TW123

Karma: 3,714

TW123 Oct 4, 2022, 1:39 AM
14 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Why don’t people post on the Forum? Some anecdotes
I have posted on the forum quite a few times. It has sometimes been part of my job to write posts for the forum. I think that I am generally a strong writer, and I rarely feel imposter syndrome.
But even I find it intimidating to post on the forum. Some of what is written here is just really, really well written and thought out. It’s intimidating to think you are posting alongside those posts! I think in my case though, it’s a good thing I’m intimidated. If I wasn’t at all intimidated, I would innundate the forum with random ramblings, because my general bar for sharing thoughts in other contexts (e.g. with my friends in informal settings) is very low. I was the kind of person who used to write emails to administrators in middle school asking them for changes to the school’s caterpillar abatement policy (yes, actually). I am the kind of person who writes 50% of the texts in the group chat. And so on. You do not want somebody like me constantly posting on the EA forum!
I have several full length posts I’ve written that in the past year that I haven’t put up. I could post them, and maybe somebody could get value from them, but they aren’t finished according to my standards. And I won’t post them until they are, if they ever are.
I suspect there are many others who are the opposite of me. Their thoughts are just as good, or better, but their general bar for posting things is way too high and they should work on becoming less intimidated. That’s why it’s really hard to give generalized advice. If you say, “please, post, don’t worry about it!” people like me will post way too much. If you say, “the bar is so high, really think about it” people who aren’t like me will post way too little. That’s why the most helpful thing in my view is to just ask some friends for personalized advice. They probably have a pretty good idea of which side of this spectrum you might fall on.

TW123 Sep 30, 2022, 11:54 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: “A Creepy Feeling”: Nixon’s Decision to Disavow Biological Weapons
First just want to flag that I don’t have extremely high confidence in the last section in general, it wasn’t nearly as researched as the rest.
I agree there are a number of disanalogies, most specifically that it does seem like biological weapons are straightforwardly less useful than lethal autonomous weapons. In this sense maybe LAWS are more like chemical weapons, which were at least claimed to be useful (though probably still not as useful), but were also eventually banned.
I’m not sure I agree about the creep factor. I think it’s possible to make LAWS “creepy;” at least, watching the Slaughterbots documentary felt creepy to me. I think it’s true they could be “cooler” though; I can’t imagine a biological weapon being cool.
I don’t believe you explicitly defined “CBW.”
Thanks, fixed. It stands for “chemical and biological weapons.”

TW123 Sep 28, 2022, 7:02 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: maxfieldwallace’s comment on: Any recommendation for how to explain EA funds grants to friend?
Yeah I wasn’t sure which grants you were referring to (haven’t looked through them all), but indeed that doesn’t seem to be explained by what I said.
I agree that EA already selects for high SES people and that offering funding for them to organize a group doesn’t negate this problem. Other steps are also needed. However, I know quite a few anecdotal cases of group organizers being able to organize more than they otherwise would have because they were being paid, and so this policy does concretely make some difference.

TW123 Sep 27, 2022, 1:39 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Any recommendation for how to explain EA funds grants to friend?
I’m not involved with EA funds, but some university group organizers have taken semesters of leave in the past to do group organizing full time for a semester. If you assume their term is 14 weeks, then that’s 14*40=560 hours of work. At $20/hr, that’s more than $10,000. And I think it is pretty reasonable to request more than $20/hr (various funding sources have previously offered something like $30/hr).

In general, nowadays, many group organizers are not volunteers and are paid for their part time work (if they are not full time, this shouldn’t amount to five figures for one semester though). I think this is a good thing, since many university students simply cannot afford to take a volunteer job with a commitment of 10+ hours per week, and I wouldn’t want EA groups only run by people who are rich enough that that’s feasible.

TW123 Sep 25, 2022, 1:05 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA forum content might be declining in quality. Here are some possible mechanisms.
Ironically, I don’t think the comment I made that Thomas included above rises to my usual standard for my posts. You can see in the thread there are some issues with it, and if I were going to make a post about it I’d probably collect some data. I tend to have a lower standard for making comments.

TW123 Sep 23, 2022, 1:06 AM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: Criticism of the 80k job board listing strategy
I think you’re right and it’s worth thinking about these cases. That being said, I think tail impact is going to come from people who have good judgement including on how to develop their careers, open new opportunities, and select future jobs across their career. It’s unclear to me which group the 80k job board should be catering to, but plausibly those most extremely self-motivated people don’t need a job board to show them their options.

TW123 Sep 22, 2022, 3:45 AM
23 points
6 ∶ 0
on: Why Wasting EA Money is Bad
Thanks for posting, I think you have some great thoughts! I generally agree with the spirit of this post.
I do think it’s worth noting that what people view as “excessive” or “not frugal” is not always in line with reality. For instance, many people find it “excessive” to order a $10 uber to save 30 minutes, but don’t find it excessive to wait until the very last minute to book a train ticket such that the price has increased from $20 to $120. In my view the latter is more excessive. This is just to say that the actual numbers matter, rather than purely the vibes of the spending. But as you say, the vibes matter too for community culture.
If you haven’t already seen them, you might be interested in some other posts on similar issues:

TW123 Sep 21, 2022, 2:08 PM
34 points
12 ∶ 6
on: Criticism of the 80k job board listing strategy
I think this is putting too much on 80k. They have hundreds of jobs in many different areas listed on their website, and it’s a very daunting task to evaluate each one of them when the evaluators are generalists who often have to rely on (conflicting) opinions from people in the community. On top of that, what is career capital for one person could plausibly be direct impact for some other person, so it doesn’t really seem one size fits all.

If somebody can’t evaluate jobs on the job board for themselves, I’m not that confident that they’ll take a good path regardless. People have a tendency to try to offload thinking to places like 80k, and I actually think it could be bad if 80k made it easier to do that on extremely fine grained topics like individual jobs.

I do like the idea of having comments on particular jobs. And it also would be good for 80k to be more clear they don’t expect all these jobs to necessarily have direct impact.

I don’t know whether it’s the case that many people on the internet are looking at the job board and deciding which jobs to apply to when they don’t have a strong engagement with EA ideas, and that these sorts of people are the types who would actually get the jobs. If that’s the case (80k would know better than me), then I think it maybe does make sense to restrict to jobs that aren’t going to be bad if such a person gets them. That seems like an empirical question.

TW123 Sep 20, 2022, 8:57 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Alex P’s comment on: Why AGIs utility can’t outweigh humans’ utility?
I just think anguish is more likely than physical pain. I suppose there could be physical pain in a distributed system as a result of certain nodes going down.

It’s actually not obvious to me that simulations of humans could have physical pain. Seems possible, but maybe only other orders of pain like anguish and frustration are possible.

TW123 Sep 20, 2022, 7:46 PM
37 points
25 ∶ 2
on: The Mistakes of Focusing on Student Outreach in EA
Students have by far the most flexibility in their careers. It’s not uncommon for university students (in the US—maybe some other age in other countries) to do things like switch their major from biology to economics; except in very rare circumstances, 40 year old biologists do not become economists. If you suppose that certain high-impact career paths require very special skills not common in the population, then you might need people to develop those skills early rather than try to find people who already have them. There are some areas of EA that probably do have this property, though the popular perception of it is maybe overblown.
I do think it would be good if there could be more experienced older people in EA, since I think there are probably many people out there with highly relevant and useful experience who haven’t heard of EA but would be receptive.

TW123 Sep 20, 2022, 6:58 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Alex P’s comment on: Why AGIs utility can’t outweigh humans’ utility?
In philosophy of mind the theory of functionalism defines mental states as causal structures. So for example, pain is the thing that usually causes withdrawal, avoidance, yelping, etc. and is often caused by e.g. tissue damage. If you see pain as the “tissue damage signaling” causal structure, then you could imagine insects also having this as well, even if there is no isomorphism. It’s hard to imagine AI systems having this, but you could more easily imagine AI systems having frustration, if you define it as “inability to attain goals and realization that such goals are not attained”. The idea of an isomorphism is required by the theory of machine functionalism, which essentially states that two feelings are the same if they are basically the same Turing machine running. But humans could be said to be running many Turing machines, and besides no two humans are running the same Turing machine, and comparing states across two Turing machines doesn’t really make sense. So I’m not very interested in this idea of strict isomorphism.
But I’m not fully onboard with functionalism of the more fuzzy/”squishy” kind either. I suppose something could have the same causal structures but not really “feel” anything. Maybe there is something to mind body materialism: for instance pain is merely a certain kind of neuron firing. In that case, we should have reason to doubt that insects suffer if they don’t have those neurons. I certainly am one to doubt that insects suffer, but on the more functionalist flavor of thinking I don’t. So I’m pretty agnostic. I’d imagine I might be similarly agnostic towards AI, and as such wouldn’t be in favor of handing over the future to them and away from humans, just as I’m not in favor of handing over the future to insects.
To answer the second question, I think of this in a functionalist way, so if something performs the same causal effects as positive mental states in humans, that’s a good reason to think it’s positive.
For more I recommend Amanda Askell’s blog post or Jaegwon Kim’s Philosophy of Mind textbook.

TW123 Sep 20, 2022, 1:02 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why AGIs utility can’t outweigh humans’ utility?
Since animals share many similar biological structures with us and evolved similarly, it’s relatively possible to make claims about their sentience by analogy to our own. Claims about AI sentience are far harder to verify. One could imagine the possibility of an AI that behaves as if sentient but isn’t really sentient. This gives significantly more reason to be wary of just handing everything over to AI systems, even if you are a total hedonistic utilitarian.

I also agree with others that building a sentient AI with a positive inner life doesn’t seem remotely easy.

TW123 Sep 19, 2022, 12:59 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Looking for a Roommate for EA Global in D.C., ASAP!
You might want to post in the EA global slack? You should have gotten an email with an invite (or at least I did). There are also details in that slack on some housing options.

TW123 Sep 18, 2022, 6:27 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform
You’re quite right, it was left too implicit.
often people who aren’t aware of or care about forum norms
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who aren’t aware of or care about the “high bar” norm. This is in part due to others explicitly saying the bar should be lower, which (as others here have noted) has a stronger effect on some than on others.
Edit: I don’t have time to do this right now, but I would be interested to plot the proportion of posts on the EA forum from people who have been on the forum for less than a year over time. I suspect that it would be trending upwards (but could be wrong). This would be a way to empirically verify part of my claim.

TW123 Sep 17, 2022, 2:50 PM
22 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform
I’ll add another mechanism:

I think there are many people who have very high bars for how good something should be to post on the forum. Thus the forum becomes dominated by a few people (often people who aren’t aware of or care about forum norms) who have much lower bars to posting.
What links here?
- EA forum content might be declining in quality. Here are some possible mechanisms. by Thomas Kwa (Sep 24, 2022, 10:24 PM; 130 points)

TW123 Sep 15, 2022, 11:57 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Key takeaways from Famine, Affluence, and Morality
I really like the illustrations! It’s not too common to see illustrations on the forum and these are great.

TW123 Sep 7, 2022, 11:28 PM
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: HjalmarWijk’s comment on: 13 background claims about EA
I agree with most of what you are saying.

However, the post seemed less self-aware to me than you are implying. My impression from interacting with undergraduates especially, many of whom read this forum, is that “these cool people believe this” is often read as “you should believe this.” (Edit: by this paragraph I don’t mean that this post is trying to say this, rather that it doesn’t seem aware of how it could play into that dynamic.)

Thus I think it’s always good practice for these sorts of posts to remind readers of the sort of thing that I commented, especially when using terms like “influential leaders” and “background claims.” Not because it invalidates the information value of the post, but because not including it risks contributing to a real problem.

I didn’t personally feel the post did that, hence my comment.

In addition, I do wish it were more specific about particularly which people it’s referring to, rather than some amorphous and ill-defined group.

TW123 Sep 7, 2022, 1:54 PM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: 13 background claims about EA
I agree that all else equal, it’s highly useful to know what people at hubs are thinking, because they might have great ideas, influence funding, etc.
However, I think a charitable interpretation of that comment is that it is referring to the fact that we are not perfect reasoners, and inevitably may start to agree with people we think are cool and/or have money to give us. So in some ways, it might be good to have people not even be exposed to the ideas, to allow their own uncorrelated ideas to run their course in whatever place they are. Their uncorrelated ideas are likely to be worse, but if there are enough people like this, then new and better ideas may be allowed to develop that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

TW123 Sep 7, 2022, 1:43 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Akash’s comment on: 13 background claims about EA
I appreciated the part where you asked people to evaluate organizations by themselves. But it was in the context of “there are organizations that aren’t very good, but people don’t want to say they are failing,” which to me implies that a good way to do this is to get people “in the know” to tell you if they are the failing ones or not. It implies there is some sort of secret consensus on what is failing and what isn’t, and if not for the fact that people are afraid to voice their views you could clearly know which were “failing.” This could be partially true! But it is not how I would motivate the essential idea of thinking for yourself.
The reason to think for yourself here is because lots of people are likely to be wrong, many people disagree, and the best thing we can do here is have more people exercising their own judgement. Not because unfortunately some people don’t want to voice some of their opinions publicly.
I am not sure what you mean by “EA strategy”. You mention funding, and I think it is fair to say that a lot of funding decisions are shaped by Berkeley ideas (but this is less clear to me regarding FTX regrantors). But I argue the following have many “Berkeley” assumptions baked in: (1), (2), (3 - the idea that the most important conversations are conversations between EAs is baked into this), (4 - the idea that there exists some kind of secret consensus, the idea that this sort of thing is nearly always fat tail distributed is uncontroversial), (5 - “many” does a lot of work here, but I think most of the organizations you’re talking about are in the area), (8- the idea that AI safety specific mentors are the best way to start getting into AI safety, not, say, ML mentors), (10 - leaving out published papers, arxiv).
I’m not saying that all of these ideas are wrong, just that they actually aren’t accepted by some outside that community.

TW123 Sep 7, 2022, 5:47 AM
103 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 13 background claims about EA
This post is mostly making claims about what a very, very small group of people in a very, very small community in Berkeley think. When throwing around words like “influential leaders” or saying that the claims “often guide EA decision-making” it is easy to forget that.
The term “background claims” might imply that these are simply facts. But many are not: they are facts about opinions, specifically the opinions of “influential leaders”
Do not take these opinions as fact. Take none for granted. Interrogate them all.
“Influential leaders” are just people. Like you and I, they are biased. Like you and I, they are wrong (in correlated ways!). If we take these ideas as background, and any are wrong, we are destined to all be wrong in the same way.
If you can, don’t take ideas on background. Ask that they be on the record, with reasoning and attribution given, and evaluate them for yourself.