That's fair enough and levels of Background understanding vary (I don't have a relevant PhD either), but then the criticism should be about this point being easily misunderstood rather than making a big deal about the strawman position being factually wrong. In which case it would also be much more constructive than adversarial criticism.
I think part of titotal’s point is it’s not the ‘strawman’ interpretation but the straightforward one, and having it framed that way would understandably be frustrating. It sounds like he also disagrees with Eliezer’s actual, badly communicated argument [edit: about the size of potential improvements on biology] anyway though? Based on the response to Habryka
Yeah, I think it would have been much better for him to say "proteins are shaped by..." rather than "proteins are held together by...", and to give some context for what that means. Seems fair to criticize his communication. But the quotes and examples in the linked post are more consistent with him understanding that and wording it poorly, or assuming too much of his audience, rather than him not understanding that proteins use covalent bonds.
The selected quotes do give me the impression Eliezer is underestimating what nature can accomplish relative to design, but I haven't read any of them in context so that doesn't prove much.
This is about a personal experience - rescuing a dog on a trip in Mexico - that helped me realize how I wrestle with being effective.
My girlfriend and me were recently in Mexico. After speaking at a conference, we took two weeks off in Yucatan. We had both been aware...
Perhaps another way to frame it might be to count the time and money outside of the your donation bucket? As in, donation budget is rational/effective, and everything else can be included as part of discretionary spending on personal/wellbeing? eg- same bucket as hobbies, travel etc.
Not sure if this might simplify things mentally and guard against motivated reasoning and slippery slope concerns
Who the fuck are you?
I run EA's biggest volunteer organisation. We train psychology graduate volunteers to treat mental illnesses, especially in LMICs. To lead by example, I don't take a salary despite working >50Hs per week. To pay the bills, I coach rich people's...
Hello, I'd just like to say that I enjoy your honesty almost as much as your writing style. Keep them both up.
We are excited to announce a match for donations made towards our operations at Giving What We Can!
Starting December 1st, every dollar donated towards GWWC’s operations will be matched 1:1 up to US$200,000 until the match has been exhausted, or until January 31st 2024, ...
Thanks both. They haven't shared this with us specifically so I can't speak for them. They have been very clear that it is a conditional match.
I'll try updating the wording for clarity.
Johannes Ackva, Megan Phelan, Aishwarya Saxena & Luisa Sandkühler, November 2023
Context for Forum Readers:
This is the methodological component of our Giving Season Updates, originally published here and leaning heavily on our recent EAGx Virtual...
Thanks for sharing your thinking in a detailed and accessible way! I think this is a great example of reasoning transparency about philanthropic grantmaking, and relevant modelling.
Similarly, the impact of any given policy depends on the quality of implementation, features of the world we do not know before, as well as general political, economic and geopolitical conditions, to name a few. Again, an uncertainty of a factor of 10x seems conservative ex ante.
How are you thinking about adaptation to climate change (e.g. more air conditioning)?
...If all the
This is the summary of the report with additional images (and some new text to explain them) The full 90+ page report (and a link to its 80+ page appendix) is on our website.
This report forms part of our work to conduct cost-effectiveness analyses ...
I have previously let HLI have the last word, but this is too egregious.
Study quality: Publication bias (a property of the literature as a whole) and risk of bias (particular to each individual study which comprise it) are two different things.[1] Accounting for the former does not account for the latter. This is why the Cochrane handbook, the three meta-analyses HLI mentions here, and HLI's own protocol consider distinguish the two.
Neither Cuijpers et al. 2023 nor Tong et al. 2023 further adjust their low risk of bias subgroup for publication b...
Gemini Pro (the medium-sized version of the model) is now available to interact with via Bard.
Here’s a fun and impressive demo video showing off Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities:
[Edit, Dec. 8 at 5:54am EST: This demo video is potentially misleading.]
How Gemini compares...
Thanks for the response!
A few quick responses:
it says 'less than 10 SAT exams' in the training data in black and white
Good to know! That certainly changes my view of whether or not this will happen soon, but also makes me think the resolution criteria is poor.
I think funding, supporting, and popularising research into what 'good' benchmarks would be and creating a new test would be high impact work for the AI field - I'd love to see orgs look into this!
You might be interested in the recent OpenPhil RFP on benchmarks and forecasting.
...Perhaps the median commu
I'm a little disheartened at all the downvotes on my last post. I believe an EA public figure used scientifically incorrect language in his public arguments for x-risk, and I put quite a bit of work into explaining why in a good faith and scientifically sourced manner. ...