Data scientist working on AI forecasting through Epoch and the Stanford AI Index. GWWC pledge member since 2017. Formerly social chair at Harvard Effective Altruism, facilitator for Arete Fellowship, and founder of the DC Slate Star Codex meetup.
Robi Rahman
Karma: 1,448
I don’t really see anything in the article to support the headline claim, and the anonymous sources don’t actually work at NIST, do they?
Rather than farmers investing more profits from growing plants into animal farming, I think the main avenue of harm is that animal feed is an input to meat production, so if the supply of feed increases, production of meat would increase.
Under preference utilitarianism, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether AIs are conscious.
I’m guessing preference utilitarians would typically say that only the preferences of conscious entities matter. I doubt any of them would care about satisfying an electron’s “preference” to be near protons rather than ionized.
So you think your influence on future voting behavior is more impactful than your effect on the election you vote in?
Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through.
Josh You and I wrote a python script that searches Google for a list of keywords, saves the text of the web pages in the search results, and shows them to GPT and asks it questions about them from a prompt. This would quickly automate the rest of your data collection if you have the pledge signers in a list already. Email me if you want a copy.
The social value of voting in elections is something where I’ve seen a lot of good arguments on both sides of an issue and it’s unresolved with substantial implications for how I should behave. I would really love to see a debate between Holden Karnofsky, Eric Neyman, and Toby Ord against Chris Freiman and Jacob Falkovich.
Context for people who don’t follow the authors:
“Why Swing-State Voting is not Effective Altruism” by Jason Brennan and Chris Freiman: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12273
Eric Neyman on voting:
https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/?s=vot
“Casting the Decisive Vote” by Toby Ord
https://www.tobyord.com/writing/decisive-vote
“Vote Against” by Jacob Falkovich
I don’t think this is empirically true. US speed limits are typically set lower than the safest driving speeds for the roads, so micromurders from speeding are often negative in areas without pedestrians.
Insurance fraud has low social cost? Explain?
I agree, however, isn’t there still the danger that as scientific research is augmented by AI, nanotechnology will become more practical? The steelmanned case for nanotech x-risk would probably argue that various things that are intractable for us to do now, have no theoretical reasons why they couldn’t be done if we were slightly better at other adjacent techniques.
they were trying to do was place two carbon atoms onto a carbon surface, and they failed, as they didn’t have the means to reliably image diamond surfaces
Has this limitation been ameliorated by advancements in imaging? I used to work in materials science and don’t anymore, but my understanding is that scientists have very recently refined needles to one-atom width at the point, which should improve the resolution of scanning tunneling microscopy. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
a prosecutor showing smiling photos of a couple on vacation to argue that he couldn’t have possibly murdered her
I think you meant a defense attorney, not a prosecutor.
Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section.
It’s not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
It’s not clear whether Kat wants people to think that it’s about some unmotivated third party, or if it’s supposed to be obvious that it’s Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldn’t update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person it’s referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50⁄50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like it’s talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying it’s obvious, but I’m really confused.
It’s not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Ben’s post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that it’s Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasn’t denied it.
David probably meant “overall character of Nonlinear management” there. And in that case you might not interview the managers themselves, although you’d probably want to interview other employees to see if they were treated like Alice and Chloe.
Can you just confirm that it’s something someone else told you, and not referring to yourself in third person?
Phrasings like
“if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”
for what is evidently a fully paid, luxurious work & travel experience… tanks the quality of the comment.Huh? No, that is a succinct and accurate description of a disputed interpretation, and I think Nonlinear’s interpretation is wrong there. They keep saying in their defense that they paid Alice (the equivalent of) $72,000 when they didn’t—it’s really not the same thing at all if 80% of it is comped flights, food, and hotels. At least for me, the amount of cash that would be an equivalent value to Alice’s compensation package is something like $30-40,000.
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations
Though the degree of un-professionalism displayed by all parties involved in this saga is startling, I actually think EA has a great mix of “boring” orgs and fast-and-loose startup-y ones. One organization having ridiculous drama like this, once every few years, out of hundreds of EA orgs existing without incident, might be the right level where we’re balancing mistakes vs excessive bureaucracy. (On the other hand, you could argue the FTX disaster was caused by this kind of thing, and that much harm, even once, outweighs the benefits of reduced bureaucracy in a thousand other orgs.)
I don’t follow. Can you explain how Will Aldred’s comment was preposterously naive?
I think it’s not actually accurate to say that
The vast majority of what they gave is disputing the evidence
as it’s constantly interspersed with stuff like how great it is to work in a hot tub.
I don’t see Shapley values mentioned anywhere in your post. I think you’ve made a mistake in attributing the values of things multiple people have worked on, and these would help you fix that mistake.