Pato's Quick takes

Learning to multiply the work that you do by automating it with AI when it becomes good enough to do so it's a lot more valuable than multiplying the hours that you work per week. It's not hard to see how you could make the first one 10x your output at some point, while the second one could be 2x at most.

Not to mention the benefits for your health that you could get from having more leisure time or, if you would prefer it, the additional impact/ career capital you could get from using that time to take on more responsibilities.

There should be more ongoing debate about whether it's good or not to call oneself an EA; I haven't seen many posts myself. We should try to think through all the pros and cons. 

It probably depends on who you are and the career you want to have, but for some reason it feels like most people think it's bad in most cases.

Even if you disagree with some subgroups or like to have a small identity, it could be bad for the world that most EA-adjacents don't call themselves EAs. 

Over time, it could make some of them less effective or altruistic. It could also allow crazy people to give bad first impressions and misrepresent the movement. SBF, of course, is the prime example of this; maybe it would be better if people were autistic about EA like he was. In this state, we may be a ticking bomb just waiting for more crazy EA-adjacents to join and worsen the brand even more. And it's just a matter of cases like those until it's left in an irrecoverable state.

Another reason may be that identifying with a label has to do with feelings that we cannot control and we should value honesty. But then, can we fix that from within the movement if we realize it would be better for people to identify as an EA?

It could be because it sounds cringe too, but maybe it's worth enduring it. 

Idk, these are just some pros and cons I just thought about.

Systemic change interventions should be mentioned as a category of things EA works on when introducing EA and categorizing EA work, outside the "countermeasure" interventions that are done to solve more specific problems (animal suffering, x-risks, global h&d, etc) and meta-work.

I think this would help clarify the idea that EA tries to analyze systemic change proposals and puts money and work on them sometimes. 

They would include causes like improving institutional decision-making, happiness research, etc, and even new ideas like making AIs' character good.

I think there are a lot of people who want to do good, but just if they think they're fixing "the system". We can attract these people and give them answers to what we believe is better to do and incorporate their ideas if good.

In principle, they are of course great because of the positive feedback loops that systems could provide and that could make the impact of the interventions grow exponentially. Maybe the community could be thinking more about them.

Bettering social media platforms could be a top-tier systemic intervention.

My understanding is that EA puts most systemic change / solutions S-rated in terms of impact but F-rated in terms of neglectedness and tractability.

Is this the case for social media? Is it super hard and attempted to make the platforms, either internally or through policy, to not maximize for engagement? What about popularizing (and building if necessary) platforms that reward for what would be "useful" for people (or society at large)?

Because I think it's the most impactful systemic leverage I can think of. Unlike reforms to traditional media, entertainment, education and even politics, changes to them would reach and make at least small changes to most most of the demographics of most countries. And we need to add to this that they are not just replacing those sources of influence to individuals (except education I guess?), but also replacing the last bastion of influence: social circles.

People give 'The Day After' as an example of a movie that motivated nuclear disarmament and it would be good to have something similar for AIXR and I agree and I think there's something important to learn about that case.

That movie and 'Threads' are about the catastrophe *happening*, and about how absolutely terrible that would be. It forces you to put yourself there and that makes a strong emotional impact.

I think this type of intuition pump is the most powerful of them; people get the most motivated to change their lives when they think about their last moments and what they could regret then. Same thing happens when people think of their loved ones dying; they feel motivated to tell them that they love them or protect them.

The end of the world is basically both of those things at once.

Making people put themselves in that scenario is something AIXR comms hasn't tried much IMO. Only examples I remember are John Sherman once in his podcast and a book, and one tweet from Michael Trazzi.

I'm still learning basic things about AI Alignment, but it seems to me that all AIs (and other technologies) already don't give us exactly what we want but we don't call that outer misaligned because they are not "agentic" (enough?). The thing is that I don't know if there's a crucial? onthologic? property that make something agentic really, I think it could be just some type of complexity that we give a lot of value to. 

And also ML system are inner misaligned in a way because they can't generalize to everything from examples and we can see that when we don't like the results to a particular task that they give us. I don't think misaligned is maybe the word for these technologies, but really the important thing is that they don't do what we want them to do.

So the question about AI risk really is: are we going to build a superintelligent technology? Because that is the significant difference with the previous technologies. If that's the case, we are not going to be the ones influencing the future the most, building little by little what we actually want and stopping the use of technologies whenever they aren't useful. We are going to be the ones turned off.