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)

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

Tristan Williams30 Oct 2023 11:15 UTC

143 points

8 comments3 min readEA link

(www.whitehouse.gov)

Tristan Williams 17 Sep 2023 13:10 UTC
65 points
18 ∶ 0
on: A quick update from Nonlinear
When might we see a more detailed response from Nonlinear?

Tristan Williams 13 Jan 2023 21:20 UTC
63 points
32 ∶ 3
on: Thread for discussing Bostrom’s email and apology
A good friend sent me an article from Vice on this with the comment below “EA is falling apart laughing emoji” He’s a great friend, but to be honest this comment pissed me off, and more than the FTX coverage, this round feels like a sort of particular hate attack on EA.
Think what you want about Bostrom and his comment, digging through the threads of previous online engagements of someone to find some dirt to hopefully hurt them and their associated organizations and acquaintances is personally disgusting to me, and I really hope that we don’t engage in similar sort of tactics in response, though I don’t think it’s a really worry because the general level of decency from EAs at least seems to be higher than the ever lowering bar journalists set.

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

Tristan Williams7 Mar 2024 9:24 UTC

40 points

3 comments19 min readEA link

[Book Review] asterisk #1

Tristan Williams18 Oct 2023 19:40 UTC

37 points

0 comments3 min readEA link

What are people up to in the world?

Tristan Williams13 Jan 2023 23:25 UTC

34 points

2 comments5 min readEA link

Tristan Williams 28 Sep 2023 21:39 UTC
32 points
3 ∶ 0
on: From Passion to Depression and Pessimism: My Journey with Effective Altruism
What do you feel like the community could best do for you going forward?

{Book Summary} The Art of Gathering

Tristan Williams16 Apr 2024 10:44 UTC

29 points

6 comments13 min readEA link

[Question] Should you leave bad reviews on low quality vegan restaurants?

Tristan Williams25 Sep 2023 13:30 UTC

29 points

16 comments2 min readEA link

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 16 Nov 2022 21:40 UTC
21 points
13 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Some important questions for the EA Leadership
Strong upvote here. I really like how you calmly assessed each of these in a way that feels very honest and has a all-cards-on-the-table feel to it. Some may still have reservations towards your comments given that you seem to at least somewhat fit into this picture of EA leadership, but this feels largely indicative of a general anger at the circumstances turned inwards towards EA that feels rather unhealthy. I certainly appreciate the OP as this does seem like a moment ripe for asking important questions that need answers, but don’t forget that those in leadership are humans who make mistakes too, and are generally people who seem really committed to trying to do what everyone in EA is: make the world a better place.

[BOTEC] For Effect of Emergency Siren Noise Pollution on Global Wellbeing

Tristan Williams20 Jul 2023 21:47 UTC

17 points

0 comments9 min readEA link

Tristan Williams 22 Nov 2023 17:53 UTC
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.

Summary of the AI Bill of Rights and Policy Implications

Tristan Williams20 Jun 2023 9:28 UTC

16 points

0 comments22 min readEA link

Tristan Williams 29 Mar 2023 16:38 UTC
16 points
3 ∶ 0
on: FLI open letter: Pause giant AI experiments
The LessWrong comments here are generally (quite) (brutal), and I think I disagree, which I’ll try to outline very briefly below. But I think it may be generally more fruitful here to ask some questions I had to break down the possible subpoints of disagreement as to the goodness of this letter.
I expected some negative reaction because I know that Elon is generally looked down upon by the EAs that I know, with some solid backing to those claims when it comes to AI given that he cofounded OpenAI, but with the (immediate) (press) (attention) it’s getting in combination with some heavy hitting signatures (including Elon Musk, Stuart Russel, Steve Wozniak (Co-founder, Apple), Andrew Yang, Jaan Tallinn (Co-Founder, Skype, CSER, FLI), Max Tegmark (President, FLI), and Tristan Harris (from The Social Dilemma) among many others) I kind of can’t really see the overall impact of this letter being net negative. At worst it seems mistimed and with technical issues, but at best it seems one of the better calls to action (or global moratoriums as Greg Colbourn put it) that could have happened, given AI’s current presence in the news and much of the world’s psyche.
But I’m not super certain in anything, and generally came away with a lot of questions, here’s a few:
1. How convergent is this specific call for pause on developing strong language models with how AI x-risk people would go about crafting a verifiable, tangible metric for AI labs to follow to reduce risk? Is this to be seen as a good first step? Or something that might actually be close enough to what we want that we could rally around this metric given its endorsement by this influential group?
  1. This helps clarify the “6 months isn’t enough to develop the safety techniques they detail” objection which was fairly well addressed here as well as the “Should Open AI be at the front” objection.
2. How much should we view messages that are a bit more geared towards non x-risk AI worries than the community seems to be? They ask a lot of good questions here, but they are also still asking “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” an important question, but one that to me seems to deviate away from AI x-risk concerns.
  1. This is at least tangential to the “This letter felt rushed” objection, because even if you accept it was rushed, the next question is “Well, what’s our bar for how good something has to be before it is put out into the world?”
3. Are open letters with influential signees impactful? This letter at the very least to me seems to be a neutral at worst, quite impactful at best sort of thing, but I have very little to back that, and honestly can’t recall any specific time I know of where open letters cause significant change at the global/national level.
4. Given the recent desire to distance from potentially fraught figures, would that mean shying away from a group wide EA endorsement of such a letter because a wild card like Elon is a part of it? I personally don’t think he’s at that level, but I know other EAs who would be apt to characterize him that way.
5. Do I sign the post? What is the impact of adding signatures with significantly less professional or social clout to such an open letter? Does it promote the message of AI risk as something that matters to everyone? Or would someone look at “Tristan Williams, Tea Brewer” and think “oh, what is he doing on this list?”

[Book Review] asterisk #2

Tristan Williams5 Nov 2023 22:35 UTC

13 points

3 comments5 min readEA link

[Question] Should you delete unpopular posts?

Tristan Williams5 May 2023 0:47 UTC

12 points

2 comments1 min readEA link

[Book Review] Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs

Tristan Williams5 Oct 2023 13:26 UTC

11 points

0 comments4 min readEA link

Tristan Williams 29 Sep 2023 10:36 UTC
10 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: IReallyWantToBeAnonymous’s comment on: From Passion to Depression and Pessimism: My Journey with Effective Altruism
Anytime, I want this to be a community that cares not just for the productive contributors, but also for others who’ve come in and out of involvement.
I know this doesn’t help with anything financial, but the only thing I can tell you without knowing more is that maybe making non-EA friends could be a point of focus for you right now. Potentially away from family and absent other support structures, it might help you dig yourself out a bit. This may be obvious (and non-helpful if what you need is the how and not the what) but I mention it because I’ve a feeling of trying to right yourself first before you go out and try to build that structure a couple of times before, where I think having others around for help and care could really be invaluable.
Sadly can’t offer any financial help myself, but happy to talk sometime if you’d like!

Tristan Williams 28 Sep 2023 20:47 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: Ben_West’s Shortform
Update: the court ruled SBF can’t make reference to his philanthropy