Effective Altruism Forum

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Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

Curated

CCF: As more money arrives, the best place to give keeps moving

Rethink Priorities·2d ago·8m read

Instrumental convergence is incoherent (so pls slightly lower your p(extinction))

Arepo·1d ago·24m read

It’s time for frontier AI staff to reassess their work: 8 strategic updates | Rob Wiblin

80000_Hours·2d ago·14m read

What to sort out before the money lands

Jack Lewars·3d ago·9m read

Give to a Goal - the case for “Big Goal” social change

Andrew Youn·3d ago·5m read

Popular comments and quick takes

RyanCarey's Quick takes

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RyanCarey

5d*

197

The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.

You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.

Current EA forum

Current Lesswrong

Current Hacker News

Cat🔸's Quick Takes

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Cat🔸

I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:

people want clarity in a chaotic world, but philosophers often poses more questions than answers (like how EA itself is an open question)
populism is really popular right now, but philosophers are technocrats in ivory towers (like the memetic associations EA has with ivy league educations, silicon valley, etc.)
there's a lot more noise about what EA thinks rather than what EA does, aligning with the stereotype that philosophers don't do anything to apply their ideas in the real world.

I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:

EA did a lot of pandemic risk preparation before COVID, and is part of the reason why the COVID vaccine came out as quickly as it did (Also really good if people start asking about why EA is investing in AI safety)
EA has gotten people to donate >2 billion to save >300k lives through GiveWell alone
(for leftist friends) EA supports a lot of direct money transfers to people in the global south, allowing for local entrepreneurship
(depends on the audience) EA is one of the reasons why so many countries are now emphasizing cage-free eggs, so chickens don't die in their own feces

Sanjana Iyer's Quick Takes

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Sanjana Iyer

Quick reflections from EAG NYC:

People in econ academia are worried about the lack of urgency and adaptability amongst peers who hopped on the econ of AI bandwagon, and think there is an overemphasis of empirical work and causal inference on marginal problems (like productivity gains) to impress other economists. Economists aren't rewarded for trying to answer ill defined but important / ambitious / longterm questions about AI e.g. gradual disempowerment, post-labour.
Some technical AI safety people are disillusioned with mech interp and are trying to work in AI policy because they think this is the going to move the needle most now.
1-1 system using the new Swapcard matcher is great, very low friction way to meet specific people where you know there's a high chance the conversation will be very fruitful.
The number and quality of my match requests were starkly higher from EAG London a few months ago, almost certainly due to MATS being on my profile.
I've gotten to the stage where now undergrads match with me for advice (I'm no longer the student!), and they're confused about what to do. I tell them is to remain relentlessly curious but I have no good advice for what the world looks like in 3 years.
People are increasingly supportive of when I say I put off PhD plans partially due to shorter timelines.
People don't have a good pitch to explain gradual disempowerment risks to their non AGI-pilled friends, as it's fuzzier/less obvious than misuse and misalignment. They seemed to like the cattle analogy I overuse.
Fellowship hopping beyond 2 fellowships is seen as an anti-signal in the AI safety space.

Instrumental convergence is incoherent (so pls slightly lower your p(extinction))

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titotal

I think there's been a lot of goalpost shifting around weak and strong instrumental convergence arguments.

The original formulation of Instrumental convergence, by people arguing for AI doom, was that every sufficiently intelligent AI agent would become a fanatical meglomaniac that destroyed humanity in order to achieve inscrutable, alien goals.

Today, we have an ungodly number of fairly capable AI agents that are just being let loose, often unsupervised on the open internet. What percentage of these are wannabe meglomaniac world-conquerers? It looks like "almost zero" to me, although it's certainly concerning that it may not be exactly zero.

At what level of capability is this mythical hard left turn towards meglomania meant to suddenly show up simultaneously in all these AI's, which all seem to be doing wildly different things and acting in wildly different ways? Do you think AI doomers in 2015 would have predicted this to occur before or after AI starting cracking Millenium prize problems? It seems to me like the doomer version of IC is not only falsifiable, it's quickly being falsified in front of our very eyes.

Arjun Yadav's Quick takes

I've noticed a couple of times in workshops, retreats and conferences that folks quite new to their jobs in EA orgs find themselves in a position where they are talking about their org's work and mission statement and get questioned on their theory of change, and while the first two make complete sense, the last one often gets met with "I've just started my role" or "I've only been at X for Y weeks".

This is perfectly reasonable, but I wonder if this has been noticed by other people, and this overall makes me feel we need to see more experienced members of an org dedicate more time to being public-facing in said events!

Counterfactual 2:1 match for $250k in animal welfare donations on October 22nd

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Daniele Vassallo