I’m a researcher in psychology and philosophy.
Stefan_Schubert
Karma: 6,692
Thanks, very interesting.
Regarding the political views, there are two graphs, showing different numbers. Does the first include people who didn’t respond to the political views question, whereas the second exclude them? If so, it might be good to clarify that. You might also clarify that the first graph/sets of numbers don’t sum to 100%. Alternatively, you could just present the data that excludes non-responses, since that’s in my view the more interesting data.
Yes, I think that him, e.g. being interviewed by 80K didn’t make much of a difference. I think that EA’s reputation would inevitably be tied to his to an extent given how much money they donated and the context in which that occurred. People often overrate how much you can influence perceptions by framing things differently.
Yes. The Life You Can Save and Doing Good Better are pretty old. I think it’s natural to write new content to clarify what EA is about.
“Co-writing with Julia would be better, but I suspect it wouldn’t go well. While we do have compatible views, we have very different writing styles, and I understand taking on projects like this is often hard on relationships.”
Perhaps there are ways of addressing this. For instance, you could write separate chapters, or parts; or have some kind of dialogue between the two of you. The idea would be that each person owns part of the book. I’m unsure about the details, but maybe you could find a solution.
Do you mean EAGx Berkeley 2022 or EA Global: Bay Area 2023?
Informed speculation might … confuse people, since there’s already plenty of work people call “AI forecasting” that looks similar to what I’m talking about.
Yes, I think using the term “forecasting” for what you do is established usage—it’s effectively a technical term. Calling it “informed speculation about AI” in the title would not be helpful, in my view.
Great post, btw.
I find some of the comments here a bit implausible and unrealistic.
What people write online will often affect their reputation, positively or negatively. It may not necessarily mean they, e.g. have no chance of getting an EA job, but there are many other reputational consequences.
I also don’t think that updating one’s views of someone based on what they write on the EA Forum is necessarily always wrong (even though there are no doubt many updates that are unfair or unwarranted).
Hm, Rohin has some caveats elaborating on his claim.
(Not literally so—you can construct scenarios like “only investors expect AGI while others don’t” where most people don’t expect AGI but the market does expect AGI—but these seem like edge cases that clearly don’t apply to reality.)
Unless they were edited in after these comments were written (which doesn’t seem to be the case afaict) it seems you should have taken those caveats into account instead of just critiquing the uncaveated claim.
Fwiw I think this is good advice.
If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.
This discussion seems a bit of a side-track to your main point. These are just examples to illustrate that intuition is often wrong—you’re not focused on the minimum wage per se. Potentially it could have been better if you had chosen more uncontroversial examples to avoid these kinds of discussions.
Fwiw I think it would have been good to explain technical terminology to a greater extent—e.g. TAI (transformative artificial intelligence), LLM (large language model), transformers, etc.
It says in the introduction:
I expect some readers to think that the post sounds wild and crazy but that doesn’t mean its content couldn’t be true.
Thus, the article seems in part directed to readers who are not familiar with the latest discussions about AI—and those readers presumably would benefit from technical concepts being explained when introduced.
The first paragraph is this:
“If the rise of Sam Bankman-Fried was a modern tale about cryptocurrency tokens and “effective altruism,” his fall seems to be as old as original sin. “This is really old-fashioned embezzlement,” John Ray, the caretaker CEO of the failed crypto exchange FTX, told the House on Tuesday. “This is just taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose, not sophisticated at all.””
I don’t think that amounts to depicting EA as banditry. The subject is Sam Bankman-Fried, not the effective altruism movement.
Nathan, who created the thread, had some fairly general suggestions as well, though, so I think it’s natural that people interpreted the question in this way (in spite of the title including the word “specific”).
I think more general claims or questions can be useful as well. Someone might agree with the broader claim that “EA should democratise” but not with the more specific claim that “EA Funds should allow guest grantmakers with different perspectives to make 20% of their grants”. It seems to me that more general and more specific claims can both be useful. Surveys and opinion polls often include general questions.
I’m also not sure I agree that “EA should” is that bad of a phrasing. It can help to be more specific in some ways, but it can also be useful to express more general preferences, especially as a preliminary step.
No, I think yours and Ryan’s interpretation is the correct one.
the new axis on the right lets you show much you agree or disagree with the content of a comment
Linked from here.
Thank you!
Fwiw I’m not sure it badly damages the publishability. It might lead to more critical papers, though.
The NYT article isn’t an opinion piece but a news article, and I guess that it’s a bit less clear how to classify them. Potentially one should distinguish between news articles and opinion pieces. But in any event, I think that if someone who didn’t know about EA before reads the NYT article, they’re more likely to form a negative than a positive opinion.
My impression is that the coverage of EA has been more negative than you suggest, even though I don’t have hard data either. It could be useful to look into.
I also guess cry wolf-effects won’t be as large as one might think—e.g. I think people will look more at how strong AI systems appear at a given point than at whether people have previously warned about AI risk.