Tristan Williams

• Tristan WilliamsApr 4, 2024, 10:13 AM

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  in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Talk­ing to Congress: Can con­stituents con­tact­ing their leg­is­la­tor in­fluence policy?

  Sorry I must have missed this earlier, but yeah we linked to your shortforum in the post, a really great example of the positive upshot of doing this sort of work! Have you done any writeups on how you went about the meetings yet? Feels like that might also be worthwhile.

Talk­ing to Congress: Can con­stituents con­tact­ing their leg­is­la­tor in­fluence policy?

• Tristan WilliamsNov 27, 2023, 5:38 PM

  1 point

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  on: AI Safety Seems Hard to Measure

  The dropdowns appear to be broken, had to go to the coldtakes version

• Tristan WilliamsNov 22, 2023, 5:53 PM

  17 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: Sam Alt­man re­turn­ing as OpenAI CEO “in prin­ci­ple”

  I tried to explain why you may not want to put it that way, i.e. that there’s perhaps an issue of framing here, and you first reply “but the statement is true” and essentially miss the point.

  I’ll briefly respond to one other point, but then want to reframe this because the confusion here seems unproductive to me (I’m not sure where our views differ and I don’t think our responses are helping to clarify that for one another). The original comment was expressing a view like “using the phrase ‘EAs are out’ is probably a bad way to frame this”. You responded “but it’s literally true” and then went on to talk about how disusing this seems important for EA. But no one’s implying it’s not important for us to discuss? The argument is not “let’s not talk about their relations to EA” it’s a framing thing, so I think you’re either mistaken on what the claim is here, or you just wrote this in a somewhat confusing manner where you started talking about something new and unrelated to the original point in your second paragraph.

  To reframe: I’d perhaps want you to think on a question: what does it mean for us to be concerned that EAs are no longer on the board? Untangling why we care, and how we can best represent that, was the goal of my comment. To this end, I found the bits where you expand on your opinions on Toner and the board generally to be helpful.

• Tristan WilliamsNov 22, 2023, 9:52 AM

  21 points

  13 ∶ 6

  in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: Sam Alt­man re­turn­ing as OpenAI CEO “in prin­ci­ple”

  I think the general point is that this makes sense from a charitable perspective, but is open to a fair degree of uncharitable impressions as well. When you say “EAs are out” it seems like we want some of our own on the inside, as opposed to just sensible, saftey concerned people.

  It kind of implies EAs are uniquely able to conduct the sort of saftey conscious work we want, when really (I think) as a community what we care about is having anyone on there who can serve as a ready tonic to for-profit pressures.

  What succinct way to put this is better? “Saftey is out” feels slightly better but like it’s still making some sort of claim that we have unique providence here. So idk, maybe we just need slightly longer expressions here like “Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley have done really great work and without their concern for saftey we’re worried about future directions of the board” or something like that.

  (the other two paragraphs of yours focus somewhat confusingly on the idea of labeling EAs as being necessary for considering the impact of this on EA (and on their ability to govern in EA) which I think is best discussed as its own separate point?)

• Tristan WilliamsNov 7, 2023, 5:22 PM

  1 point

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  on: AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined

  What sort of goals might be common to human level AIs emerging in different contexts for different purposes? Why wouldn’t these AIs (in this situation where they’re developed slowly and in an embedded context) have just as much diversity in goals as humans do? Or is the argument that they, at an incredibly high level, are just going to end up wanting things more similar to other AIs than humans?

• Tristan WilliamsNov 7, 2023, 4:16 PM

  1 point

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  on: Spread­ing mes­sages to help with the most im­por­tant century

  I think this series is out of order, at least if it’s intended to be read in release order based on your website (and the into here “In this more recent series, I’ve been trying to...” indicates to me this is not the start but rather a more middle lying article and that I should stick with the release order to read the series.

[Book Re­view] as­ter­isk #2

• Tristan WilliamsNov 2, 2023, 10:24 AM

  1 point

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  on: Fore­cast­ing trans­for­ma­tive AI: what’s the bur­den of proof?

  Why exactly is this obvious?

  If you think humans (or our descendants) have billions of years ahead of us, you should think that we are among the very earliest humans, which makes it much more plausible that our time is among the most important.

  I understand the basic thrust of actions taken earlier having a greater chance to cause significant downstream effects because there’s simply more years in play, but is that all there is to the claim?

• Tristan WilliamsNov 1, 2023, 6:29 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: mariekedev’s comment on: Open Thread: Oc­to­ber—De­cem­ber 2023

  I’d add ImpactCoLabs (I’d look here first, before other resources) and the Animal Volunteer Opportunities Board.

[Con­gres­sional Hear­ing] Over­sight of A.I.: Leg­is­lat­ing on Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

• Tristan WilliamsOct 31, 2023, 9:13 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Pres­i­dent Bi­den Is­sues Ex­ec­u­tive Order on Safe, Se­cure, and Trust­wor­thy Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

  Thanks, I’ll toss this in at the top now for those that are curious

• Tristan WilliamsOct 31, 2023, 9:13 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Pres­i­dent Bi­den Is­sues Ex­ec­u­tive Order on Safe, Se­cure, and Trust­wor­thy Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

  Anytime :) I didn’t do much, but glad to know it was helpful because I was debating whether to continue trying to organize for future stuff

Pres­i­dent Bi­den Is­sues Ex­ec­u­tive Order on Safe, Se­cure, and Trust­wor­thy Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

• Tristan WilliamsOct 28, 2023, 1:18 PM

  1 point

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  on: Trans­for­ma­tive AI Timelines Part 1 of 4: What Kind of AI?

  Same problem with the footnotes (doesn’t show a preview) and actually this one might be bugged (currently can’t see any footnotes).

• Tristan WilliamsOct 27, 2023, 4:37 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: This Can’t Go On

  Thanks for this, it helped shore things up for me, and I think it’s maybe valuable enough to link to in the main piece with short disclaimer e.g. “Does the value/​atoms stuff seem weird or unintuitive to you? Read more here”

• Tristan WilliamsOct 27, 2023, 4:07 PM

  1 point

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  on: This Can’t Go On

  The footnotes are broken here and don’t show the preview (which is a very helpful feature for the cold takes article).

• Tristan WilliamsOct 26, 2023, 7:45 PM

  1 point

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  on: Digi­tal Peo­ple Would Be An Even Big­ger Deal

  Social scientists could study people who had tried things like this and look for patterns, which would be much more informative than social science research tends to be now. (They could also run deliberate experiments, recruiting/​paying people to make copies of themselves to try different lifestyles, cities, schools, etc. - these could be much smaller, cheaper, and more definitive than today’s social science experiments.)

  One question I had after reading this: how do we know that the digital environments would be similar enough to our own environments to take them as the same? I’m having trouble explaining the thought further, because it feels more like an intuition, but I guess it feels like there’s some necessary degree of chaos present in our world that couldn’t be properly modeled in a digital world. That is, something feels importantly different about a created world versus ours, in a way that would seem apt to change how I interacted with the world if I were in the digital environment.
  

• Tristan WilliamsOct 21, 2023, 10:16 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Ronja’s comment on: Effec­tive al­tru­ism in the gar­den of ends

  Yet another weary traveler has come to this post down the line and felt many of the same resonances. I’d love to talk to you as well, calendly in my bio if you are so inclined :)

• Tristan WilliamsOct 20, 2023, 12:04 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Tristan Williams’s comment on: What he’s learned as an AI policy in­sider (Tan­tum Col­lins on the 80,000 Hours Pod­cast)

  Just saw the new post, thanks for updating!

  Another suggestion I’ll toss out: it might take a minute, but I’d love to see at least a link post for all the shows and your show notes (and maybe a sequence with all of them organized there by release date). The forum is a place I can go to talk about the show, to rate it even^[1], but I’ve found in most scenarios thusfar when I’ve wanted to do that that the show doesn’t have a corresponding forum post.

  1. ^

     I’d probably rate things consistently if this were the case, which would give you at least one data point for feedback on the show with greater granularity. For example I had some strong opinions about the Tim LeBon episode, but no where to put them.