zeshen

Karma: 84

zeshen Mar 14, 2024, 12:36 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: What posts would you like someone to write?
Thanks! I think I was having the impression that the Gates Foundation was struggling to give out money (e.g. this comment from a long time ago), but I’m now learning that that’s probably no longer true—they set a goal of $9 billion by 2026 and they’re already having a budget of $8.6 billion this year. Now it makes sense.

zeshen Mar 13, 2024, 6:57 PM
3 points
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in reply to: DavidNash’s comment on: What posts would you like someone to write?
Thanks for the link! I vaguely remember reading this but probably didn’t really get an answer that I was hoping for. In the case of AMF, reason 1 doesn’t apply, because they seem to want the money to do things now instead of building reserves. Reason 4 seems most relevant—maybe the Gates Foundation is hoping that a Malaria vaccine (which recent developments have shown positive results) could render bed nets futile? But I don’t think I buy this either—considering how effective these vaccines currently are, how long it takes to roll out vaccines in these countries, and that Bill Gates himself has previously vouched for bed nets (albeit before the vaccines were endorsed by WHO). As for reasons 2, 3, and 5, I just don’t really see how these reasons are worth killing so many babies for—I can’t picture a decision maker in the Foundation saying “yeah we have decided to let a hundred thousand people die of Malaria so that we can diversify our risks and encourage others to donate”.
I may be missing something, but I only see a few reasonable scenarios:
1. The Gates Foundation does indeed plan to donate, and they might be the ‘donor of last resort’
2. They really do not intend to fill the funding gap, perhaps because they don’t think additional funding to AMF is as cost-effective as advertised
3. They are confident that AMF will somehow get funding from other sources

zeshen Mar 12, 2024, 7:10 AM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: What posts would you like someone to write?
I’d be interested to understand why there are still huge shortfalls in the supposedly top effective charities.
For example, AMF has a funding gap of $300 milion. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has an endowment of $67 billion, which of course they intend to donate away. Bill Gates also endorses GiveWell, and has an explicit focus on solving Malaria (it also lists 20 organizations that they partner with, but AMF is not one of it).
So why isn’t the AMF funding gap plugged yet, by the Gates foundation, or anyone else? As for the Foundation, is it a matter of grant evaluation process? Is there anything else relevant I should know to better understand the whole funding landscape of these issues?

zeshen Apr 16, 2023, 7:10 AM
1 point
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on: AGI Isn’t Close—Future Fund Worldview Prize
To achieve AGI we will need to program the following:
- knowledge creating processes
- emotions
- creativity
- free will
- consciousness.
I suspect a large part of the crux is the definition of AGI itself. I don’t know many people who think that an agent / system must fulfill all of the above criteria to qualify as ‘AGI’. I personally use the term AGI to refer to systems that have at least human-level capabilities at all tasks that a human is capable of performing, regardless of whether the system posses other properties like consciousness and free will.

On a separate matter, I think it might be a good idea if there is a dual voting system for posts, just like comments, where people can upvote/downvote and also agree/disagree vote. This is a post that I would upvote but strong disagree on. In the meantime I gave it an upvote anyway, since I like posts that at least attempt to constructively challenge prevailing worldviews, and also to balance out all the downvotes.

zeshen Mar 25, 2023, 6:00 AM
4 points
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in reply to: gabriel_wagner’s comment on: Survey on intermediate goals in AI governance
I just browsed through it, their reasons for not doing so is also described in a section in the report.

zeshen Mar 18, 2023, 3:13 AM
1 point
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on: Evidence on how cash transfers empower women in poverty
I think it’ll be great if this post is also on GiveDirectly’s website, perhaps under the blogs section?

zeshen Jan 18, 2023, 6:36 AM
2 points
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on: aisafety.community—A living document of AI safety communities
Crossposting plex’s comment from LessWrong:
Updates!
1. Have been continually adding to this, up to 49 online communities.
2. Added a student groups section, with 12 entries and some extra fields (website, contact, calendar, mailing list), based on the AGISF list (in talks with the maintainer to set up painless syncing between the two systems).
3. Made a form where you can easily add entries.
Still getting consistent traffic, happy to see it getting used :)

zeshen Jan 16, 2023, 12:49 AM
1 point
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in reply to: firstuserhere’s comment on: aisafety.community—A living document of AI safety communities
Let me know if it still doesn’t work, thanks!

zeshen Jan 15, 2023, 9:04 AM
2 points
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on: Concerns about AI safety career change
Great questions.
On question 4, I don’t personally know of any groups based in Asia, but feel free to check out this database of AI Safety relevant communities, and join any of them.

zeshen Jan 8, 2023, 8:44 AM
1 point
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in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Read The Sequences
Would you recommend Probability Theory: The Logic of Science to people with little math background?

zeshen Dec 1, 2022, 1:26 AM
1 point
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on: Why Neuron Counts Shouldn’t Be Used as Proxies for Moral Weight
This is nice, but I’d also be interested to see quantification of moral weights for different animals when accounting for all the factors besides neuron count, and how much it differs from solely using neuron count alone.

zeshen Nov 16, 2022, 7:42 AM
11 points
3 ∶ 1
on: Who’s at fault for FTX’s wrongdoing
I like this post much more than your previous post.

zeshen Oct 11, 2022, 8:53 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: Why defensive writing is bad for community epistemics
Confidence-in-path rather than confidence-in-results.
Nicely said.
--
See you at GatherTown soon!

zeshen Oct 10, 2022, 11:16 PM
8 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Why defensive writing is bad for community epistemics
I really like this post, especially as someone who is fairly anxious when writing for fear of being judged as ignorant. I definitely agree that we should promote an environment conducive for people to say wrong things.
However, I don’t fully agree with the notion of celebrating the self-confidence of people who “declare that think they can do more good than Peter Singer”. I’m quite likely misinterpreting what you mean by confidence as over-confidence, but just on the face value of it, I prefer claims to have an appropriate level of confidence associated with them. When someone makes a strong claim, I’d like to know whether the person is a domain expert with good epistemics who has done extensive research to arrive at the conclusion, or an innocent kid who claims to have discovered the most important thing in the world. Perhaps just stating epistemic status upfront would solve the problem. And perhaps over-confident people who are just about to take your advice to celebrate confidence and stop rewarding modesty should just reverse the advice.
On a tangential note, I sometimes find myself doing ‘defensive writing’ not just for defensive reasons, but also to try to convey what I mean to the reader as accurately as I can by ruling out everything else.

zeshen Oct 7, 2022, 12:40 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Stephen Clare’s comment on: Ask (Everyone) Anything — “EA 101”
Looking at your profile I think you have a good idea of answers already, but for the benefit of everyone else who upvoted this question looking for an answer, here’s my take:
Are there AI risk scenarios which involve narrow AIs?
Yes, a notable one being military AI i.e. autonomous weapons (there are plenty of related posts on the EA forum). There are also multipolar failure modes on risks from multiple AI-enabled superpowers instead of a single superintelligent AGI.
Why does most AI risk research and writing focus on artificial general intelligence?
A misaligned AGI is a very direct pathway to x-risk, where an AGI that pursues some goal in an extremely powerful way without having any notion of human values could easily lead to human extinction. The question is how to make an AI that’s more powerful than us do what we want it to do. Many other failures modes like bad actors using tool (narrow) AIs seem less likely to lead directly to x-risk, and is also more of a coordination problem than a technical problem.

zeshen Jul 24, 2022, 6:47 AM
14 points
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in reply to: titotal’s comment on: How EA is perceived is crucial to its future trajectory
Point taken, though EA seems to welcome criticisms a lot to the point of giving out large prizes for good criticisms. Scott Alexander also argues that EA actually goes too far in taking criticisms on board.

zeshen Apr 29, 2022, 10:59 PM
4 points
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on: Comparative advantage does not mean doing the thing you’re best at
Thanks for the article! I was a little confused by the title “doing the thing you’re best at” on whether it means “doing the thing you’re best at compared to everything else you know how to do” or “doing the thing you’re best at compared to everyone else”, where the former is comparative advantage and the latter is absolute advantage? The content of your article is clearer though—thanks for that.

zeshen Apr 27, 2022, 3:17 AM
2 points
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on: [$20K In Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
“Anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.”—Ernest Rutherford, shortly before the invention of the Atomic Bomb.

”If there were any risk of [an “AI apocalypse”], it wouldn’t be for another few decades in the future.”—Yann LeCun, 2016 (not being really serious)

zeshen Apr 27, 2022, 2:58 AM
5 points
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on: [$20K In Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
“It will either be the best thing that’s ever happened to us, or it will be the worst thing. If we’re not careful, it very well may be the last thing.”—Stephen Hawking on AI.

zeshen May 9, 2021, 6:10 AM
2 points
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on: EA Malaysia Cause Prioritisation Report (2021)
Thanks a lot for the work and the report. Interesting findings you got there.
I have no experiences in EA so i’m just thinking out loud here—apologies in advance for my ignorance. I’m wondering if we have good reliable statistics on causes of deaths in the country (death being a proxy for suffering), and we could look into the categories of avoidable deaths (e.g. curable illnesses) and whether those areas are receiving enough support / funding. Also, from a poverty perspective, I’m curious if we have an idea how many Malaysians live in hardcore poverty and what can be done to get them out of it.
Also, what exactly is EA Malaysia’s role as compared to EA global? I can imagine that global issues such as climate change and AI existential risks are also being heavily looked at by EA global and others, and depending on the issue, EA Malaysia’s involvement could be either independent, complementary, or redundant.
I’m sure you have already thought about these points. Thanks again for the study.