SebastianSchmidt

• SebastianSchmidtAug 5, 2023, 10:06 AM

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  on: Against the “smarts fetish”

  I agree with the overall claim of the post—i.e., that IQ is currently overrated within EA (although this will certainly depend on the context—i.e., it’s much less the case in some contexts). That said, I do feel confused about several aspects—including which factors are the most important for impact.
  For the record, I think that IQ is in the ~ top 5 qualities that are appreciated de facto within EA and perhaps even the top 1 in some contexts and that this is being overrated.
  
  I think it’s overrated for two reasons.
  1. Firstly, depending on the role, it’s an important but not in the top 2 most important factors for impact. E.g., being an excellent researcher will benefit more from IQ than being an excellent manager or community health person. Similarly, some studies suggest that CEOs or companies are higher than average but not significantly so (e.g., the median CEO of a large-scale company is in the top 17% of the population in terms of cognitive abilities). I’ll mention some factors that I think are important on the margin below.
  
  2. IQ is hard to change, so it’s more constructive to focus on things that can be cultivated.
  
  In terms of which qualities that are important to cultivate on the margin, I think the following are potential candidates in some contexts:

  1. Mental and physical health.

  2. Interpersonal skills.

  3. Impartial altruism.

  4. Epistemics—including independent thinking, scientific literacy, and epistemic humility.

  5. Ambition.

  6. Stamina/​conscientiousness.

  7. General professional and personal experience (i.e., having a significant amount of experience from various walks of life).

  8. Self-care and personal growth: We want everyone to be at their best in and flourish in the the long run. This means that we take care of ourselves by taking time off and investing in learning, and having an antifragile attitude towards the inevitable challenges that we will face. We also aim to lead by example and be the change we want to see in the world.

  9. Ownership/​agency:

  10. Collaborative spirit: We are committed to fostering an open and welcoming environment that allows for the flourishing of different people and approaches to doing good. We think we can do more good by working together with others and building great partnerships.

  
  
  That said, I think there are many other characteristics (that aren’t traits) that are important to keep in mind—this includes relevant professional and personal experience and sociological factors (sadly, affluence and education level within one’s family and country matter a lot in the current composition of the world).

• SebastianSchmidtJul 27, 2023, 10:05 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Kevin_Cornbob’s comment on: How to quickly set up Claude as a chat bot for on­line fel­low­ships and courses

  Yeah, this could be the case. Just not sure that gpt4 can be given enough context for it to be a highly user friendly chatbot in the curriculum. But it might be the best of the two options.

• SebastianSchmidtJul 23, 2023, 7:44 PM

  7 points

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  on: AMA: Peter Wilde­ford (Co-CEO at Re­think Pri­ori­ties)

  Hi Peter, thanks for your work. I have several questions:

  1. Most organizations within EA are relatively small (<20). Why do you think that’s the case and why is RP different?

  2. How do you decide on which research areas to focus on and, relatedly, how do you decide how to allocate money to them?

  3. What do you focus on within civilizational resilience?

  4. How do you decide whether something belongs to the longtermism department (i.e., whether it’ll affect the long-term future)?

• SebastianSchmidtJul 23, 2023, 7:29 PM

  1 point

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  on: How to quickly set up Claude as a chat bot for on­line fel­low­ships and courses

  Thanks for running with the idea! This is a major thing within education these days (e.g., Khan academy). This seems reasonably successful although Peter’s example and the tendency to hallucinate makes me a bit concerned.

  I’d be keen on attempting to fine-tune available foundations models on the relevant data. E.g., gpt-3.5 and see how good a result one might get.

• SebastianSchmidtJul 12, 2023, 9:27 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: rileyharris’s comment on: Fu­ture Academy—Suc­cesses, Challenges, and Recom­men­da­tions to the Community

  Hi Riley,
  Thanks a lot for your comment. I’ll mainly speak to our (Impact Academy) approach to impact evaluation but I’ll also share my impressions with the general landscape.
  
  Our primary metric (*counter-factual* expected career contributions) explicitly attempts to take this into account. To give an example of how we roughly evaluate the impact:
  
  Take an imaginary fellow, Alice. Before the intervention, based on our surveys and initial interactions, we expected that she may have an impactful career, but that she is unlikely to pursue a priority path based on IA principles. We rate her Expected Career Contribution (ECC) to be 2. After the program, based on surveys and interactions, we rate her as 10 (ECC) because we have seen that she’s now applying for a full-time junior role in a priority path guided by impartial altruism. We also asked her (and ourselves) to what extent that change was due to IA and estimate that to be 10%. To get our final Counterfactual Expected Career Contribution (CECC) for Alice, we subtract her initial ECC score of 2 from her final score of 10 to get 8, then multiply that score by 0.1 to get the portion of the expected career contribution which we believe we are responsible for. The final score is 0.8 CECC. As an formula: 10 (ECC after the program) − 2 (ECC before the program) * 0.1 (our counterfactual influence) = 0.8 CECC.
  
  You can read more here: https://​​docs.google.com/​​document/​​d/​​1Pb1HeD362xX8UtInJtl7gaKNKYCDsfCybcoAdrWijWM/​​edit#heading=h.vqlyvfwc0v22
  
  I have the sense that other orgs are quite careful about this too. E.g., 80,000hours seems to think that they only caused a relatively modest amount of significant career changes because they discovered that the people had updated significantly due to reasons not related to 80,000hours.
  
  

Fu­ture Academy—Suc­cesses, Challenges, and Recom­men­da­tions to the Community

• SebastianSchmidtJul 2, 2023, 6:25 PM

  1 point

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  on: Why EA Com­mu­nity building

  Thanks for this. I think it could’ve been more awesome by having a stronger statement on the importance of the EA ideas, values, and mindsets. I recognize that you somewhat mention this under reasons 2 and 5 but I would’ve liked to see it stated even more strongly.

• SebastianSchmidtJul 2, 2023, 6:14 PM

  1 point

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  on: How has FTX’s col­lapse af­fected pub­lic per­cep­tion of EA?

  Thanks so much for doing this. I’m very happy to see how the general public and university students seemed to be mostly unaware and unaffected by FTX. By being happy, I don’t mean to imply that we should take the situation lightly and not learn from it. I’m curious about other groups such as young professionals. However, I am somewhat shocked to see the massive drop in trust in leadership (1/​3 distrusting leaders). This is definitely a significant effect which might yield good consequences—e.g., people being more likely to develop their own views and be less inclined to defer to certain individuals.

• SebastianSchmidtJul 2, 2023, 6:01 PM

  6 points

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  on: Third Wave Effec­tive Altruism

  Thanks for the model—I think it’s useful.
  I think it’d probably be more appropriate to say that wave 2 was x-risk (and not broad longtermism) and/​or that longtermism became x-risk. Before reading your thoughts on the possibilities for the third wave, I spent a few seconds developing my thoughts. The thoughts were:
  1. Target audience: More focus on Global South/​LMIC.
  2. Culture: Diversification and more ways of living (e.g., the proportion of Huel drinkers go down).
  3. Call-to-action: A higher level community/​set of ideas (e.g., distilling and formalizing the method of EA and/​or longtermism) and cause-specific community (AI safety, etc.).
  4. Other: EA as a label gets reduced (e.g., if CEA changes its name).

• SebastianSchmidtJun 29, 2023, 2:35 PM

  1 point

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  on: Some tal­ent needs in AI governance

  Thanks for this! How many people did you interview for this?

• SebastianSchmidtJun 14, 2023, 1:02 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Joey🔸’s comment on: Tips for peo­ple con­sid­er­ing start­ing new incubators

  Thanks a lot for this. I eagerly read it last year and found several valuable takeaways. Looking forward to reading the foundation handbook!
  
  Just inserting a high-level description for other readers:
  I expected that their perspective would be too rigid (e.g., overly reliant on rigorous research on average effects and generalizing too strongly), cynical (as opposed to humanistic and altruistic), and overly focused on intelligence. Fortunately, my expectations were off. In fact, they were highly nuanced (emphasizing the importance of judgment and context), considerate (e.g., devoting a full chapter to women and minorities), and deemphasized intelligence (taking a multiplicative model of success—although, to be clear, they still claim that intelligence is very important). That said, their theory of change is quite distinct from ours (e.g., innovation and creativity are emphasized substantially more than morality and doing the most good).
  
  I also appreciated their discussion of the evidence around intelligence, role models, and talent search in sports.

• SebastianSchmidtMay 25, 2023, 9:22 PM

  2 points

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  on: Tips for peo­ple con­sid­er­ing start­ing new incubators

  Thanks for this! We’ll soon be vetting talent—are there any resources you’d recommend for understanding and selecting talent?

• SebastianSchmidtMay 15, 2023, 3:54 PM

  1 point

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  on: Effec­tive al­tru­ism in the gar­den of ends

  Thanks for this. I’m somewhat reminded of this post on using a different motivational system than guilt.

• SebastianSchmidtMay 11, 2023, 9:22 AM

  2 points

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  on: Com­mu­nity build­ing: Les­sons from ten years of fa­cil­i­ta­tion experience

  Very valuable—thank you Severin!

• SebastianSchmidtApr 28, 2023, 7:02 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Emily’s comment on: 2021 EA Men­tal Health Sur­vey Results

  Thanks so much for this reply—very informative.

  This seems relatively aligned with my perspective although the specifics of what the therapists said in relation the strong moral values matter as moral perfectionism can be self-defeating. I’d also add that it seems as if older EAs are less concerned with EA-informedness than younger. For an example of why it might be beneficial to have an EA-informed coach or therapist, I quite liked this podcast episode on 80K.

• SebastianSchmidtApr 16, 2023, 2:53 PM

  1 point

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  on: 2021 EA Men­tal Health Sur­vey Results

  Thanks for this!
  
  Would it be possible for you to provide information on the quantity/​frequency of the following findings?
  
  1. “People find it difficult to find therapists who accept the values of Effective Altruism or whom they can trust”
  
  2. “Thoughts on whether an EA-aligned therapist is necessary: some say yes, others no; some say it’s helpful to speak with therapists who are outside of the EA community.”
  
  Also, for 2, I’m curious whether they made claims about whether it was necessary or whether it was optimal. Seems quite different and my experience tells me that some growth areas (e.g., career-related beliefs and struggles) would be optimal for having someone EA-aligned (or at least EA-informed) whereas others wouldn’t matter (e.g., ADHD).

• SebastianSchmidtApr 13, 2023, 12:52 PM

  18 points

  4 ∶ 1

  on: Ap­ply to >30 AI safety fun­ders in one ap­pli­ca­tion with the Non­lin­ear Network

  Thanks for this. Seems important to provide more funding to folks who want to do good work!

• SebastianSchmidtApr 5, 2023, 12:11 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: The Over­ton Win­dow widens: Ex­am­ples of AI risk in the media

  Might be overly short due to the recent advancements and recency bias (e.g., would be interesting to see in a few weeks) but that’s a massive sample size!

• SebastianSchmidtApr 1, 2023, 2:04 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Gidi Kadosh’s comment on: An­nounc­ing VIVID: A new EA or­ga­ni­za­tion as­piring to scale effec­tive self-im­prove­ment & reflection

  Seems good to me. I’m still making up my mind as to whether it should be seen as its own cause area as opposed to a framing and method that can be used to enhance other cause areas.

• SebastianSchmidtMar 30, 2023, 7:14 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Gidi Kadosh’s comment on: An­nounc­ing VIVID: A new EA or­ga­ni­za­tion as­piring to scale effec­tive self-im­prove­ment & reflection

  Thanks for your reply.
  I agree that it’s highly complex and can positively affect other cause areas and I’m happy to jam more on this. However, I also think it’s important to not assume that it’s a panacea that’s good for everything. E.g., I do worry that focusing too much on well-being could be bad for the world as one starts to act in ways that optimize for that and neglects the significance of other cause areas. But I think it’s plausibly a really big thing which is why I’m exploring. I’ve written you a dm to set up a call.