Understood. I was responding to what I assumed OP was getting at, regardless of how poorly framed, and your specific naming of chemicals threw me off. Thanks for clarifying.
SiobhanBall
Karma: 920
What would need to happen for you to stand down on AI safety?
I’m not saying you should. I’m not saying you will. But what evidence would make you substantially less concerned than you are today?I’ve been asking people at EAG London some variation of two questions:
How worried are you about the economic and existential risks from AI?
What is the ‘expiry date’ of those worries?
This may seem leading, as if I’m implying that I’m not fully convinced by the broader arguments. Well, I’m not… not. My position is that I’m under-informed. But I still want to know how those better informed than I think about the limits of their concern.
So… is it a matter of time? If nothing substantially bad has happened in 10 years, will we stop fearing? Or is it a matter of meeting certain benchmarks of cooperation? Could it be when governments figure out a method of wealth redistribution that doesn’t result in societal decline?
Let me know your thoughts!
Change ‘alternative proteins’ to ‘cultivated meat’ and then I agree almost entirely.
I don’t think humanity will ever give up meat of our own volition. I’m not even sure that all the collective efforts and actions of vegans/vegetarians/advocates have caused a counterfactual decrease in meat production. I’m thinking about posing that question on here in its own post.
But once there’s an alternative to slaughter meat that tastes the same, is priced the same, and enjoys enough public acceptance to be bought in small-at-first, then swiftly increasing volumes… only then will factory farming stop existing. If there’s another path to ending factory farming in our lifetimes, then I don’t see it. And the downvotes I get when I talk about this dun’t help me see it, neither (grumpy cat face).
All else is re-arranging furniture on the Titanic, I fear.
Of course, the path is far from guaranteed. I’m personally on a quest to get to the fundamentals of what the path truly entails, what are the things holding it back, how do we win the fight for public acceptance (perhaps this is the most challenging potential ‘failure mode’), what are the tech barriers, how can they be overcome, how much investment is still needed (a lot), and on and on.
Good post, perhaps we can move towards being less apologetic in stating our conviction for alternative proteins and/or cultivated meat. I’m fine with APs, I just think they’re a stop-gap on the train to cultivated-town.
Can you explain how they’re the same?
Great post, not sure what to suggest. Thanks for publishing.
Thanks for this post! It’s clear, clever, and thought-provoking.
I’d push back on the moralising of salespeople. The reason they don’t necessarily worry about whether it will be ‘good’ for you to buy what they’re selling, and why that’s okay, is because you are the authority on that. Salespeople are not responsible for everyone’s experience of the world or the varying degree of appetite-to-be-sold-to among different people. What you find jarring, others might find refreshing.
In any case, thanks for showing that working with freelancers is often far more cost-effective than hiring an employee, due to reduced discovery costs. I’m all for orgs making quicker decisions to reduce the true cost of engagement from their side; why, you could book a call with me right now if you happened to need a good writer.
If you don’t book a call, and later discover you needed a good writer after all, you’ll have to pay the discovery costs you just described. So, is the marginal benefit of continuing the search (assuming, for argument’s sake, that more time spent tracks linearly to a better result) worth the additional transaction costs of looking beyond this comment?EA orgs should work with freelancers more often and, moreover, start applying a true cost effectiveness analysis to the way hiring is done. They seem to under-account for the transaction costs they themselves impose. For example, I know of an EA org with a specific policy against screening candidates during EAG, prioritising their remote process instead. A whole room full of potential hires who have already been somewhat screened for alignment, and basically no evidence that their in-house process produces better results for the extra cost. What could the counter-factual impact of those savings be? Small in the big scheme of things, perhaps, but worth considering.
Is anybody here doing something about the most recent ebola outbreak?
I am, yeah. I don’t think reasonable enquiry or more discussion is likely to shift the dominant narrative on a topic this inflammatory. The reactions to the CEA post made that clear.
I reckon there is more internal conflict; it’s just not being disclosed.
‘To me, this isn’t some carvout for sexual harassment, it’s trying to treat discussion of sexual harassment like I treat everything else.’This is a thankless endeavour. The topic is too emotionally heated, and the social incentives are too skewed towards what you’ve seen.
My own view is that the topic of whether there is or isn’t a particular problem with sexual harassment in EA has become a distraction. If there are concrete failures, name them and fix them. If there are clear policies that might improve things, propose them. But the ambient claim that EA is unusually bad is under-evidenced to me too, and I don’t think the community benefits from treating that as the default frame.
I largely agree, the plight of animals is being looked past … as is the only somewhat realistic solution to factory farming (and, therefore, the implications of AI on factory farming).
All or most funding currently allocated towards animal welfare in EA ought to be focused on but one intervention, in my view: policy advocacy to help get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves ASAP. No other intervention offers comparable upside (in terms of reduced suffering) of even a modest market penetration of cultivated meat.
I don’t see another way to end factory farming in our lifetimes.
Just one person’s strongly held view, though I’m also pleased to see Bruce Friedrich’s talk at EAG next week titled ‘the only tractable solution to industrial animal farming’. See some of you there!
Hi, cool program! A few questions:
‘The IAP: Entrepreneurship Track acts as a compliment to many other high-impact entrepreneurship programs. In fact, many IAP alumni have subsequently gone on to complete other entrepreneurial programs and incubators...’
So, is this new program a kind of a pre-cursor to those programs? How does the content differ (besides you covering AI safety, which I think AIM doesn’t)?
Also, who’s facilitating the Entrepreneurship Track?
Quick FYI for anyone still waiting to hear back re: EAG London. I learned today that my acceptance email from March never reached me, and apparently there have been a few email hiccups this year.
Might be worth checking spam/alternative inboxes or contacting admissions if you’re still waiting.
What do people think the implications are for the AI safety field if internal deployment is where frontier AI labs are heading? It would seem less tractable to me, especially for people who aren’t already deeply networked into the labs, which I expect describes most people currently trying to pivot into AI safety.
I’d like to know too.
Hi! Congratulations on the growth. A few questions from a fairly interested outside observer:
1. How do you think about counterfactual impact? It seems quite difficult to separate outcomes that would likely have happened anyway from outcomes meaningfully attributable to your interventions, particularly in a tough market. I don’t expect that’s fully solvable, but I’m curious about what methods or heuristics you use.
2. What do you see as the main differences between Probably Good and other career advisory organisations/services such as 80,000 Hours or High Impact Professionals? Where do you think your comparative advantage is emerging?
3. You mention an extensive search before selecting an internal hire for the ED role. Roughly how many applicants were involved, and how much staff time did the process consume overall? I’m generally sympathetic to internal hires/closed rounds in most cases because of the potential time/cost savings, but I’d be interested to better understand the level of those potential savings in practice.
Thanks for sharing, I’d definitely be interested in reading a longer retrospective at some point.
One angle I’d add is that there may be a complementary, more immediate approach: bringing in experienced grantmakers from adjacent fields and helping them transition into AI safety.
I think many of the core skills (evaluating proposals, making judgment calls with uncertain information, communicating decisions, managing portfolios, etc) are quite transferable. The main gap is context, for the reasons you’ve described. I think that’d be faster to remedy than building grantmakers from scratch.
Do you think this kind of approach (getting proven grantmakers into AI safety) could help solve the expected bottleneck? Perhaps I’m underestimating the barriers.
Ok, my updated understanding is that Sentient Futures is primarily focused on field-building, with a view to supporting interventions as they emerge over time.
One thing I’m still trying to get a better grip on is how this translates into impact on animals, and ideally, on what timescale. I’ve had similar questions when thinking about wild animal welfare more broadly: when does investment in building a field start to produce concrete outcomes that benefit animals?
In the AI x animals case, it seems slightly more pressing because of the time-sensitivity point. I’m trying to reconcile the idea that ‘this is urgent’ with an approach that is upstream and preparatory.
I’m also conscious that most of what I’m seeing is the public-facing layer, and you mentioned that a lot of the communication is happening in more private or high-context settings; so it may be that the picture looks more abstract from the outside than it does from within.
Thanks for the invite. I (edit) was going to join the showcase, but my kid is sick. I hope it goes well.
Thanks, Martijn. Yes, that’s another point of confusion; someone would need to pick up the tab for the added costs associated with better welfare.
Thanks for engaging, Constance, this does answer some of my questions.
I take your point that the window for the EU AI Act was short and that missing it would have meant missing it entirely. Are there any other win-win situations have been found and packaged so far, beyond the EU AI Act?
The BOTEC is a careful piece of reasoning, but it’s a model that compares two categories of work without specifying what either involves in practice. It doesn’t answer my questions about what concretely gets done, and how animals stand to benefit.
Your homepage describes Sentient Futures as existing to ‘identify the leverage points for weaving welfare into the core of future systems and cultivate the foundational community needed to activate them.’ A casual reader can’t translate that into what work is happening in real terms.
You acknowledged the communication gap yourself; I wonder if that’s where some effort could go, given you’re trying to build a field that hinges on persuading people of the gravity and impact of changes that need to happen now, with time-sensitive urgency.
Given how many people apply for these roles, I don’t understand the struggle. I just attended EAG, which was packed to the rafters with people who have done the bootcamps/courses/programs looking for a way in to a high-impact org; many of them with serious experience in things like journalism, business operations, and academic publishing. EA appears well-manned enough to treat such valuable talent as volunteers/metrics for their career programs; I don’t believe that there is an under-supply issue. I think there aren’t enough jobs.