Joseph_Chu's Quick takes

Is the main idea here that if "have you ever defected against a non-agressor" is the agreed way to decide who to not cooperate with, then cooperative strategies win and then stay cooperative when power imbalances are large? Is there a reason would agents choose to use that instead of any other decision criteria? Also, I wouldn't say that the obvious critique is that your model is too simple, I would say it's that your model can easily be unrealistic if you don't try very hard to check it. Good game theory models are sometimes very simple.

Unfortunately, a single organisation can't do everything. There's a lot of advantages of picking a particular niche and targeting it, so I think it makes sense for 80,000 Hours to leave serving other groups of people to other organisations.

Have you heard of Probably Good? Some of the career paths they suggest might be more accessible to you.

You might also want to consider running iterations of the intro course locally.  Facilitating can be challenging at times, and not everyone will necessarily be good at it, but I suspect that most people would become pretty good given enough practice and dedication.

Earning to Give is another option that is more accessible as it just requires a career that pays decently (and there are a lot of different options here).

I don't fit a typical EA but I've managed to get things done by being "Entrepreneurial" and focussing on neglected areas.

Find things that are important, neglected and where you have a comparative advantage.

EAs overrate smartness in a world that prioritises getting shit done quickly. Being the 5th commenter on a google doc is not a path to impact. Create something. Bring a thing into the world people need but noone is doing.

Firstly, I'm sorry that you feel inadequate compared to people on the EA Forum or at EAGs. I think EA is a pretty weird community and it's totally reasonable for people to not feel like it's for them and instead try and do an ambitious amount of good outside the community.

I think this is somewhat orthogonal to feelings of rejection or the broader point that you are making about the higher impact potential of larger communities but I've personally felt that whilst EA seems to "care more" about people who are particularly smart, hardworking, and altruistic, it does a good job of giving people from various backgrounds an opportunity to participate - even if it's differentially easier if you went to a top university.

For example, I think if someone with little or no reputation were to post a few top 10% of rethink priorities quality articles on important topics in fish welfare on the EA Forum they'd gain a lot of career capital and would almost overnight be on various organisation's radars as someone to consider hiring (or at least be competitive in various application processes). I think that story is probably more true for AI safety. Contrast this with hiring for various hedge funds and consultancies which can be really hard to break into if you didn't go to a small set of universities.

I think there are a lot of roles on the 80k job board and other places that don't need anyone special but just need good hard generalist workers. A lot of operations roles don't need anything special but just "work that needs doing".

As some examples https://jobs.lever.co/aisafety/c5269975-e074-44ee-ad32-9ff521f4d709 this is a good job if someone wants something in AI safety.

This is more of an EA infrastructure role https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/careers/operations-associate

Another AI role https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/postings/b6cbef86-5239-4218-9aaa-8b7fe660db72

Another AI role https://www.arena.education/operations-lead

For animal welfare, I would say the bulk of the jobs don't need anyone who is some kind of 0.001% person.
https://animal-equality.rippling-ats.com/job/807514/operations-manager

https://www.fishwelfareinitiative.org/pa

For Global health, there are a ton of jobs at the Clinton Health Initiative that you don't need to move to Africa to do. Other than that, here are some

https://malariaconsortium.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3701297?cid=2061&t=Compliance-Manager

It can be tough to see things you'd like do do and to feel that they aren't accessible to you. (although I think you are correct that 80k, and most of the larger EA orgs place focus primarily on elites)

It seems that you've already hit on the major points, so maybe you just need to take time to process it and accept it. But I do what to provide two alternatives:

First, people make tradeoffs and sacrifices. Some of the people you see writing impressive essays about animal suffering or creating a project that gets respect and funding, there are a lot of things that they are choosing to not do. This ranges from the simple (they don't get the fun of following that new show) to the profound (they don't spend time cultivate a good relationship with a sibling, or they leave a girlfriend to move to a new country). 

Second, some of the people on the EA forum aren't actually so talented or intelligent or thoughtful or kind. We may seem that way sometimes, and maybe sometimes we are, but we also have times when we are foolish or selfish or blundering. A few different framings:

• An academic way to think of it is that we are all engaging in impression management.
• A casual way to think of it is that we are all cosplaying as intelligent and thoughtful people.
• A analogy is to think of a photographer who takes 1,000 pictures, and 900 of them are bad, 90 are okay, and 10 are excellent; but you only see the 10, because that is what gets published.
• To use real, anonymized examples
  • "John Doe" is a real person, who I have met, and is one the top posters here. I consider him kind and intelligent and thoughtful, and he was thoughtless and inconsiderate once, lacking sympathy for another person's situation. Does that make him a bad person? No. It makes him human.
  • "Jane" works hard to reduce the suffering in the world and is well known in her cause area. I also observed her (in-person, not online) being inconsiderate of others and deprioritizing them in a way that benefited her organization and her cause. Does that make her a villain? No. She was stressed and busy and focused on other things and trying to accomplish stuff. It just makes her human.
  • "EA org with funding and respect" had simple typos on their website
  • "Anonymous ORG_XYZ" posted sloppy inaccurate/misleading information.
  • A fairly well-known EA org insisted that they will only hire people for a generalist role with both a specific professional background and several years of leadership/management experience at an EA organization. (which is somewhat ridiculous, as there are only a handful of people in the world who meet this standard)
  • Job applications (an area I am somewhat familiar with) are often rejected for reasons unrelated to the person's ability to do the job. Maybe you've heard of the idea that candidates get rejected if the decision-maker wouldn't want to spend time stuck in an airport with them. I haven't heard anyone specifically reference this heuristic, but I've seen similar things: people are rejected because of vibes.

So what I'm saying here is that people (and the organizations that people work for) make mistakes, some trivial, and some major. It is possible that you are looking at other people's highlight reels, and assuming that it represents their normal performance.

First of all, do not give up! And keep fighting/trying to reach your goals :)

I am not sure how the 80,000 Hours career advising and the Long-Term Future Fund work, but it might be good if they check some internal bias that selects people from certain universities. So, we shouldn't take it personal as not worthy enough.

I attended one of these schools, and I guarantee you most of the people there are quite normal.^[1] It could be that many of the successful applicants at the funds have some kind of support that you do not currently have.

Many jobs are prioritised for people coming from elite schools and/or with the right connections. Or at least this is what I have seen. We might get rejected even if we are better than someone else.

What to do then? I would say you need to higher your chances of achieving your goals. One way is to play in some unexplored space. You gotta find a niche, and connect with people. Talk to people, and spam people around to get the ball rolling :)  

By the end of the day, you gotta believe in yourself, no matter how smart/athletic/contributing you are. And this is what I say is the most important trait.^[2]

Keep up!

1. ^{^}

   People I met that entered just for a master are nothing special, except for a few really amazing people, graduate/PhD level I would say 50-50, and undergraduate level is the one with the highest variance, with truly out of sample kids or just low performance. I have also met people from some non-elite/low-ranking schools, and some of them are very intelligent and would be easily in the top cohort at elite schools.

2. ^{^}

   If I ever found a company, I will choose people based on character and competence. Piece of paper where one studied won't matter.

I believe that everyone in EA should try to use the SHOW framework to really see how they can advance their impact. To reiterate:

1. Get Skilled: Use non-EA opportunities to level up on those abilities EA needs most.

2. Get Humble: Amplify others’ impact from a more junior role.

3. Get Outside: Find things to do in EA’s blind spots, or outside EA organizations.

4. Get Weird: Find things no one is doing. 

I do think getting skilled is the most practical advice. And if that fails, you can always get humble: if you make an EA 10% more effective you already contributed 10% of their impact! 

Both ideas are compelling in totally different ways! The second one especially stuck with me. There's something powerful about the idea that being reliably “nice” can actually be a strategic move, not just a moral one. It reminds me a lot of how trust builds in human systems too, like how people who treat the vulnerable well tend to gain strong allies over time.

Curious to see where you take it next, especially if you explore more complex environments.

As you've pointed out, the questions are very different. The Gallup Poll asks people to rank their current position in life from "the best possible" to the "worst possible" on a ten point scale which implies that unequal opportunities and outcomes matter a lot.

The IPSOS poll avoids any sort of implicit comparison with how much better things could otherwise have been or actually is for others, and simply asks whether they would describe themselves as (very) happy or not (at all) on a simpler 4 point scale which is collapsed to a yes/no answer for the ranking

So Chinese and Indian people aren't being asked whether they're conscious of the many things they lack which could make their life better like in the Gallup poll, they're being asked whether they feel so bad about their life they wish to describe themselves as unhappy (or, for various other questions "unsatisfied"). People tend to be biased towards saying they're happy and there's likely to be a cultural component to how willing people are to say they're not too

And to add to the complications, the samples are non-random and not necessarily equivalent. IPSOS acknowledge their developing country samples are significantly more affluent, urban and educated than the population, which might explain why even when it comes to their personal finances they're often more "satisfied" than inhabitants of countries with much higher median incomes. Gallup doesn't admit that sampling bias, but even if it's present to exactly the same extent (it's bound to be present to some extent; poor, rural illiterate people are hard to randomly survey) it probably doesn't have the same effect. Indian professionals can simultaneously be "happy" with their secure-by-local standards position in life and aware that their life outcomes could have been a whole lot better.

Think the stark differences are a good illustration of the limits to subjective wellbeing data, but arguably neither survey captures SWB particularly well anyway, the former because it asks people to make a comparison of [mainly objective] outcomes and the latter because the scale is too simple to capture hedonic utility.

Short form/quick takes can be a good compromise, and sources of feedback for later versions.

As someone who most of my time here critiquing EA/rationalist orthodoxy, I don't think you have much to worry about, besides annoying comments. A good faith critique presented politely is rarely downvoted. 

Also, I feel like there's selection bias going on around the quality of posts. The best, super highly upvoted posts may be extremely high quality, but there are still plenty of posts that aren't (and that's fine, this is an open forum, not an academic journal). 

I'd be interested in reading your list of lethalities response. I'm not sure it would be that badly recieved, for example, this response by quinton pope got 360 upvotes. List of lethalities seems to be a fringe view even among AI x-risk researchers, let alone the wider machine learning community. 

This is one reason why it's very common for people to write a Google doc first, share it around, update it based on feedback and then post. But this only works if you know enough people who are willing to give you feedback.

On this Forum, it is rather rare for good-faith posts to end up with net negative karma. The "worst" reasonably likely outcome is to get very little engagement with your post, which is still more engagement than it will get in your drafts folder. I can't speak to LW, though.

I also think that the appropriate reference point is not the median level of the average post here, but much of the range of first posts from people who have developed into recognized successful posters.

From your description, my only concern would be whether your post sufficiently relates to EA. If it's ~80-90 percent a philosophy piece, maybe there's a better outlet for it. If it's ~50-70 percent, maybe it would work here with a brief summary of the philosophical position upfront and an internal link for the reader who wants to jump directly to the more directly EA-relevant content?

I encourage you to share your ideas.

I've often felt a similar my thoughts aren't valuable enough to share feeling. I tend to write these thoughts as a quick take rather than as a normal forum post, and I also try to phrase my words in a manner to indicate that I am writing rough thoughts, or observations, or something similarly non-rigorous (as sort of a signal to the reader that it shouldn't be evaluated by the same standard).

Either it'll be recieved well, or you get free criticism on your ideas, or a blend of the two. You win in all cases. If it get down voted into oblivion you can always delete it; how many deleted posts can you tie to an author? I can't name one. 

Ultimately, nobody cares about you (or me, or any other random forum user). They're too busy worrying about how they'll be perceived. This is a blessing. You can take risks and nobody will really care if you fail.

My view is you should write/post something if you believe it's an idea that people haven't sufficiently engaged with in the past. Both of your post ideas sound like that to me.

If you have expertise on AI, don't be shy about showing it. If you aren't confident, you can frame your critiques as pointed questions, but personally I think it's better to just make your argument.

As for style, I think people will respond much better to your argument if it's clear. Clear is different from extensive; I think your example of many-sections-with-titles-and-footnotes conflates those two. That format is valuable for giving structure to your argument, not for being a really extensive argument that covers every possible ground. I agree that "interesting train of thought in unformatted paragraphs" won't likely be received well in either venue. I think it's good communication courtesy to make your ideas clear to people who you are trying to convey them to. Clear structure is your friend, not a bouncer keeping you out of the club.

Post links to google docs as quick takes if posting posts proper feels like a high bar?

It's really hard to know without knowledge of how much a nanny costs, your financial situation and how much you'd value being able to look after your child yourself.

If you'd be fine with a nanny looking after your child, then it is likely worthwhile spending a significant amount of money in order to discover whether you would have a strong fit for alignment research sooner.

I would also suggest that switching out of AI completely was likely a mistake. I'm not suggesting that you should have continued advancing fundamental AI capabilities, but the vast majority of jobs in AI relate to building AI applications rather than advancing fundamental capabilities. Those jobs won't have a significant effect on shortening timelines, but will allow you further develop your skills in AI.

Another thing to consider: if at some point you decide that you are unlikely to break into technical AI safety research, it may be worthwhile to look at contributing in an auxiliary manner, ie. through mentorship or teaching or movement-building.

Also, even if we can train and run a model the size of the human brain, it would still be many orders of magnitude less energy efficient than an actual brain. Human brains use barely 20 watts. This hypothetical GPU brain would require enormous data centres of power, and each H100 GPU uses 700 watts alone.

I ran out of the usage limit for GPT-4o (seems to just be 10 prompts every 5 hours) and it switched to GPT-4o-mini. I tried asking it the Alpha Omega question and it made some math nonsense up, so it seems like the model matters for this for some reason.