending $50 billion.
Elon Musk
You mean the revenue maximizing corporations… that call themselves labs.
…
John CollisonWhat will xAI’s business be? Is it going to be consumer, enterprise? What’s the mix of those things going to be? Is it going to be similar to other labs—
Elon Musk
You’re saying “labs”. Corporations.
I want to signal-boost this conversation between you and @Wei Dai (and others), and see whether you have any further thoughts on the matter
Recent piece on this you might like:
https://davidoks.blog/p/gdp-numbers-in-poor-countries-are
A good recent piece on this:
https://davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-population-numbers-are-fake
Talking about Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and the problems with satellite data
Karnofsky, on the Dwarkesh podcast said (emphasis mine):
I mean, you can look up our $30 million grant to OpenAI. I think it was back in 2016–– we wrote about some of the thinking behind it. Part of that grant was getting a board seat for Open Philanthropy for a few years so that we could help with their governance at a crucial early time in their development. I think some people believe that OpenAI has been net negative for the world because of the fact that they have contributed a lot to AI advancing and to AI being sort of hyped, and they think that gives us less time to prepare for it. However, I do think that all else being equal, AI advancing faster gives us less time to prepare. It is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s the only consideration. I think OpenAI has done a number of good things too, and has set some important precedents. I think it’s probably much more interested in a lot of the issues I’m talking about and risks from advanced AI than like the company that I would guess would exist if they didn’t, would be doing similar things.
I don’t really accept that the idea that OpenAI is a negative force. I think it’s highly debatable. We could talk about it all day. If you look at our specific grant, it’s even a completely different thing because a lot of that was not just about boosting them, but about getting to be part of their early decision making. I think that was something that there were benefits and was important. My overall view is that I don’t look back on that grant as one of the better grants we’ve made, not one of the worse ones. But certainly we’ve done a lot of things that have had, you know, that have not worked out. I think there are some times shortly when we’ve done things that have consequences we didn’t intend. No philanthropist can be free of that. What we can try and do is be responsible, seriously do our homework to try to understand things beforehand, see the risks that we’re able to see, and think about how to minimize them.
I expect there is some variability, the author in this piece focuses on alcohol, which I don’t know that much about, but for “Reduce unhealthy diet” (Objective 3, page 10), CEARCH did a report here, which relates to WHO’s best buys (if not quite exactly matching their specified intervention), and found it to be “49,419 DALYs per USD 100,000″
For best buys in education, I recommend Rachel Glennester’s 80,000 hours podcast episode, where she praises the best buys, but also criticises how education spending is done
She has a second episode, which also touches on best buys
P.S. I’m not sure why this post has two disagree votes—seems like a perfectly valid forum post to me
Not sure if you caught it but there was a detailed critique and discussion of this 90% figure on LessWrong
There’s a transcript of the Ivan Gayton podcast, and other discussion, here
There are some interesting comments on LessWrong
I have been recommended the Drone Ultimatum podcast, but haven’t listened to any
Discussed on the forum here
I am a huge Ted Chiang fan, but your review misses one of the most amazing things about his writing—it is written in very brief and straightforward words and sentences!
A number of his short stories are available for free online, for instance Exhalation in Lightspeed magazine. Under ‘Works’ on his Wikipedia page, you can find others (sometimes via web archives)
A large recent RCT found that free contraception had no impact on birth rates in Burkina Faso—I wonder if/how this affects this cause area
One website, which doesn’t quite match all your criteria, is https://longbets.org/bets/, which has bets from people like Warren Buffet, Scott Alexander, Ray Kurzweil, and Eric Schmidt
I tried draft/auction leagues, and while the draft/auction itself was incredibly fun, I found that there was never much action afterwards, trade offers were always treated suspiciously (adverse selection!)
And in regular FPL you still have to consider cost-effectiveness, consensus thinking, and have the same constraints as everyone else playing—which I like