Quick takes
My three most recent posts on Substack are relevant to effective altruism:
- Shouldn’t we spend money on AGI safety, just in case?
- The sad decline of effective altruism
- The pseudo-religious origins of the AI bubble
I can’t discuss them on the EA Forum, but I’m happy to do so on Substack.
Can't because I've received an indefinite, possibly permanent soft ban (severe rate limit of 2 comments per week) since January from the EA Forum mods with a warning that it may escalate to a full ban.
It's not really about something I can change — or at least that I'm willing to change — because it's ultimately an editorial decision by the mods about what kind of conversations, content, and disagreement they want on the EA Forum. In my understanding (which could be wrong), they want the EA Forum to be more of a collaborative space where contributors are up...
My personal messy thoughts on some of the things EA Netherlands (and maybe other community building orgs?) should be doing in the near future (building on our recent post). Sharing to get input. Please tell me what you think I'm getting wrong.
Some Tenets
Community building, not talent placement. EAN is primarily a community-building organisation. The theory of change is community capital — career capital × coordination ability — which bridges two impact horizons. Individual community members accumulate career capital and reach one or more of thr...
More EA undergrads should do political volunteering. It's impactful AND fun.
Choose an election that's impactful (e.g. AI safety candidate) and neglected (e.g. primaries in always-blue/red places), couch-crash the weekend there, and volunteer with the campaign.
I say this after doing 15 hours of street canvassing myself. I was surprised by how anecdotally impactful and fun it was. If you like people-watching, talking to strangers, and/or joining passionate projects for a weekend, I think you'll also love this.
I wish I thought of this earlier.
Literature on th...
As someone who did this, and ended up actually working as a political staffer for years, strongly agree. Not just for the reasons you mentioned, but volunteering on a campaign for a weekend is a pretty easy/cheap test to see if you have aptitude and/or enjoyment in the realm of politics as a whole. If you do, even a short stint is a great way to learn some pretty handy transferable skills, and to meet people that might be handy to know if you’re trying to influence policy down the line. Campaigns love thoughtful, passionate people, and they can be convince...
I'm working on an article for a magazine touching on pain management during post-surgical extubation, and once again I find myself freshly disturbed by how difficult it is to get good data about PAIN during extubation (and many other procedures) because the dominant culture in "pain management" cares so little about pain itself. They often care exclusively about preventing memories of pain, rather than preventing... pain.
A paper I read today[1] says: "Many of the patients exhibited severe bucking or similar bodily movements, raising concerns that they...
Should I point it out publicly when a post I read seem to have heavy markers of AI, to me? Especially if Pangram and other AI detectors[1] don't clock it.
Reasons not to:
- I could be wrong (I think this is unlikely, but I'm not sure. I don't have ground truth. What I do know is that pretty much no pre-2021 writings trigger this in me).
- I personally get very mad when people accuse my (fully human-generated) writing as AI, excepting occasional meta-jokes. So admittedly I'm on both sides of this.
- False positives are far more harmful than false negatives
IMO add it, especially if it bothers you for a given post. Cases are often egregious even when Pangram misses it. I personally feel like these posts end up long winded & eloquent (but empty of surprising insights). I am sad to read what looks to be an effort-post, only to realize it is little more than a prompt.
Alternatively, we should get an emoji react that is just 'LLM?'
Three Claude Code skills I find helpful:
- Urgent-watch: allows me to close Slack and email, and have Claude run a loop in the background to check every 30 mins if there is anything time-sensitive that means I should exit deep work and reply to things.
- Gdoc2md: I work mainly in Google Docs, often with many comments, and the native ‘download as markdown’ feature loses the comments. So I have a skill that take a doc url and downloads it as a word file, which Claude can parse to extract the comments and format them as footnotes in a clean md file for other Claude
Biggest one for me is the meta-skill of asking it to make skills for tasks I want it to do in more than one chat. I can now make an early draft of the EA Newsletter almost entirely with a chain of claude skills.
Edit: 'early draft' because they are each a bit crap in their own way. They do get better every month though.
Does anyone know whether there's a way to buy cultivated (lab-grown) meat now? I've always wanted to host a cultivated meat barbecue and invite my omnivorous friends, but I have not been able to find any cultivated meat that's currently commercially available.
For Australians and Singaporeans, you can order it from Vow, who I understand are one of the world’s largest cultivated meat producers. However, they mostly produce delicacy formats such as pâté and croquettes—steaks are probably a few years off, regardless of where you eat.
I hosted ~12 friends or so at my place for a vegetarian meal last year and offered the pâté and croquettes as starters. They were well received, essentially just perfect substitutes for the real thing.
The Straw and the Camel's back
I recently had a colleague complain that oat milk was a 'luxury' that the work coffee machines didn't need. And this tiny little comment kind of broke me. I feel like I am so careful not to judge or lecture everyone around me for their insanely massive moral failings around animal welfare, or donating - yet apparently people can't even just let me have my suffering-free milk in peace.
Which prompted me to re-evaluate something I hadn't really thought about in a long time - being EA (or EA-adjacent or however people wanna ...
Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact
Next month (September 2024) is my 10th anniversary of formally engaging with EA. This date marks 10 years since I first reached out to the Foundational Research Institute about volunteering, at least as far as I can tell from my emails.
Prior to that, I probably had read a fair amount of Peter Singer, Brian Tomasik, and David Pearce, who might all have been considered connected to EA, but I hadn’t actually actively tried engaging with the community. I’d been engaged with the effective animal advocacy commun...
Nothing super constructive to say, but two years later, I still think about this post a lot and keep coming back to it to read some specific bullets. It's somewhat moving, but also very content-dense, one of my favorite pieces of writing/information on here.
I generally find pieces about how people's views and drives evolve helpful on many levels, and I'd welcome more of them, even from much less senior people. I try to keep track of this for myself: it's useful for gaining insights into, for example, what actually influences my priorities over time and how contingent those drives are.
I'd like to have conversations with people who work or are knowledgeable about energy and security. Whether that's with respect to energy grids, nuclear power plants, solar panels, etc. I'm exploring a startup idea to harden the world's critical infrastructure against powerful AI. (I am also building a system to make formal verification more deployable at scale so that it may reduce loss of control and misuse scenarios.)
I've given workshops on using AIs for productivity/research to various research organizations like MATS. I'm happy to offer a bit of my ti...
Been thinking about morality recently. Here are my current thoughts, take them with a grain of salt because they aren't battle-tested yet.
There are some strong arguments for utilitarianism, but regardless of what is correct theoretically, in practise utilitarianism doesn't work well without some kind of deontological bars.
Continuing with attempting to develop a pragmatic morality, it then become clear that virtue ethics is important too because a) rules are rigid compared to judgement b) decisions aren't independent but also affect how you'll act in the fu...
I quite liked this article by Martha Nussbaum: Virtue Ethics is a Misleading Category. She points out that both the classical utilitarians and Kant talked extensively about virtues. On the other hand, there's great variation among those who call themselves 'virtue ethicists', such that it's not clear if virtue ethics is really a thing.
But the point I want to make is: a good utilitarian has to acknowledge the role of virtue, and I think a lot of modern utilitarians have forgotten this. We want to use utility-calculation to guide our actions, but humans can'...
I wanted to make this poll to see how the community views the speed/x-risk tradeoff. I'm personally 99% x-risk and 1% speed, so I would hard agree. My prediction is most people will agree, maybe a 70/30 split, but I'm curious to see.
I would be willing to delay technological innovation by up to 100 years to significantly reduce existential risk
I think the question is too imprecise phrased to be answered precisely. When would the delay start? Over what time period would it be felt? (e.g. a 100% delay for 100 years is very different than 1% delay over 10,000 years)
I'm thus giving a directional answer assuming we're talking about whether seeking to dramatically reducing technological progress in exchange for safety is a feasible way to make the world a better place. I don't thi...
The recent forecasting is overrated post got me thinking:
Solution Seeking a Problem
When talking about forecasting, people often ask questions like “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” This is the wrong way to go about solving problems.
Intuitively, that seems correct, and I've relied on the expression "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This got me thinking: is it necessarily the wrong way, or is this a truism?
If I have a legitimately useful and powerful tool, isn't it indeed valuable to look around for problems...
This just came to mind: the reason that it's the wrong way to go about solving problems is that you want to solve the largest problems (well, per resource) and not just solve any random problem. Like, there is a problem that my shoes are currently untied, and I don't want to bend down or spend 10 seconds to tie them, but it's not very important.
So if you want to solve the most important problems, you should start with the problem and then work backwards for what solutions you might wish existed. I think the mere fact that people often talk about forecasting as the solution they are seeking to apply, whether that be Sentinel or whoever, is evidence that things are going wrong.
I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are p...
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questions—I am not at all a utilitarian, and I don’t think you should be either. But I’ll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please don’t do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuer...
You should volunteer at your first EAG! (Especially if you are a student or early career)
- If you don’t have a network in EA, EAG’s can be overwhelming. Volunteering gives you a ready-made, organic network.
- Volunteering is pretty chill - a lot of the shifts aren’t that hard.
- At your first EAG, it’s unlikely that you are using your time so efficiently that a few hours of volunteering would cut into the value of your conference.