Noah Birnbaum's Quick takes

This is a great idea, although this would be a big call for many of us to do who might hope that our org could get some of that funding. Even someone like myself who fires shots pretty freely might think twice. We wouldn't want to rule our organisation out by writing too strong a Steelman against this. Any steelman would involve arguing that previous promises from founders and employees don't carry much weight, which could be seen as a personal slight against someone who could conceivably give you money. Sometimes I wonder if I've already said too much!

@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸has written a bit on this he might have a comment here?

As a first pass, I asked GPT Pro to consider and model this, and Codex to host it, with interactive BOTEC tools etc.

https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/

I'm just looking through it now (I'll respond/adapt to hypothes.is comments). Let me know if this sort of thing is useful or annoying.

An important (and to me fairly open) related question is to what extent this ends up being action-guiding? 
Eg if I lower my probability estimate of this materialising by 10 percentage points, how much will it affect resources I spend on helping to prepare for the possible outcome? Perhaps people here have thoughts on that - my impression is that working on improving the future opportunity set for such donations is relatively robustly good right now?

I keep seeing people use the word "dead" in this way and I don't get it. Today so far I see 8 posts and 2 shortforms. Dead would be 0 posts and 0 shortforms. Do you have some standard for how many posts the EA Forum should have per day?

I think the other thing is that we've tucked away the "community section". People used to come for the drama and stay for well, partly drama and partly other stuff they saw. I think its fine if they come for the drama and read other stuff. 

I think Substack isn't great for comments and the forum is much better for comments.

I agree that the Forum is (fairly) dead; I don't read it much anymore, and feel somewhat sad about this. I also think a lot of energy has moved to Substack, and would guess that this is a stronger effect than LessWrong cross-posting.

"Super dead" is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is less activity than there should be. The main issue is pretty apparent to me though: there isn't sufficient cross-posting to the forum. There's tons of good stuff on substack, but also on various org websites and blogs. 

I don't think other causes are nearly as important as this.

From what I understand, Forum usage declined for a couple of years and has now stabilised. 

My guess is that, since the Forum is mostly used by fairly engaged EAs, the post-FTX slowdown in top-of-funnel growth is showing up here on a lag. People don't usually arrive on the Forum cold; my impression is there's typically a runway of a year or two between first contact with EA and posting or commenting in earnest. So a recruitment hole in 2023–24 produces a Forum hole now, even if intake has since recovered.

If that's roughly right, two things should follow: the share of activity from accounts under ~12 months old will have dropped more than overall activity has, and Forum recovery will lag whatever recovery CEA is seeing at the top of the funnel by another year or two.

And then it's probably compounded by dispersion — as you point out, a lot of the conversation that would once have happened here has migrated to LW, X, or Substack. 

Thanks Noah! I cosign your suggestions, but probably not your 'super dead' diagnosis.

I'd add:

1. Remember to give and remove karma. A better sorted Forum is a better use of everyone's time.
2. Consider commenting more. I started drafting a post about this last week, but basically I think that at its best, comments on the Forum can be its greatest comparative strength. Forum comments are definitely better than comments on Substack (in my view) and I'd like to make that difference even starker.
   1. Addendum: don't undervalue comments. A good comment can get as much karma as a good post. A graph I made last week [at bottom of quick take] shows that the average karma given to comments has decreased. Proportionally this can't be completely explained by the userbase being smaller - so either people are giving less karma across the board for a non-quality reason, or they value comments less. (LMK if you have other Qs about this, now AI can write the SQL for me I can access a lot more statistics.)
3. Tell me people I should crosspost (dm me or comment here). When we ask substackers if we can crosspost them they almost always say yes. 

Also FWIW - I don't see the LessWrong thing as the reason for the Forum seeming more dead, that isn't a new development. 

PS- The Forum team will be on a retreat this week, and we are having a team day on Friday, so all comments on the state of the Forum/ suggestions and requests for what you want to see are massively appreciated and timely. 

Hi Noah. The engagement time on the EA Forum has not presented a clear upwards or downwards trend over the past 2 years or so.

• If your private doc doesn't need to be private, don't make it private

I agree.

It is incorrect to characterize the EA forum as "intellectual".

The term "pseudo-intellectual" is more appropriate.

+1 I would love an EA to be working on this. 

Without a strongly supportive faculty member, I feel like you would struggle to make a group last longer than 2 years, since the succession and turnover dynamics of uni groups would be amplified. 

Could still be worthwhile even with the lack of sustainability.

Students for High Impact Charity was a project to support groups at high schools, but it had difficulty getting traction. It's hard to start a group from afar if you're not a student or faculty there.

I think it sounds like an exciting idea. In my role funding EA CB work over the years I've seen a few of these clubs, so there's not literally nothing, but it's true that it's much less common than at universities, and I'm not aware of EA groups at these specific high schools.

The answer to many questions of the form "why isn't there an EA group for XYZ" tends to be "no organizer / no one else working to make it happen" and I'm guessing that's the main answer here too.

FWIW I went to the best (or second best lol) high school in Chicago, Northside, and tbh the kids at these top city highschools are of comparable talent to the kids at northwestern, with a higher tail as well. More over everyone has way more time and can actually chew on the ideas of EA. There was a jewish org that sent an adult once a week with food and I pretty much went to all of them even tho i would barely even self identify as jewish because of the free food and somewhere to sit and chat about random stuff while I waited for basketball practice. 

So yes I think it would be highly successful. But I think you would need adult actual staff to come at least every other week (as brian mentioned) and as far as I can tell EA is currently struggling pretty hard w/organizing capacity and it seems to be getting worse (in part because as I have said many times, we don't celebrate organizers enough and we focus the movement too much on intellectualism rather than coordination and organizing). So I kind of doubt there is a ton of capacity for this. But if there is it's a good idea. I'm happy to help you understand how you could implement this at CPS selective enrollment schools if you want to help do it yourself. 

I think the "most topics" thing is ambiguous. There are some topics on which mainstream experts tend to be correct and some on which they're wrong, and although expertise is valuable on topics experts think about, they might be wrong on most topics central to EA. [1] Do we really wish we deferred to the CEO of PETA on what animal welfare interventions are best? EAs built that field in the last 15 years far beyond what "experts" knew before.

In the real world, assuming we have more than five minutes to think about a question, we shouldn't "defer" to experts or immediately "embrace contrarian views", rather use their expertise and reject it when appropriate. Since this wasn't an option in the poll, my guess is many respondents just wrote how much they like being contrarian, and EAs have to often be contrarian on topics they think about so it came out in favor of contrarianism.

[1] Experts can be wrong because they don't think in probabilities, they have a lack of imagination, there are obvious political incentives to say one thing over another, and probably other reasons, and lots of the central EA questions don't have actual well-developed scientific fields around them, so many of the "experts" aren't people who have thought about similar questions in a truth-seeking way for many years

Manifesting

Yep—Beast Philanthropy actually did an AMA here in the past! My takeaway was that the video comes first, so that your chances of a partnership would greatly increase if you can make it entertaining. This is somewhat in contrast with a lot of EA charities, which are quite boring, but I suspect on the margins you could find something good.

What IMHO worked for GiveDirectly in that video, and for Shrimp Welfare in their public outreach, has been the counterintuitiveness of some of these interventions. Wild animals, cultured meat, shrimp, are more likely to fit in this bucket than corporate campaigns for chickens I reckon.

As Huw says, the video comes first. I think this puts almost anything you'd be excited about off the table. Factory farming is a really aversive topic for people, and people are quite opposed to large scale WAS interventions. The intervention in the video he did make wasn't chosen at random. People like charismatic megafauna.

While I like the potential incentive alignment, I suspect finder’s fees are unworkable. It’s much easier to promise impartiality and fairness in a single game as opposed to an iterated one, and I suspect participants relying on the fees for income would become very sensitive to the nuances of previous decisions rather than the ultimate value of their critiques.

Ultimately, I don’t think there are many shortcuts in changing the philosophy of a movement. If something is worth challenging, than people strongly believe it and there will have to be a process of contested diffusion from the outside in. You can encourage this in individual cases, but systemizing it seems difficult.

Started something sorta similar about a month ago: https://saul-munn.notion.site/A-collection-of-content-resources-on-digital-minds-AI-welfare-29f667c7aef380949e4efec04b3637e9?pvs=74

One reason a comprehensive version of this would be difficult for insect welfare is that a couple of projects are 'undercover'. Rethink Priorities have guidance on donating to insects, shrimp and wild animals that might be relevant.

Separately, I understand @JordanStone has a pretty comprehensive sense of who's who in space governance, and would be a good person to contact if you're thinking about getting into this field.

What a wonderful idea! Mayank referred me over to this post, and I think EA at UIUC might have to hop on this project. I'll see about starting something in the next month or so and sharing a link to where I'm compiling things in case anyone else is interested in collaborating on this. Or, it's possible an initiative like it already exists that I'll stumble upon while investigating (though such a thing may well be outdated).

I would love to see that normalised, I'm personally in the ideation stage for a new org, and have been considering asking the forum to help red team, but it's not something I've seen done all that much, so I've somewhat held off.

Unfortunately it also sounds Russian, which has some serious downsides at the moment....

For me at least, that implies an institute founded or affiliated with somebody named Petrov, not just inspired by somebody, and it would seem slightly sketchy for it not to be.

My go-to diagram for illustrating your point, from (who else?) Scott Alexander's varieties of argumentative experience:

[Graham’s hierarchy of disagreements] is useful for its intended purpose, but it isn’t really a hierarchy of disagreements. It’s a hierarchy of types of response, within a disagreement. Sometimes things are refutations of other people’s points, but the points should never have been made at all, and refuting them doesn’t help. Sometimes it’s unclear how the argument even connects to the sorts of things that in principle could be proven or refuted.

If we were to classify disagreements themselves – talk about what people are doing when they’re even having an argument – I think it would look something like this:

Most people are either meta-debating – debating whether some parties in the debate are violating norms – or they’re just shaming, trying to push one side of the debate outside the bounds of respectability.

If you can get past that level, you end up discussing facts (blue column on the left) and/or philosophizing about how the argument has to fit together before one side is “right” or “wrong” (red column on the right). Either of these can be anywhere from throwing out a one-line claim and adding “Checkmate, atheists” at the end of it, to cooperating with the other person to try to figure out exactly what considerations are relevant and which sources best resolve them.

If you can get past that level, you run into really high-level disagreements about overall moral systems, or which goods are more valuable than others, or what “freedom” means, or stuff like that. These are basically unresolvable with anything less than a lifetime of philosophical work, but they usually allow mutual understanding and respect.

More on the high-level generators of disagreement (emphasis mine, other than 1st sentence):

High-level generators of disagreement are what remains when everyone understands exactly what’s being argued, and agrees on what all the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for disagreeing anyway. In retrospect, these are probably why the disagreement arose in the first place, with a lot of the more specific points being downstream of them and kind of made-up justifications. These are almost impossible to resolve even in principle. ...

Some of these involve what social signal an action might send; for example, even a just war might have the subtle effect of legitimizing war in people’s minds. Others involve cases where we expect our information to be biased or our analysis to be inaccurate; for example, if past regulations that seemed good have gone wrong, we might expect the next one to go wrong even if we can’t think of arguments against it. Others involve differences in very vague and long-term predictions, like whether it’s reasonable to worry about the government descending into tyranny or anarchy. Others involve fundamentally different moral systems, like if it’s okay to kill someone for a greater good. And the most frustrating involve chaotic and uncomputable situations that have to be solved by metis or phronesis or similar-sounding Greek words, where different people’s Greek words give them different opinions.

You can always try debating these points further. But these sorts of high-level generators are usually formed from hundreds of different cases and can’t easily be simplified or disproven. Maybe the best you can do is share the situations that led to you having the generators you do. Sometimes good art can help.

The high-level generators of disagreement can sound a lot like really bad and stupid arguments from previous levels. “We just have fundamentally different values” can sound a lot like “You’re just an evil person”. “I’ve got a heuristic here based on a lot of other cases I’ve seen” can sound a lot like “I prefer anecdotal evidence to facts”. And “I don’t think we can trust explicit reasoning in an area as fraught as this” can sound a lot like “I hate logic and am going to do whatever my biases say”. If there’s a difference, I think it comes from having gone through all the previous steps – having confirmed that the other person knows as much as you might be intellectual equals who are both equally concerned about doing the moral thing – and realizing that both of you alike are controlled by high-level generators. High-level generators aren’t biases in the sense of mistakes. They’re the strategies everyone uses to guide themselves in uncertain situations.

(also related: Value Differences As Differently Crystallized Metaphysical Heuristics and the previous essays in that series)

Regarding your "something clearly rational here that's kinda unintuitive to get a grip on", I think of it as epistemic learned helplessness as a "social safety valve" to the downside risk of believing persuasive arguments that can (potentially catastrophically) harm the believer, cf. Reason as memetic immune disorder.

There's a lot more to the study of disagreement if you're keen, shame it's mostly just one person working on it and they're busy writing a book nowadays.

I think there are ways to get the info without threatening the coherence of your system. For example, you can try to understand, and then absorb into intuition, alternative root/basic intuitions. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Hypotheses by Pepper, and Lakoff's ideas on metaphors. As a concrete example in the case of timelines, I would offer https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wgqcExv9AgN5MuJuY/bioanchors-2-electric-bacilli as an intuition for longer / less confident timelines that you could try to understand intuitively (without necessarily believing). Having multiple of these hypotheses is one good way to make yourself more fluent in viewing multiple alternative states of the world as being intuitively plausible / worth investigating / asking for falsification.

From the CAIS tweet:

We believe the effective altruism movement is, unfortunately, controlled opposition. The less influence it has on AI safety, the better.

I really don't like it when people paint the whole movement with one brush, but they're not wrong that there's a subset of AI safety/EA that behaves like controlled opposition. Obvious example is Anthropic/Dario (who was one of the first GWWC signatories); Good Ventures basically doesn't fund anything that might be bad for AI company stock prices; I can think of some other possible examples but I don't want to denigrate anyone in case I'm wrong.

It's definitely not true that the whole movement is controlled opposition. Here I am, an EA, loudly advocating for a pause on AI development. There are plenty of us low-level EAs who oppose AI companies, but we don't control funding.

I think this is technically true but irrelevant: if we have superpersuasive AI, then there won't be human experts anymore, because the AI will have more expertise than any human. Unless somehow the AI is superpersuasive while still having sub-human performance in most ways, which seems unlikely to me.

They're both great episodes, though — relistened to #138 last week :)