Studying BTech at IIT Delhi. Check out my comment and post history for topics of interest. Please prefer seeing recent comments over older ones as my thoughts have been updating very frequently recently. I spent 18 months deep into cryptocurrency and DeFi before I came here.
profile: samueldashadrach.github.io/EA/
Last updated: March 2022
Thanks for your reply. I did in fact realise the same thing later on! I could send you my attempt or link it here if you’re interested.
I suggested a similar idea here, although my posts wasn’t as clear:
Also I think [person with a viewpoint] needs to be narrowed down to the few most popular viewpoints in the world or atleast developed world, otherwise this becomes a very large task.
Not sure why you got downvoted. First para is valid, second seems a bit off context. (Like yes, it’s related but is it related enough to actually further the goals of the OP?)
Understood. Sorry for harshness in my original comment then.
Note: OP has assured me the following is not a concern. Haven’t deleted the comment so the discussion is still visible.
I’m using a large heading because I feel the cost of EA supporting fraudulent projects can be high; I don’t usually do this.
As someone who has previously worked in the cryptocurrency space, I don’t think your stablecoin is likely to maintain peg longterm unless it has significant underlying reserves—USD or other assets. Significant here means atleast 40-50% backing, although it is much better if it higher. You may have seen the recent UST collapse as an example of a large-scale project that collapsed due to insufficient backing—at peak there was $18 billion in UST circulating market cap.
In the absence of backing, it is easy for this project to be deceptively marketed. I am okay with unbacked coins being marketed as explicitly that, as then everyone holding them knows their value is defined purely on memes / narrative, and can make their decisions accordingly. I am also okay with coins that are backed as long as they are transparent about what backing they have, and actually have said backing. With your project’s current pitch, it is easy to mislead users into thinking the coin will maintain a $1 pegged price (or any non-zero price for that matter) due to backing, although in reality it has no backing.
Until you can make sure that the coin will not be deceptively marketed, I also don’t think it’s a good idea for EA folks to engage with the project.
I see. Thanks for this.
Peter Thiel’s address to EA in 2013, San Francisco:
My concern about people and animals having net-negative lives has been related to what’s happening with my own depression.
+1 on this part.
I feel like this is a very common failure mode—people look at the happiness or suffering prevalent in their own personal life and extrapolate it to whether the average person is net positive, zero or negative utility.
Thanks for replying!
You’re right there’s some difficulty in figuring out which opinions do we want to poll EAs for and present data. And how much would outsiders trust that data, as opposed to perceptions they may have obtained through other means. I didn’t fully think this through when I was posting.
re: PR department
I think it would be useful to have PR, although I’m not entirely sure what policies they should take, or how insider versus outsider conversations should be fragmented. Some people have raised issue with the EA forum too because it is too open to outsiders.
re: Dr Gebru’s opinions
Yeah if you take a very generous interpretation you can see some of it is based in truth. Although I personally still think it has more to do with her lens of viewing the world combined with assigning way too high priors on how much bias exists in the community. Hence I thought being upfront about how much and what kinds of bias exist might help. Am unsure too. As for her lens itself, it’s not one I fully ascribe to but it’s a lens a lot of people have, and hence imo it’s worth engaging with people from inside of their own perspective or lens.
Hmm, maybe I can call it a prior but from the view of the outsider. Say an outsider with far-left stances comes and talks to 5 EAs, and finds 1 person who shares their far-left opinions, and 1 person who has stances they find repulsive. Or maybe it’s not 5 EAs in person they meet, but 5 articles or blog posts they read. They’re now going to assume that roughly 20% of EAs are far-left and 20% have opinions they find repulsive, by extrapolating their “prior”.
(And sure the ideal thing to do is talk to more than 5 people but not everyone has time or interest for that, which is why I might want EAs to instead present this data to them explicitly.)
I see—this is a valid point.
I was thinking of reporting survey results (of EA opinions on non-EA stances) - do you think it is hard to conduct surveys objectively?
You’re right “bias” may not have been the best word for what I wanted to say, it’s somewhat negatively-coded.
I’d be keen to know more what you mean by “what directs one to arrive at such a position”.
2 makes sense.
Regarding 3, I completely agree. I think you can present this nuance in the intro pages too. Like here is the current distribution of EA opinions on your favorite movement X, but if you feel you can convince us on X we’re open to change.
Thank you for this! This makes sense, and this could be added to intro pages.
I also still think it’s useful to list out (in intro pages) systemic changes that other movements support that we don’t support (or atleast don’t have consensus support for inside of EA).
I see. I think your answer exactly as you’ve said it, would be useful to add to intro pages. Like maybe a survey result can be added.
Also yeah I don’t think this should be a defining feature of EA or something to rally under, but it is important info that could be presented to someone coming to EA first time who is already looking for this info.
Hey!
Would recommend putting a summary in the post
This might not be a popular line of thought but:
Are you maximising impact, or some positive neurological reward (happiness, joy, contentment) that you get because of the impact? If the latter, then this reward does not have to scale linearly with the impact itself. Helping 1M people doesn’t feel 1M times better than helping one person.
Now you might say that wait, what I am actually optimising for is “feeling like I did the impartial utilitarin thing no matter what my short-term scope-insensitive feelings are”. And take the action that tries to help 1M people. But now “feeling like I did the impartial utilitarin thing” too is not something that scales linearly with impact—yes you’ll now take utilitarian actions but the joy you get from knowing you’re a utilitarian still won’t scale linearly with the impact itself.
I’m not sure I have a resolution to this, but keen on people’s thoughts.
Im not sure how to upload a doc on phone so I’m just copy pasting the content.
If this isn’t valuable for the forum I’m also happy to take it down (either the comment or the post)
This is mostly a failed attempt at doing anything useful, that I nevertheless wish to record.
See also: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AiH7oJh9qMBNmfsGG/institution-design-for-exponential-technology
There is a lot of complexity to understanding how tech changes the landscape of power and how bureaucracies can or should function. A lot of this complexity is specific to the tech itself.
For instance, nuances of how nukes must be distributed can affect how its command structure can look like, or how the uranium supply chain must look like. Or nuances of what near-term AI cannot or cannot do, for surveillance and enforcement, can affect the structure of bureaucracies that wish to wield this power. Or nuances of how compute governance can work, for AGI governance structures.
I wondered if it possible to abstract away all of this complexity by simply assuming any tech allows for a relation of power between two people, one exerts control on the other. And then build theory that is invariant to all possible relations of power and therefore all possible technologies we may invent in the future.
Toy example
I wished to build theory for how institutions can hold very powerful tech. Here’s a toy example I thought of.
A magical orb with following properties Wearer can wear it for 10 seconds, and instantaneously make a wish that destroys all other orbs still being formed in the universe. Wearer can wear it for 60 seconds, and become an all-knowing all-intelligent all-capable god. Also assume: Anybody anywhere in the universe can start chanting (publicly known) prayers for 60 seconds to create a new orb All chanting is audible to everyone in the universe
Challenge Design a stable social technology that uses an orb to ensure no other orb exists in the universe, but also ensure this orb doesn’t fall to someone who become a god.
Why define the problem this way?
Even when defining the problem I realised I had to make more assumptions that I initially thought I did.
I had to assume all chanting is audible to everyone, to sidestep the problem of who controls surveillance tech and how powerful is it?
I had to assume anybody can chant, to sidestep the problem of who can chant, and also not get into pre-emptive solutions such as keeping the prayers a secret. Note also that I considered prayers as the way to create orbs, and not some existing physical resource. This is because physical resources also allow for solutions that control their supply chain, which has more complexity (such enriched uranium for nukes or compute governance for AGI). I did not want those kinds of solutions; I only wanted solutions actually using the orb.
How to solve this problem?
Clearly the value of ensuring the orb is safe exceeds the value of lives of those in the bureaucracy built around the orb (assuming a bureaucracy is built). Hence I will casually refer to death threats and deaths as a form of control. In an ideal world where it is possible, I would prefer less coercive or destructive ways to design the bureaucracy—this is again just a way to remove complexity when attempting a first solution.
For starters you want one person using the orb. You also want people who can threaten to kill the person using the orb, if they wear it for more than 10 seconds at a time. You want the persons threatening to further be threatened if they don’t do this threatening, either by each other or by other people. You want a predictable second person to gain access to the orb if the first person attempts to misuse the orb and is killed. Such that you can now repeat the game theory as is, on the second person.
This attempt at a solution already contains a huge amount of complexity.
One possible way to have these threats is to give everyone guns. You now need to look at errors in firing, you need to look at errors in human’s behaviours (such as people who panic or are asleep and don’t fire). You need to look at the physical positions of the people, they are no longer agents, but agents with three-dimensional locations. You need line of sight for people to be able to surveill each other’s actions. You need ways to safely rotate shifts as people can’t be awake 24x7.
You also need mechanisms for people outside this room and society at large, to trust what happens inside is legitimate and safe, and not be willing or capable to barge in or blow up the room.
Better technology can maybe get better solutions here. A computer could fire shots more reliably than a human. A camera could avoid the requirement for line of sight. But that just introduces more complexity, such as how you will replace the cameras, who controls the bureaucracy that manufactures the cameras and how you’ll ensure they never run out, what if cameras have errors, and so on.
And these problems might be solveable but they’re high complexity which is what I was trying to avoid. Even though the orb has complexity abstracted away, I need to use technologies besides the orb to secure it, and this reintroduces all the complexity of very specific technologies.