The positive media storm for Anthropic is bigger than I thought it would be.

 Almost every major news network has featured them and almost all of it puts a halo on Amodei (which feels a bit icky but hey).

And every 4th post on my linkedin is along the lines of

"Claude hits no. 1 on App store"

"the idea that no big tech has morals is dead,"

"my 3 year love affair with GPT Is over"

"I made the switch to Claude and I'll never look back"

As much as refusing the govt. contact might delay their IPO and give their valuation a temporary hit, they could hardly have h... (read more)

I have twice recently "gently counseled" people on EA forum norms when they come in, in my opinion, a little too hot for this rather cool medium 😃 is there something official/CEA-endorsed on this subject? If not, should I/someone write it? I could point them to Scout Mindset but that's kind of a high barrier to entry. 

Thought to share some infographics on animal advocacy org expenses from the Stray Dog Institute's 2024 State of the Movement report, which I learned about via Moritz's excellent post. 

Most org spending is in North America and Europe: 

North American and European orgs accounted for most of the spend in sub-Saharan Africa and LATAM & the Caribbean, despite spending (say) only ~1% of their total expenses in SSA: 

I don't have any good sense of how this Global North-dominated funding potentially skews priorities, but this drill down by animal ... (read more)

I'm surprised that there hasn't been an attempt (as far as I know) to fund/create a competitor to Epoch.ai.

It wouldn't have to compete on all benchmarks, but it would be good to have a forecasting organisation that could be trusted with potentially dual use insights into capabilities trajectories. I don't believe this would require uniformity of views: it would just require people with a proper sense of responsibility.

I also think that the bad judgement displayed by some of their employees impinges on some of their research (emphasis on some, particularly ... (read more)

This might feel obvious, but I think it's under-appreciated how much disagreement on AI progress just comes down to priors (in a pretty specific way) rather than object-level reasoning.

I was recently arguing the case for shorter timelines to a friend who leans longer. We kept disagreeing on a surprising number of object-level claims, which was weird because we usually agree more on the kinda stuff we were arguing about.

Then I basically realized what I think was going on: she had a pretty strong prior against what I was saying, and that prior is abstract en... (read more)

Whenever I talk about Effective Altruism (EA) to someone new, I talk about EA-the-Movement and EA-the-Philosophy. EA-the-Movement draws a specific kind of person (quantitative, techy, philosophical) and has selected a few causes it has determined to be the most effective. EA-the-Philosophy is about asking whether our donations and volunteering are going to places that get the most bang for our buck and those questions can be applied to anything we care about. 

It's a way of easing people into our way of thinking without insisting that they join our par... (read more)

Given finitude of existence, I think I'd rather help an old lady cross the street & make someone smile than read forum posts. If I had a lot more time in a day, then forum posts might come after reading fiction, gardening, and baking dark chocolate brownies. But before, reading Chomsky, learning Mandarin, and trying to find an answer to a non-pragmatic theoretical question like "If aliens exist, what could that mean about humanity?" 

I.

Once upon a time, there was an EA named Alice. EA made a lot of sense to Alice, and she believed that some niche problems/causes were astronomically bigger than others. But she eventually decided that (1) the theories of change were confusing/suspicious and (2) there's substantial evidence that a bunch of EA work is net-negative. So she decided to become a teacher or doctor or something.

II.

Alice made a mistake! If she thinks that some problems/causes are astronomically bigger than others, and she's skeptical of certain approaches, she should look for bet... (read more)

PSA: regression to the mean/mean reversion is a statistical artifact, not a causal mechanism.

So mean regression says that children of tall parents are likely to be shorter than their parents, but it also says parents of tall children are likely to be shorter than their children.

Put in a different way, mean regression goes in both directions. 

This is well-understood enough here in principle, but imo enough people get this wrong in practice that the PSA is worthwhile nonetheless.

Is there any possibility of the forum having an AI-writing detector in the background which perhaps only the admins can see, but could be queried by suspicious users? I really don't like AI writing and have called it out a number of times but have been wrong once. I imagine this has been thought about and there might even be a form of this going on already.

In saying this my first post on LessWrong was scrapped because they identified it as AI written even though I have NEVER used AI in online writing not even for checking/polishing. So that system obviously isnt' perfect.

I’m pretty confident the EA community is underdiscussing on how to prevent global AGI powered autocracy, especially if the US democracy implodes under AGI pressure. There are two key questions here: (I) How to make the US more resilient, and (ii) how can we make the world less dependent on the US democracy resilience.

The Forum should normalize public red-teaming for people considering new jobs, roles, or project ideas.

If someone is seriously thinking about a position, they should feel comfortable posting the key info — org, scope, uncertainties, concerns, arguments for — and explicitly inviting others to stress-test the decision. Some of the best red-teaming I’ve gotten hasn’t come from my closest collaborators (whose takes I can often predict), but from semi-random thoughtful EAs who notice failure modes I wouldn’t have caught alone (or people think pretty differently... (read more)

I think something a lot of people miss about the “short-term chartist position” (these trends have continued until time t, so I should expect it to continue to time t+1) for an exponential that’s actually a sigmoid is that if you keep holding it, you’ll eventually be wrong exactly once.

Whereas if someone is “short-term chartist hater” (these trends always break, so I predict it’s going to break at time t+1) for an exponential that’s actually a sigmoid is that if you keep holding it, you’ll eventually be correct exactly once.

Now of course most chartists (my... (read more)