Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Sorry can you elaborate on the context? Agency is used in different ways in different contexts in ea settings. For example it means a different thing in community building vs ai alignment.
Isn't there something about agency in community building and ai alignment that they share in common? Are all notions of agency unified by some underlying concept or are they fundamentally distinct? Or do we simply not know enough to say one way or the other?
I think it's a tricky, loosely defined concept: see the Wikipedia entries about
Something that they all seem to have in common is that things that have agency "make decisions and enact them on the world".
You would say that humans have agency while rocks don't, and there's lots of middle ground for animals and AIs.
Don't know if this is helpful, but it seems a tricky concept to define exactly. There's also the related usage in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent , which isn't necessarily consistent with the definitions above