Tristan Williams

Karma: 680

I hope you’ve smiled today :)

I really want to experience and learn about as much of the world as I can, and pride myself on working to become a sort of modern day renaissance man, a bridge builder between very different people if you will. Some not-commonly-seen-in-the-same-person things: I’ve slaughtered pigs on my family farm and become a vegan, done HVAC (manual labor) work and academic research, been a member of both the Republican and Democratic clubs at my university.

Discovering EA has been one of the best things to happen to me in my life. I think I likely share something really important with all the people that consider themselves under this umbrella. EA can be a question, sure, but I hope more than that that EA can be a community, one that really works towards making the world a little better than it was.

Below are some random interests of mine. I’m happy to connect over any of them, and over anything EA, please feel free to book a time whenever is open on my calendly.

Philosophy (anything Plato is up my alley, but also most interested in ethical and political texts)
Psychology (not a big fan of psychotropic medication, also writing a paper on a interesting, niche brand of therapy called logotherapy that analyses its overlap with religion and thinking about how religion, specifically Judaism, could itself be considered a therapeutic practice)
Music (Lastfm, Spotify, Rateyourmusic; have deep interests in all genres but especially electronic and indie, have been to Bonnaroo and have plans to attend more festivals)
Politics (especially American)
Drug Policy (current reading Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt)
Gaming (mostly League these days, but shamefully still Fortnight and COD from time to time)
Cooking (have been a head chef, have experience working with vegan food too and like to cook a lot)
Photography (recently completed a project on community with older people (just the text), arguing that the way we treat the elderly in the US is fairly alarming)
Meditation (specifically mindfulness, which I have both practiced and looked at in my RA work, which involved trying to set forth a categorization scheme for the meditative literature)
Home (writing a book on different conceptions of it and how relationships intertwine, with a fairly long side endeavor into what forms of relationships should be open to us)
Speaking Spanish (Voy a Espana por un ano a dar clases de ingles, porque quiero hablar en Espanol con fluidez)
Traveling (have hit a fair bit of Europe and the US, as well as some random other places like Morocco)
Reading (I think I currently have over 200 books to read, and have been struggling getting through fantasy recently finding myself continually pulled to non-fiction, largely due to EA reasoning I think)

Tristan Williams 17 Apr 2024 20:02 UTC
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in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: {Book Summary} The Art of Gathering
Would love to hear more about what you didn’t like, but the other piece sounds like it’s worth checking out, I’ll try to give it a read soon!

Tristan Williams 17 Apr 2024 20:00 UTC
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in reply to: Ian Turner’s comment on: {Book Summary} The Art of Gathering
Ah I searched for a post a while back but didn’t find anything, might have been because I searched for the full book title, not sure, but thanks for flagging.

Tristan Williams 10 Apr 2024 14:59 UTC
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in reply to: Jon’s comment on: [Book Review] asterisk #2
Thanks for the kind message Jon :) I actually have the third one sitting as a draft right now, and hadn’t put the last little bit in because I wasn’t sure of the value, but I’ll go ahead and finish that one up. I’d love to continue reviewing, but I’d have to see if they ship to other countries, I picked up the first three at an EAGx. Highly encourage you to leave your thoughts on them as a comment here, think that could be helpful if you’re interested!

Tristan Williams 4 Apr 2024 10:13 UTC
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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.

Tristan Williams 27 Nov 2023 17:38 UTC
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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 Williams 22 Nov 2023 17:53 UTC
17 points
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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 Williams 22 Nov 2023 9:52 UTC
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 Williams 7 Nov 2023 17:22 UTC
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 Williams 7 Nov 2023 16:16 UTC
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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.

Tristan Williams 2 Nov 2023 10:24 UTC
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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 Williams 1 Nov 2023 18:29 UTC
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.

Tristan Williams 31 Oct 2023 9:13 UTC
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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 Williams 31 Oct 2023 9:13 UTC
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

Tristan Williams 28 Oct 2023 13:18 UTC
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 Williams 27 Oct 2023 16:37 UTC
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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 Williams 27 Oct 2023 16:07 UTC
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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 Williams 26 Oct 2023 19:45 UTC
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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 Williams 21 Oct 2023 10:16 UTC
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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 Williams 20 Oct 2023 12:04 UTC
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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.

Tristan Williams 14 Oct 2023 14:06 UTC
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on: What he’s learned as an AI policy insider (Tantum Collins on the 80,000 Hours Podcast)
A small presentation note: I think it could be helpful if for the titles of these you copy pasted the show title (and specifically included the number) and also if you linked to the Spotify episode.