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Curated and popular this week
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Around 1 month ago, I wrote a similar Forum post on the Easterlin Paradox. I decided to take it down because: 1) after useful comments, the method looked a little half-baked; 2) I got in touch with two academics – Profs. Caspar Kaiser and Andrew Oswald – and we are now working on a paper together using a related method.
That blog post actually came to the opposite conclusion, but, as mentioned, I don't think the method was fully thought through.
I'm a little more confident about this work. It essentially summarises my Undergraduate dissertation. You can read a full version here. I'm hoping to publish this somewhere, over the Summer. So all feedback is welcome.
TLDR
* Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.”
* Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — a phenomenon called rescaling.
* I test this hypothesis using a large (panel) dataset by asking a simple question: has the emotional impact of life events — e.g., unemployment, new relationships — weakened over time? If happiness scales have stretched, life events should “move the needle” less now than in the past.
* That’s exactly what I find: on average, the effect of the average life event on reported happiness has fallen by around 40%.
* This result is surprisingly robust to various model specifications. It suggests rescaling is a real phenomenon, and that (under 2 strong assumptions), underlying happiness may be 60% higher than reported happiness.
* There are some interesting EA-relevant implications for the merits of material abundance, and the limits to subjective wellbeing data.
1. Background: A Happiness Paradox
Here is a claim that I suspect most EAs would agree with: humans today live longer, richer, and healthier lives than any point in history. Yet we seem no happier for it. Self-reported life satisfaction (LS), usually measured on a 0–10 scale, has remained remarkably flat over the last f
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Summary
I’m excited to announce a “Digital Sentience Consortium” hosted by Longview Philanthropy, in collaboration with The Navigation Fund and Macroscopic Ventures, to support research and applied projects focused on the potential consciousness, sentience, moral status, and experiences of artificial intelligence systems. The opportunities include research fellowships, career transition fellowships, and a broad request for proposals for applied work on these topics.
For years, I’ve thought this area was seriously overlooked. It now has growing interest. Twenty-two out of 123 pages of Claude 4’s model card are about its potential moral patienthood. Scientific experts increasingly say that near-term AI sentience is a real possibility; even the skeptical neuroscientist Anil Seth says, “it is unwise to dismiss the possibility altogether.” We’re hoping to bring new people and projects into the field to increase the chance that society deals with the possibility of digital sentience reasonably, and with concern for all involved.
* Apply to Research Fellowship
* Apply to Career Transition Fellowship
* Apply to Request for Proposals
Motivation & Focus
For about as long as I’ve been reading about transformative AI, I’ve wondered whether society would face critical decisions involving AI sentience. Until recently, I thought there was not much to be done here besides perhaps more philosophy of mind and perhaps some ethics—and I was not sure these approaches would make much progress.
Now, I think there are live areas where people can contribute:
* Technically informed research on which AI systems are sentient, like this paper applying existing theories of consciousness to a few AI architectures.
* Innovative approaches to investigate sentience, potentially in a way that avoids having to take a stand on a particular theory of consciousness, like work on AI introspection.
* Political philosophy and policy research on the proper role of AI in society.
* Work to ed
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Confidence: Medium, underlying data is patchy and relies on a good amount of guesswork, data work involved a fair amount of vibecoding.
Intro:
Tom Davidson has an excellent post explaining the compute bottleneck objection to the software-only intelligence explosion.[1] The rough idea is that AI research requires two inputs: cognitive labor and research compute. If these two inputs are gross complements, then even if there is recursive self-improvement in the amount of cognitive labor directed towards AI research, this process will fizzle as you get bottlenecked by the amount of research compute.
The compute bottleneck objection to the software-only intelligence explosion crucially relies on compute and cognitive labor being gross complements; however, this fact is not at all obvious. You might think compute and cognitive labor are gross substitutes because more labor can substitute for a higher quantity of experiments via more careful experimental design or selection of experiments. Or you might indeed think they are gross complements because eventually, ideas need to be tested out in compute-intensive, experimental verification.
Ideally, we could use empirical evidence to get some clarity on whether compute and cognitive labor are gross complements; however, the existing empirical evidence is weak. The main empirical estimate that is discussed in Tom's article is Oberfield and Raval (2014), which estimates the elasticity of substitution (the standard measure of whether goods are complements or substitutes) between capital and labor in manufacturing plants. It is not clear how well we can extrapolate from manufacturing to AI research.
In this article, we will try to remedy this by estimating the elasticity of substitution between research compute and cognitive labor in frontier AI firms.
Model
Baseline CES in Compute
To understand how we estimate the elasticity of substitution, it will be useful to set up a theoretical model of researching better alg
It would may be helpful to grow a cross-national/ethnic overarching identity around "wisdom and doing good". EA does this is a bit, but is heavily constrained to the technocratic. While that is it useful subcomponent of that broader identity, it can push away people who share or aspire the underlying ideals of (1) "Doing good as a core goal of existence" and (2) "Being wise about how one chooses to do good"—but who don't share the disposition or culture of most EA's. Even the name itself can be a turnoff—it sound intellectual and elitist.
Having a named identity which is broader than EA, but which contains it, could be incredibly helpful for connecting across neurodiverse divides in daily work, and could be incredibly valuable as a cross-cutting cleavage in national/ethnic/ etc. divides in conflict environments, if this can encompass a broad enough population over time.
I'm not sure what that name might be in English, or if it makes more sense to just expand meaning of EA, but it may be worth thinking about this, and consciously growing a movement around that with aligned movements that perhaps get at other "lenses of wisdom" that focus on best utilizing/growing resources for broad positive impact.
Assuming misaligned AI is a risk, is technical AI alignment enough, or do you need joint AI/Societal alignment?
My work has involved trying to support risk awareness and coordination similar to what has been suggested for AI alignment. For example, for mitigating harms around synthetic media / “deepfakes” (now rebranded to generative AI) and it worked for a few years with all the major orgs and most relevant research groups.
But then new orgs jumped in to fill the capability gap! (e.g. eleuther, stability, etc.)
Due to demand and for potentially good reasons: those capabilities which can harm people can also help people. The ultimate result is the proliferation/access/democratization of AI capabilities in the face of risks.
I’m currently skeptical that this sort of coordination is possible without some addressing deeper societal incentives (AKA reward functions; e.g. around profit/power/attention maximization, self-dealing, etc.) and related multi-principal-agent challenges. This joint/ai societal alignment or holistic alignment would seem to be a prerequisite to the actual implementation of technical alignment.[2]
This is assuming you can even get the major players on board, which isn't true for e.g. misaligned recommender systems that I've also worked on (on the societal side).
This would also be generally good for the world! E.g. to address externalities, political dysfunction, corruption, etc.