Seems like a waste of time to read news, even if you work in AI policy.
The example you provided of the Axios article illustrates why I think you're incorrect. I remember reading this article, and being convinced that the US AISI was all but guaranteed to be scrapped. Yet knowledgeable people I heard from soon after implied they thought this was still a coin toss. Why such a discrepancy? I think the news has a 'something is happening' bias. Sometimes they twist words to imply something is happening, even when it's not clear-cut.
The way fast news presents issues can lead to receiving the wrong conclusion: my summation at the time was incorrect, as yours seems to be.
"the US government was planning to gut AISI"
Really? It seems more appropriate to say, "the Trump White House was maybe planning to fire all probationary employees at NIST, which would have gutted AISI, but the final scope was not determined at that time." And actually, this would have been a great hedge, because it turns out that a month later the US AISI is still here, despite many probational NIST employees having been fired earlier in the month.
Awesome, thanks Adam, this makes a lot of sense. I'd be excited to see reports on specific thinkers like Gwern and Yuval Noah Harrari. I'd be especially excited to look at the track records of institutions, like frontier developers or governments (e.g. the UK Government or its AISI).
I'd prefer to see you pick 'people who have made AI predictions who are not famous for those predictions' in some random-ish way. I could just say 'Gary Marcus' and be done, but I'd only be saying that because he disagrees with me on AI progress and I think he'd look bad if his track record was examined.
You're probably not trying to be super scientific, but I definitely wouldn't cite anything to a policymaker that was cherry-picked. I also wouldn't cite your tool if you only found an effect because you mainly compared people who are famous for scaling predictions, like Gary Marcus and Gwern.
Thanks for all the work you guys do! And love the new website.
I have really enjoyed using Squiggle AI for estimation tasks, and particularly cost-benefit analyses, since going to your talk about it at Minifest in mid December. Thanks for this post and for building this!
As a vegan I agree with Marcus and Jeff's takes but also think at least carnitarianism (not eating fish) is justifiable on pure utilitarian grounds. The 5 cent offset estimate is miles off (by a factor of 50-100) for fish and shrimp here, and this is how your argument falls.
I made a rough model that suggests a 100g cooked serving for farmed carp is ~1.1 years in a factory farm, and that of farmed shrimp is ~6 years in a factory farm. I modelled salmon and it came out much lower than this, but I expect this to grow when I factor in the fact salmon are carnivorous and farmed fish are used in salmon fish feed.
This is a lot of time, and it's more expensive to pay for offsets that cover a longer time period. We have two main EA-aligned options for aquaculture 'offsets', one is the Fish Welfare Initiative, which (iirc) improves the life of a single fish across its lifetime for a marginal dollar, and the other is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which improves the death (a process lasting 3-5 minutes) of 1000 shrimp per year for a marginal dollar (we don't know how good their corporate campaigns will be yet).
I'm really not sure how good it is for a carp to have a lower stocking density and higher water quality, which is FWI's intervention in India, and essentially the best case for FWI's effectiveness. If we assume it's a 30% reduction in lifetime pain we can offset a fish meal for roughly $3.33.
I don't think it's good to prevent 1 year of shrimp suffocation and then go off and cause shrimp to spend 100 years in farmed conditions (which are really bad, to be clear). Biting the bullet on that and assuming a stunner lasts 20 years and no discount rate, to offset a single shrimp meal you'd have to pay $4.6 (nearly 100 times more than the estimate you used).
Maybe you could offset using a different species (chicken, through corporate commitments). Vasco Grilo thinks a marginal dollar gets you 2 years of chicken life in factory farms averted. Naively I'd think that chicken lives are better than shrimp lives, but shrimp matter slightly less morally. This time you probably have to pay $3 to offset a shrimp meal using the easiest species to influence.
Additionally, the lead time on offsets is long (I would think at least five years from a donation to a corporate commitment being implemented). It's not good to have an offset that realises most of its value 20 years from now when, by then, there is a much higher chance of lab grown meat being cheaper or animal welfare regulations being better.
I think that you should at least be carnitarian because this is incredibly easy and based on my modelling (second sheet) it's the vast majority (90-95%) of the (morally adjusted) time saved in factory farms associated with vegetarianism. I doubt that any person gets $4 of utility from eating a different kind of meat, and this just adds up over time.
While regulation would be best,[1] commitments still make a case like this incredibly useful. The Humane League and the Better Chicken Commitment have been working on getting corporations to commit to use better breeds. It might be easier to (1) commit to using better breeds and (2) actually follow through with that commitment[2] if all UK producers have to switch to better breeds.
Yes EAs are especially altruistic. Although especially altruistic people exist across all economic classes and races, you'd still expect to see more privileged people in EA because they have the means (alongside other factors like the cycle of low diversity).
And so, EA is not a good measure of who is altruistic because it incidentally filters out people who are less wealthy, have less spare time, are more risk-averse, or don't want to be in spaces that don't represent them. If you have more privilege, you can (not want to, but have the means to) do more altruism. It's important for people to have self-serving motivations if they don't have much time or money: they know the best way to spend it.
That leads to my next point, which is that the vast majority of elite white rich people (needlessly) have selfish motivations, and can't exactly be expected to altruistically set up co-ops or start a business with no expectation of high returns in the world where it works out. This makes your point irrelevant, because it shows that even when people have the means they are still mostly not altruistic.
EA is possible because of a small minority of people having the sufficient means (time or money) and a weird altruism. Anyone who feels this weird altruism is welcome. If you know how to make people more altruistic, that would be fantastic information. Note there would be many things with a higher priority on the to-do list than 'socialism'.
I think one of the reasons why socialism is so unfalsifiable is because it's incredibly easy for socialists to shift the goalposts rapidly to another form of 'socialism' upon critique, so thank you for your definition.
You say "it's just the reduction the private capital" or this relatively benign form of anti-imperialism, but the post above outlines the USSR's space program or China's economic growth as examples of socialist successes, so it must be to do with the 'socialism' in those economies. Your definition sounds like capitalism to me: you can pay rent to a landlord, have your surplus labour taken, the only condition is that 'private capital' is being 'reduced' (something like the railways are being nationalised or corporations are being taxed).
On your institutional point, being intergovernmental organisations, I don't believe IMF and World Bank are 'private capital'. Furthermore, the Belt & Road initiative is run by China, which is listed as a socialist country in the post.
On your intervention point, would I prefer US intervention done in the name of anti-communism across the late 20th century wasn't so brutal and destructive. Does that make me any less of a liberal? I think you can be pro-capitalism and anti-imperialism, in the same way you can be pro-socialism and pro-imperialism (China, Venezuela, USSR). In other words the attributes pro-imperialism and pro-capitalism are independent.
It's important not to feel as if you are "wasting" your life because people tell you that you are smart. It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb to prioritise the sustainability of your EA actions - making sure you are happy and comfortable in your job, and putting yourself first.
If you are truly intrisically interested in a career change towards something particularly effective, I wouldn't be super concerned about test scores, they probably aren't the best metric for how you'd do in grad study or fair in your career. Your GPA is great, and being from an "unremarkable" university won't matter.
It seems like you may not be so comfortable in more quantitative fields, but 80k recommends heaps of areas that sound like a great fit: Philosophy and Psychology seem like particularly important areas for EAs!
A quick once over on their career reviews section reveals:
Population ethics researcher / policy analyst
Journalism
Research management
Non-technical roles in technical AI or biorisk research
Startup employee
Startup founding
Community building
Just to gauge more closely, it could be worth expanding that list, and running through this article.
80k has a lot of reflecting to do if what you say about them being not useful to most people is true. In my opinion though that they do try and frame things in a way that appeals to the average competent person!
Seems like a waste of time to read news, even if you work in AI policy.
The example you provided of the Axios article illustrates why I think you're incorrect. I remember reading this article, and being convinced that the US AISI was all but guaranteed to be scrapped. Yet knowledgeable people I heard from soon after implied they thought this was still a coin toss. Why such a discrepancy? I think the news has a 'something is happening' bias. Sometimes they twist words to imply something is happening, even when it's not clear-cut.
The way fast news presents issues can lead to receiving the wrong conclusion: my summation at the time was incorrect, as yours seems to be.
Really? It seems more appropriate to say, "the Trump White House was maybe planning to fire all probationary employees at NIST, which would have gutted AISI, but the final scope was not determined at that time." And actually, this would have been a great hedge, because it turns out that a month later the US AISI is still here, despite many probational NIST employees having been fired earlier in the month.
Awesome, thanks Adam, this makes a lot of sense. I'd be excited to see reports on specific thinkers like Gwern and Yuval Noah Harrari. I'd be especially excited to look at the track records of institutions, like frontier developers or governments (e.g. the UK Government or its AISI).
I'd prefer to see you pick 'people who have made AI predictions who are not famous for those predictions' in some random-ish way. I could just say 'Gary Marcus' and be done, but I'd only be saying that because he disagrees with me on AI progress and I think he'd look bad if his track record was examined.
You're probably not trying to be super scientific, but I definitely wouldn't cite anything to a policymaker that was cherry-picked. I also wouldn't cite your tool if you only found an effect because you mainly compared people who are famous for scaling predictions, like Gary Marcus and Gwern.
Thanks for all the work you guys do! And love the new website.
I have really enjoyed using Squiggle AI for estimation tasks, and particularly cost-benefit analyses, since going to your talk about it at Minifest in mid December. Thanks for this post and for building this!
AI: MATS, CAIS, IAPS
Animal welfare: EA Animal Welfare Fund, THL, Animals Aotearoa
As a vegan I agree with Marcus and Jeff's takes but also think at least carnitarianism (not eating fish) is justifiable on pure utilitarian grounds. The 5 cent offset estimate is miles off (by a factor of 50-100) for fish and shrimp here, and this is how your argument falls.
I made a rough model that suggests a 100g cooked serving for farmed carp is ~1.1 years in a factory farm, and that of farmed shrimp is ~6 years in a factory farm. I modelled salmon and it came out much lower than this, but I expect this to grow when I factor in the fact salmon are carnivorous and farmed fish are used in salmon fish feed.
This is a lot of time, and it's more expensive to pay for offsets that cover a longer time period. We have two main EA-aligned options for aquaculture 'offsets', one is the Fish Welfare Initiative, which (iirc) improves the life of a single fish across its lifetime for a marginal dollar, and the other is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which improves the death (a process lasting 3-5 minutes) of 1000 shrimp per year for a marginal dollar (we don't know how good their corporate campaigns will be yet).
I'm really not sure how good it is for a carp to have a lower stocking density and higher water quality, which is FWI's intervention in India, and essentially the best case for FWI's effectiveness. If we assume it's a 30% reduction in lifetime pain we can offset a fish meal for roughly $3.33.
I don't think it's good to prevent 1 year of shrimp suffocation and then go off and cause shrimp to spend 100 years in farmed conditions (which are really bad, to be clear). Biting the bullet on that and assuming a stunner lasts 20 years and no discount rate, to offset a single shrimp meal you'd have to pay $4.6 (nearly 100 times more than the estimate you used).
Maybe you could offset using a different species (chicken, through corporate commitments). Vasco Grilo thinks a marginal dollar gets you 2 years of chicken life in factory farms averted. Naively I'd think that chicken lives are better than shrimp lives, but shrimp matter slightly less morally. This time you probably have to pay $3 to offset a shrimp meal using the easiest species to influence.
Additionally, the lead time on offsets is long (I would think at least five years from a donation to a corporate commitment being implemented). It's not good to have an offset that realises most of its value 20 years from now when, by then, there is a much higher chance of lab grown meat being cheaper or animal welfare regulations being better.
I think that you should at least be carnitarian because this is incredibly easy and based on my modelling (second sheet) it's the vast majority (90-95%) of the (morally adjusted) time saved in factory farms associated with vegetarianism. I doubt that any person gets $4 of utility from eating a different kind of meat, and this just adds up over time.
While regulation would be best,[1] commitments still make a case like this incredibly useful. The Humane League and the Better Chicken Commitment have been working on getting corporations to commit to use better breeds. It might be easier to (1) commit to using better breeds and (2) actually follow through with that commitment[2] if all UK producers have to switch to better breeds.
See API's work on that here
See Lewis Bollard's remarks on that here
Yes EAs are especially altruistic. Although especially altruistic people exist across all economic classes and races, you'd still expect to see more privileged people in EA because they have the means (alongside other factors like the cycle of low diversity).
And so, EA is not a good measure of who is altruistic because it incidentally filters out people who are less wealthy, have less spare time, are more risk-averse, or don't want to be in spaces that don't represent them. If you have more privilege, you can (not want to, but have the means to) do more altruism. It's important for people to have self-serving motivations if they don't have much time or money: they know the best way to spend it.
That leads to my next point, which is that the vast majority of elite white rich people (needlessly) have selfish motivations, and can't exactly be expected to altruistically set up co-ops or start a business with no expectation of high returns in the world where it works out. This makes your point irrelevant, because it shows that even when people have the means they are still mostly not altruistic.
EA is possible because of a small minority of people having the sufficient means (time or money) and a weird altruism. Anyone who feels this weird altruism is welcome. If you know how to make people more altruistic, that would be fantastic information. Note there would be many things with a higher priority on the to-do list than 'socialism'.
I think one of the reasons why socialism is so unfalsifiable is because it's incredibly easy for socialists to shift the goalposts rapidly to another form of 'socialism' upon critique, so thank you for your definition.
You say "it's just the reduction the private capital" or this relatively benign form of anti-imperialism, but the post above outlines the USSR's space program or China's economic growth as examples of socialist successes, so it must be to do with the 'socialism' in those economies. Your definition sounds like capitalism to me: you can pay rent to a landlord, have your surplus labour taken, the only condition is that 'private capital' is being 'reduced' (something like the railways are being nationalised or corporations are being taxed).
On your institutional point, being intergovernmental organisations, I don't believe IMF and World Bank are 'private capital'. Furthermore, the Belt & Road initiative is run by China, which is listed as a socialist country in the post.
On your intervention point, would I prefer US intervention done in the name of anti-communism across the late 20th century wasn't so brutal and destructive. Does that make me any less of a liberal? I think you can be pro-capitalism and anti-imperialism, in the same way you can be pro-socialism and pro-imperialism (China, Venezuela, USSR). In other words the attributes pro-imperialism and pro-capitalism are independent.
It's important not to feel as if you are "wasting" your life because people tell you that you are smart. It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb to prioritise the sustainability of your EA actions - making sure you are happy and comfortable in your job, and putting yourself first.
If you are truly intrisically interested in a career change towards something particularly effective, I wouldn't be super concerned about test scores, they probably aren't the best metric for how you'd do in grad study or fair in your career. Your GPA is great, and being from an "unremarkable" university won't matter.
It seems like you may not be so comfortable in more quantitative fields, but 80k recommends heaps of areas that sound like a great fit: Philosophy and Psychology seem like particularly important areas for EAs!
A quick once over on their career reviews section reveals:
Just to gauge more closely, it could be worth expanding that list, and running through this article.
80k has a lot of reflecting to do if what you say about them being not useful to most people is true. In my opinion though that they do try and frame things in a way that appeals to the average competent person!