Gil

Karma: 1,170

Gil 26 Aug 2024 0:45 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: The case for contributing to the 2024 US election with your time & money
Setting aside the substantive issues about how accurate this post is vs. the other one, I’ll admit I’m very uncertain on how much we should avoid talking about partisan politics in AI forums, how much it politicizes the debate vs. clarifies the stakes in ways that help us act more strategically

Gil 6 Aug 2024 20:10 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The EA case for Trump 2024
Re: extremely toxic, most people who would see this post are left-wing, that is obvious.
I don’t think that a word-for-word identical where the author self-identified as an EA would be good. I think it would be less bad, and I might not clamor for the title to be changed.
The problem is that this post blew up on Twitter and a lot of people’s image of EA was downgraded because of it. To me, that’s very unfair; this post is wrong on the substance, this is an extremely unpopular opinion within EA, and the author doesn’t even identify as an EA so the post does not provide any evidence that people who identify as EA think this way. Changing the title would alleviate most of the reputational damage to EA (or well it would have if it was done earlier) and does not seem too big an ask.

Gil 6 Aug 2024 18:56 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 4
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The EA case for Trump 2024
IMO it’s pretty outrageous to make a piece entitled “The EA case for [X]” when you yourself do not call yourself identify as an effective altruist and the [X] in question is extremely toxic to most everyone on the outside. It’s like if I made a piece “the feminist case for Benito Mussolini” where I made clear that I am not a feminist but feminists should be supporting Mussolini.

Gil 6 Aug 2024 14:48 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 1
on: The EA case for Trump 2024
Could you please make the title “My case for Trump 2024” or even just “The case for Trump 2024″? It would be a more accurate description of this piece, and you are hurting EA’s reputation a bit with the current title.

Gil 6 Aug 2024 5:03 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform
I think it’s worth noting that the two examples you point to are right-wing, which the vast majority of Silicon Valley is not. Right-wing tech ppl likely have higher influence in DC, so that’s not to say they’re irrelevant, but I don’t think they are representative of silicon valley as a whole

Gil 18 Jun 2024 17:32 UTC
27 points
7 ∶ 1
on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
I do want to make the point that how tied to EA you are isn’t really your choice. The reason it’s really easy for media outlets to tie EA to scientific racism is that there’s a lot of interaction with scientific racists and nobody from the outside really cares if events like this explicitly market themselves as EA events or not. Strong free speech norms enabling scientific racism have always been a source of tension for this community, and you can’t just get around that by not calling yourselves EA.

Gil 31 May 2024 7:02 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: kuhanj’s comment on: The US Presidential Election is Tractable, Very Important, and Urgent
Ok. Sorry about the tone of the last response, that came off more rude than I would have liked. I do find it unsettling or norm-breaking to withhold information like this, but I guess you have to do what they allow you to do. I remain skeptical.

Gil 30 May 2024 9:44 UTC
5 points
11 ∶ 7
in reply to: kuhanj’s comment on: The US Presidential Election is Tractable, Very Important, and Urgent
This number is crazy low. It seems bad to make a Cause Area post on the forum that entirely rests on implausibly low numbers taken from some proprietary data that can’t be shared. You should at least share where you got this data and why we should believe it.

Gil 22 May 2024 2:30 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: [Linkpost] Statement from Scarlett Johansson on OpenAI’s use of the “Sky” voice, that was shockingly similar to her own voice.
Regulation, probably, mostly

Gil 21 May 2024 1:15 UTC
7 points
4 ∶ 0
on: [Linkpost] Statement from Scarlett Johansson on OpenAI’s use of the “Sky” voice, that was shockingly similar to her own voice.
The main questions in my mind are the extent to which public opinion (in the tech sphere and beyond) will swing against OpenAI in the midst of all this, and the extent to which it will matter. There’s potential for real headway here—public opinion can be strong.

Gil 5 May 2024 15:10 UTC
0 ∶ 0
on: Founders Pledge’s Climate Change Fund might be more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, but it is much less cost-effective than corporate campaigns for chicken welfare?
Love a good cost-effectiveness calculation.

Has anyone done a calculation of the (wild) animal welfare effects of climate change? Or is this so ungodly intractable that no one has dared attempt it.

Gil 1 May 2024 14:46 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: huw’s comment on: RedStateBlueState’s Shortform
Trump is anti-tackling pandemics except insofar as it implies he did anything wrong

Gil 1 May 2024 3:04 UTC
31 points
10 ∶ 0
on: RedStateBlueState’s Shortform
Trump recently said in an interview (https://time.com/6972973/biden-trump-bird-flu-covid/) that he would seek to disband the White House office for pandemic preparedness. Given that he usually doesn’t give specifics on his policy positions, this seems like something he is particularly interested in.
I know politics is discouraged on the EA forum, but I thought I would post this to say: EA should really be preparing for a Trump presidency. He’s up in the polls and IMO has a >50% chance of winning the election. Right now politicians seem relatively receptive to EA ideas, this may change under a Trump administration.

Gil 12 Apr 2024 16:33 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?
Yes, I just would have emphasized it more. I sort of read it as “yeah this is something you might do if you’re really interested”, while I would more say “this is something you should really probably do”

Gil 12 Apr 2024 14:19 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?
Mostly agreed, but I do think that donating some money, if you are able, is a big part of being in EA. And again this doesn’t mean reorienting your entire career to become a quant and maximize your donation potential.

Allocate Donation Election Funds by Proportional Representation

Gil1 Apr 2024 14:19 UTC

13 points

6 comments2 min readEA link

Gil 28 Mar 2024 20:07 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Repost: SBF sentenced to 25 years jail
All punishment is tragic, I guess, in that it would be a better world if we didn’t have to punish anyone. I guess I just don’t think the fact that SBF on some level “believed” in EA (whatever that means, and if that is even true) - despite not acting in accordance with the principles of EA—is a reason that his punishment is more tragic than anyone else’s

Gil 28 Mar 2024 19:01 UTC
11 points
8 ∶ 5
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Repost: SBF sentenced to 25 years jail
This is just not true if you read about the case, he obviously knew he was improperly taking user funds and tells all sorts of incoherent lies to explain it, and it’s really disappointing to see so many EAs continue to believe he was well-intentioned. You can quibble about the length of sentencing, but he broke the law, and he was correctly punished for it.

Gil 20 Mar 2024 3:33 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: EA “Worldviews” Need Rethinking
Suppose someone were to convince you that the interventions GiveWell pursues are not the best way to improve “global capacity”, and that a better way would be to pursue more controversial/speculative causes like population growth or long-run economic growth or whatever. I just don’t see EA reorienting GHW-worldview spending toward controversial causes like this, ever. The controversial stuff will always have to compete with animal welfare and AI x-risk. If your worldview categorization does not always make the GHW worldview center on non-controversial stuff, it is practically meaningless. This is why I was so drawn to this post—I think you correctly point out that “improving the lives of current humans” is not really what GHW is about!
The non-controversial stuff doesn’t have to be anti-malaria efforts or anything that GiveWell currently pursues; I agree with you there that we shouldn’t dogmatically accept these current causes. But you should really be defining your GHW worldview such that it always centers on non-controversial stuff. Is this kind of arbitrary? You bet! As you state in this post, there are at least some reasons to stay away from weird causes, so it might not be totally arbitrary. But honestly it doesn’t matter whether it’s arbitrary or not; some donors are just really uncomfortable about pursuing philosophical weirdness, and GHW should be for them.

Gil 19 Mar 2024 18:34 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: EA “Worldviews” Need Rethinking
How are you defining global capacity, then? This is currently being argued in other replies better than I can, but I think there’s a good chance that the most reasonable definition implies optimal actions very different than GiveWell. Although I could be wrong.

I don’t really think the important part is the metric—the important part is that we’re aiming for interventions that agree with common sense and don’t require accepting controversial philosophical positions (beyond rejecting pro-local bias I guess)

Gil

Allo­cate Dona­tion Elec­tion Funds by Pro­por­tional Representation

Allocate Donation Election Funds by Proportional Representation