AI alignment researcher in the Computational Cognitive Science and Probabilistic Computing Groups at MIT. My research sits at the intersection of AI and cognitive science, asking questions like: How can we specify and perform inference over rich yet structured generative models of human decision-making and value formation, in order to accurately infer human goals and values?
Currently a board member of EA Singapore, formerly co-president of Yale EA (2015-2017).
Based on my experiences as a Yale undergraduate, I’ve come away with the perhaps overly pessimistic conclusion that a lot of class-privileged leftists at Ivy+ schools don’t actually resolve that contradiction, and are unfortunately not that interested in interrogating and addressing their class privilege, or thinking about redistributing what familial or future wealth / resources they may have access to. I say this as both a former organizer of Yale EA, but also as someone who started a Resource Generation chapter there, and found it difficult to get people to engage. By way of comparison, it was considerably easier to find people interested in the local DSA chapter.
(For context, Resource Generation is a movement that organizes young (USAmerican) people with wealth or class privilege to redistribute their wealth, land, and power, and I see it as perhaps the most viable movement for class-privileged US leftists who are really interested in addressing the contradiction of being both leftist and wealthy. See for example their giving pledge guidelines, which are considerably more ambitious than GWWC, and have as their goal for the ” top 10% to develop plans to redistribute all or almost all (see below) inherited wealth and/or excess income”. )
It’s hard to have a charitable take in response to that data, but I think it’s partly that people find it quite uncomfortable to talk about class, what more interrogate their own class privilege in a deep way. The other part is that the social incentives in these schools and activist circles tend to reward more external-facing leftist actions like fossil fuel divestment protests, and not internal-facing actions like confronting one’s wealthy family to redistribute their wealth—in part because to do that publicly, you have to reveal your family is wealthy, which isn’t exactly celebrated in leftist spaces.