Thanks for writing this up! I’ve forwarded it to a friend who was interested in the happiness app space a while back.
I would add to the advice, from my experience, pick something not too far out of people’s comfort zones for a startup or research idea. There seems to be a horizon beyond which you don’t get feedback or help at all.
I think it possible that blockchain can help us solve some co-ordination problems. However it also introduces new ones (e.g. which fork of a chain/version of the protocol you should go with).
So I am torn. It would be good to see one successful use/solid proposal of the technology for solving our real world coordination problems using ethereum.
Something I am keeping an eye on is the economic space agency
I would add something likes “Sensitivity” to the list of attributes needed to navigate the world.
This is different from Predictive Power. You can imagine two ships, with the exact same compute power and Predictive Power. One with cameras on the outside and long range sensors, one blind without. You’d expect the first to do a lot better moving about the world
In Effective Altruism’s case I suspect this would be things like the basic empirical research about the state of the world and the things important to their goals.
I’m thinking about radically more secure computer architectures as a cause area.
Radical architecture changes are neglected because it hard to change computer architecture
Bad Computer security costs a fair amount at the moment
Having a computer architecture that is insecure is making it hard to adopt more useful technology like Internet of Things.
I’d be interested in doing an analysis of whether it is effective altruistic cause. I’m just doing it as a hobby at the moment. Anyone interested in the same region want to collaborate?
There are some systemic reforms that seem easier reason about that others. Getting governments to be able to agree a tax scheme such that the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world can’t hide their profits, seems like a pretty good idea. Their money piles suggest that they aren’t hurting for cash to invest in innovation. It is hard to see the downside.
The upside is going to be less in developing world than the developed (due to more profits occurring in the developed world). So it may not be ideal. The tax justice network is something I want to follow more. They had a conversation with givewell.pdf)
I’m thinking about funding an analysis of the link between autonomy and happiness.
I have seen papers like
https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/28/2/166/661129
and http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-101-1-164.pdf
I am interested in how reproducible and reliable they are and I was wondering if I could convert money into an analysis of the methodology used in (some of) these papers.
As I respect EA’s analytical skills (and hope their is a shared interest in happiness and truth), I thought I would ask here.
In the context of the measurement problem: If the idea is that we may be able to explain the Born rule by revising our understanding of what the QM formalism corresponds to in reality (e.g., by saying that some hidden-variables theory is true and therefore the wave function may not be the whole story, may not be the kind of thing we’d naively think it is, etc.), then I’d be interested to hear more details.
Heh, I’m in danger of getting nerd sniped into physics land, which would be a multiyear journey. I’m found myself trying to figure out whether the stories in this paper count as real macroscopic worlds or not (or hidden variables). And then I tried to figure out whether it matters or not.
I’m going to bow out here. I mainly wanted to point out that there are more possibilities than just believe in Copenhagen and believe in Everett.
Ah, it has been a while since I engaged with this stuff. That makes sense. I think we are talking past each other a bit though. I’ve adopted a moderately modest approach to QM since I’ve not touched it in a bit and I expect the debate has moved on a bit.
We started from a criticism of a particular position (the copenhagen interpretation) which I think is a fair thing to do for the modest and immodest. The modest person might misunderstand a position and be able to update themselves better if they criticize it and get a better explanation.
The question is what happens when you criticize it and don’t get a better explanation. What should you do? Strongly adopt a partial solution to the problem, continue to look for other solutions or trust the specialists to figure it out?
I’m curious what you think about partial non-reality of wavefunctions (as described by the AncientGeek here and seeming to correspond to the QIT interpretation on the wiki page of interpretations, which fits with probabilities being in the mind ).
and Eliezer hasn’t endorsed any solution either, to my knowledge)
Huh, he seemed fairly confident about endorsing MWI in his sequence here
Concerning QM: I think Eliezer’s correct that Copenhagen-associated views like “objective collapse” and “quantum non-realism” are wrong, and that the traditional arguments for these views are variously confused or mistaken, often due to misunderstandings of principles like Ockham’s razor. I’m happy to talk more about this too; I think the object-level discussions are important here.
I don’t think the modest view (at least as presented by Gregory) would believe in any of the particular interpretations as there is significant debate still.
The informed modest person would go, “You have object reasons to dislike these interpretations. Other people have object reasons to dislike your interpretations. Call me when you have hashed it out or done an experiments to pick a side”. They would go on an do QM without worrying too much about what it all means.
Is there any data on how likely EAs think that explosive progress after HLMI will happen? I would have thought it more than 10%?
I would also have expected more debate about explosive progress, more than just the recent Hanson-Yudkowski flair up, if there was as much doubt in the community as that survey suggests.
Another reason to not have too much modesty within society is that it makes expert opinion very appealing to subvert. I wrote a bit about that here.
Note that I don’t think that my views about the things that I believe subverted/unmoored would be necessarily correct, but that the first order of business would be to try and build a set of experts with better incentives.
Since I’ve not seen it mentioned here, unconferences seem like a inclusive type of event as described above. I’m not sure how EAG compare.
Yes, there are a few EA leftists whose main priority is to systemically reform capitalism, but not significantly more than there were in the first place, and they are a tiny group in comparison to the liberals, the conservatives, the vegans, the x-risk people, and so on. As far as I can tell, the impact of all these articles and comments in bringing leftists into active participation with EA was totally nonexistent.
I’m not sure I count or not. My work on autonomy can be seen as investigating systemic change. I’ve been to a couple of meetups and hung around this forum a bit and I can tell you why the community is not very enticing or inviting from my point of view, if you are interested.
Edit to add:
I can only talk about EA London which I went to a couple of the meetups. To preface things I had generally good interactions with people they were nice and we chatted a bit about non-systemic EA interests (which I am also interested in). There was lots of conversation and not too much holding-forth.
I was mainly trying to find people interested in discussing AI/future things as any systemic change has to take this into consideration and there is lots of uncertainty. I was asked what I was interested in by organisers and asked if anyone knew people primarily interested in AI, and I didn’t get any useful responses. At the time I didn’t know enough about EA to ask about systemic change (and wasn’t as clear on what I exactly wanted).
This slightly rambling point is to illustrate that it is hard to connect with people on niche topics (which AI seems to be in London). There probably needs to be a critical mass of people joining at once for a locality to support a topic.
I’ve joined a London EA facebook group focused on the future so I have my hopes.
That is pretty benign, a problem but not a large one. More could be done, but more could always be done.
The second, which I think might be more exclusionary, is EAG. I applied for tickets and to volunteer but I’ve heard nothing so far. I’m unsure why there is even selection on tickets.
I suspect I don’t look like lots of EAs on an application form: I don’t earn to give, but have taken a pay cut to work part time on my project, which I hope will help everyone in the long run. I may not have quite the same chipper enthusiasm.
I suspect other people interested in systemic change will look similarly different from lots of EAs, and the curation of EAG might be biased against them. If it is, then I probably have not lost out much by not going!
I mainly wrote this comment to try and give some possible reasons for the lack of a significant group interested in systemic change (despite articles/comments to the contrary). I’m not expecting EA to change, you can’t be a group for everyone and you do interesting and good things. But it is good to know some of the potential reasons why things are how they are.
Edit2: I got a polite email from Julia Wise telling me that the reason I didn’t get an invite was because London was a smaller event and that people were selected on the basis of “those who will benefit most from attending EA Global London.” It would be nicer if these things were a little more transparent, e.g. you are applicant #X we can only accept #Y applicants, to give you a better idea of the chances. From my own perspective for the people that are interested in current niche EA topics it is important to be able to potentially meet other people from around the world interested in their topics. EAG might not be the place for that though.
As a data point for how useful ITN is for trying to think about system change I shall talk about my attempt.
My attempt is here.
So the intervention was to try and start a movement of people who shared technological development with each other to help them live (so food/construction/computing), with the goal of creating autonomous communities (capable of space faring or living on other planets would be great, but is not the focus). The main difference between it and the normal open source movement is that it would focus on intelligence augmentation to start with for economic reasons.
The main problems I came across were arguing it would have positive long term impact due to existential risk and war risks compared to singletons (I think it would, because I am skeptical of the stability of singletons).
It will take a long time to form a convincing argument about this one way or another, and probably a significant amount of more expertise in economics, sociology and game theory as well.
If a fully justified ITN report is needed before EAs start to be interested in it, then it is likely that it and other ideas like it will be neglected. Some ideas will need significant resources put into determining their tractability and also the sign of their impact.
I’ve posted about an approach to AGI estimation.
I would love to find collaborators on this kind of thing. In London would be great.
I take the point. This is a potential outcome, and I see the apprehension, but I think it’s a probably a low risk that users will grow to mistake robotics and hardware accidents for AI accidents (and work that mitigates each) - sufficiently low that I’d argue expected value favours the accident frame. Of course, I recognize that I’m probably invested in that direction.
I would do some research onto how well sciences that have suffered brand dilution do.
As far as I understand it Research institutions have high incentives to
Find funding
Pump out tractible digestible papers
See this kind of article for other worries about this kind of thing.
You have to frame things with that in mind, give incentives so that people do the hard stuff and can be recognized for doing the hard stuff.
Nanotech is a classic case of a diluted research path, if you have contacts maybe try and talk to Erik Drexler, he is interested in AI safety so might be interested in how the AI Safety research is framed.
I think this steers close to an older debate on AI “safety” vs “control” vs “alignment”. I wasn’t a member of that discussion so am hesitant to reenact concluded debates (I’ve found it difficult to find resources on that topic other than what I’ve linked—I’d be grateful to be directed to more). I personally disfavour ‘motivation’ on grounds of risk of anthropomorphism.
Fair enough I’m not wedded to motivation (I see animals having motivation as well, so not strictly human). It doesn’t seem to cover Phototaxis which seems like the simplest thing we want to worry about. So that is an argument against motivation. I’m worded out at the moment. I’ll see if my brain thinks of anything better in a bit.
I agree it is worth reconsidering the terms!
The agi/narrow ai distinction is beside the point a bit, I’m happy to drop it. I also have an AI/IA bugbear so I’m used to not liking how things are talked about.
Part of the trouble is we have lost the marketing war before it even began, every vaguely advanced technology we have currently is marketing itself as AI, that leaves no space for anything else.
AI accidents brings to my mind trying to prevent robots crashing into things. 90% of robotics work could be classed as AI accident prevention because they are always crashing into things.
It is not just funding confusion that might be a problem. If I’m reading a journal on AI safety or taking a class on AI safety what should I expect? Robot mishaps or the alignment problem? How will we make sure the next generation of people can find the worthwhile papers/courses?
AI risks is not perfect, but is not at least it is not that.
Perhaps we should take a hard left and say that we are looking at studying Artificial Intelligence Motivation? People know that an incorrectly motivated person is bad and that figuring out how to motivate AIs might be important. It covers the alignment problem and the control problem.
Most AI doesn’t look like it has any form of motivation and is harder to rebrand as such, so it is easier to steer funding to the right people and tell people what research to read.
It doesn’t cover my IA gripe, which briefly is: AI makes people think of separate entities with their own goals/moral worth. I think we want to avoid that as much of possible. General Intelligence augmentation requires its own motivation work, but one so that the motivation of the human is inherited by the computer that human is augmenting. I think that my best hope is that AGI work might move in that direction.
The unilateralists curse only applies if you expect other people to have the same information as you right?
You can figure out if they have the same information as you to see if they are concerned about the same things you are. By looking at the mitigation’s people are attempting. Altruists should be attempting mitigations in a unilateralist’s curse position, because they should expect someone less cautious than them to unleash the information. Or they want to unleash the information themselves and are mitigating the downsides until they think it is safe.
I’ve not had the best luck reaching out to talk to people about my ideas. I expect that the majority of new ideas will come from people not heavily inside the group and thus less influenced by group think. So you might want to think of solutions that take that into consideration.