If it is indeed possible to modify animal minds to such an extent that we would be 100% certain that previously displeasing experiences are now blissful, then couldn’t we extend this logic and “solve” every single problem? Like, making starvation and poverty and disease and extinction blissful as well?
I feel there are crucial moral and practical (e.g., 2nd order effects) considerations to account for here.
Fascinating — skimmed his wikipedia and this video, and I think he is 100% serious. He even wrote a paper with Sandberg and Roache arguing the same.
I posted this because it is an inside joke at our university group, but I appreciate that some professional philosophers have given it a more serious treatment.
Such rich literature! I think the major flaw in their methodology is lack of coordinated, incremental scaling (which seems to be the reason why the test subject faced quite a bit of trouble). That said, it still reinforces the arguments of the proposal above, so thank you for sharing these!
I was skeptical, and then I saw the menu.
If Dustin wants to further diversify his investment portfolio, this might be a great choice.
David Nash’s Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism seems highly underrated, and you should most probably give it a follow.
I don’t think any other newsletter captures and highlights EA’s cause-neutral impartial beneficence better than the Monthly Overload of EA. For example, this month’s newsletter has updates about Conferences, Virtual Events, Meta-EA, Effective Giving, Global Health and Development, Careers, Animal Welfare, Organization updates, Grants, Biosecurity, Emissions & CO2 Removal, Environment, AI Safety, AI Governance, AI in China, Improving Institutions, Progress, Innovation & Metascience, Longtermism, Forecasting, Miscellaneous causes and links, Stories & EA Around the World, Good News, and more. Compiling all this must be hard work!
Until September 2022, the monthly overloads were also posted on the Forum and received higher engagement than the Substack. I find the posts super informative, so I am giving the newsletter a shout-out and putting it back on everyone’s radar!
What do you think is the reason behind such a major growth? What are they doing differently that GWWC or other EA orgs could adopt?
I think it would have been better if you distilled your responses; much of the 80K career sheet is trying to guide you towards next steps and clarify your priorities and preferences, so the initial set of questions may be kind of redundant. The post right now is kind of hard to parse.
If I had to guess, this may be the reason behind the downvotes, although I am unsure.
I see somewhere around 4-6 career directions right now. Since you have a few years of financial runaway and since you stated that “Exploration. I don’t know what I’m going to do as a career,” it might be worth meticulously planning out the next 6-12 months to explore the different options you are considering.
SWE: do you have prior coding experience? If yes, how did you like programming and how good were you at it? If not, then have you checked short programs which will help you learn the basics of programming quickly and also gauge if you enjoy and are adept at it?
Being a SWE is more than being a programmer, but programming is a necessary first step.
Safety: Are you interested in Technical safety? If yes, do you enjoy programming, math, and research to a considerable degree? Are you also open to policy/governance roles? What about being an operations person involved in a Safety org?
Journalism: Do you have prior experience with and enjoy research and writing? If not, maybe writing some sample pieces and getting feedback from friends/strangers who will be blunt about the quality and depth of your writing would help.
Landlord/personal trainer/psychology: These might be the easiest for you given your financial situation and because you already have relevant work experience. That said, since effective giving will be your primary pathway to impact in this case:
It would be worth spending lots of time learning about effective giving,
Choosing which cause/interventions you want to donate to, and
Maximizing the amount of money you can donate.
How did I miss this update? Either way, thank you for sharing!
What happened to US Policy Careers?
They had several in-depth, informative articles. Shame if they are off the Forum and there is no way to access them.
Minor nitpick: “NEOs (objects smaller than asteroids)”
The definition of NEOs here seems wrong. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to call them “Tiny NEOs?” The current definition makes it sound as if asteroids aren’t NEOs, but most NEOs are asteroids.
‘Hold fire on making projections’ is the correct read, and I agree with everything else you mention in point 2.
About point 1 — I think sharing negative thoughts is absolutely a-ok and important. I take issue with airing bold projections when basic facts of the matter aren’t even clear. I thought you were stating something akin to “xyz are going to happen,” but re-reading your initial post, I believe I misjudged.
I am unsure how I feel about takes like this. On one hand, I want EAs and the EA community to be a supportive bunch. So, expressing how you are feeling and receiving productive/helpful/etc. comments is great. The SBF fiasco was mentally strenuous for many, so it is understandable why anything seemingly negative for EA elicits some of the same emotions, especially if you deeply care about this band of people genuinely aiming to do the most good they can.
On the other hand, I think such takes could also contribute to something I would call a “negative memetic spiral.” In this particular case, several speculative projections are expressed together, and despite the qualifying statement at the beginning, I can’t help but feel that several or all of these things will manifest IRL. And when you kind of start believing in such forecasts, you might start saying similar things or expressing similar sentiments. In the worst case, the negative sentiment chain grows rapidly.
It is possible that nothing consequential happens. People’s mood during moments of panic are highly volatile, so five years in, maybe no one even cares about this episode. But in the present, it becomes a thing against the movement/community. (I think a particular individual may have picked up one such comment from the Forum and posted it online to appease to their audience and elevate negative sentiments around EA?).
Taking a step back, gathering more information, and thinking independently, I was able to reason myself out of many of your projections. We are two days in and there is still an acute lack of clarity about what happened. Emmett Shear, the interim CEO of OpenAI, stated that the board’s decision wasn’t over some safety vs. product disagreement. Several safety-aligned people at OpenAI signed the letter demanding that the board should resign, and they seem to be equally disappointed over recent events; this is more evidence that the safety vs. product disagreement likely didn’t lead to Altman’s ousting. There is also somewhat of a shift back to the “center,” at least on Twitter, as there are quite a few reasonable, level-headed takes on what happened and also on EA. I don’t know about the mood in the Bay though, since I don’t live there.
I am unsure if I am expressing my point well, but this is my off-the-cuff take on your off-the-cuff take.
I like the LW emoji palette, but it is too much. Reading forum posts and parsing through comments can be mentally taxing. I don’t want to spend additional effort going through a list of forty-something emojis and buttons to react to something, especially comments. I am often pressed for time, so almost always I would avoid the LW emoji palette entirely. Maybe a few other important reactions can be added instead of all of them? Or maybe there could be a setting which allows people to choose if they want to see a “condensed” or “extended” emoji palette? Either way, just my two cents.
Couldn’t the comment section under the episode announcement posts (like this one) serve the same purpose? Or are you imagining a different kind of discussion thread here?
The closest would be CEA’s communication team, but as you point out: “it’s not desirable to have a big comms. function that speaks for EA and makes the community more formal than it is.”
I think it’d be challenging (and not in good taste) for CEA to craft responses on behalf of the entire EA community; it is better if individual EAs critique articles which they think misrepresents ideas within the movement.
I see the same recycled and often wrong impressions of EA far too often, so I appreciate you taking the time and doing this!
Thank you for sharing your impressions! Some comments and questions:
Does longtermist institutional reform count as systemic change?
Meta-question: What is systemic change? How do you define it?
I think this a term that has become memetically dominant in the Left and has lost its meaning because it is used far too often and casually. So, now whenever people mention that term, I am not quite sure if I know what they mean by it.
I think one speculative reason why longtermist circles don’t discuss concerns like the ones you raise is because of a somewhat prevalent belief that the post-scarcity utopia will happen soon after AGI. In a nutshell: AGI will happen very soon, the creation of AGI will lead to ASI (or AGI+) fairly quickly, and if this whatchamacallit is sufficiently aligned, it will solve all our problems.
Even if an individual somewhat subscribed to this notion, they may not think about most present concerns as they would all seem trivial. After all, they will soon be “solved” in the post-AGI world.[1]
I don’t think professional longtermist organizations operate on this belief or even entertain it.
But if pure suffering elimination was the only thing that mattered, no one would be endangered, right? I am guessing there are some other factors you account for when valuing human lives?
I suspect we share very different ethical intuitions about the intrinsic value of non-human lives.
But even from an amoral perspective, this would be an issue because if a substantial number of engineered chickens pecked each other to death (which happens even now), it would reduce profitability and uptake of this method.
I partially agree, but even a couple of malevolent actor who enhance themselves considerably could cause large amounts of trouble. See this section of Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors.