Alfredo_Parra
Bio
Participation4
Previously worked at the Institute for Law & AI (formerly Legal Priorities Project) and the Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly Effective Altruism Foundation). I also co-founded EA Munich in 2015. I have a PhD in Computational Science from TU Munich.
How others can help me
Looking for an institutional home and funding to do research on consciousness (including artificial sentience).
Posts 4
Comments27
Topic contributions4
I think that a corollary of the first point is that we can learn a lot about alignment by looking at humans who seem unusually aligned to human values (although I think more generally to the interests of all conscious beings), e.g. highly attained meditators with high integrity, altruistic motivations, rationality skills, and a healthy balance of sytematizer and empathizer mindsets. From phenomenological reports, their subagentic structures seem quite unlike anything most of us experience day to day. That, plus a few core philosophical assumptions, can get you a really long way in deducing e.g. Anthropic's constitutional AI principles from first principles.
Nearly five years since this post was written, and still so little attention and virtually no funding in EA is dedicated to this problem. Ignoring the logarithmic distribution of suffering continues to be my top contender for biggest blindspot in the EA community. My heart goes out to the likely millions of people worldwide who suffer hell-level pain on a regular basis. I'll continue to think of ways to help.
Thanks for writing this! You might find this article interesting: The heavy-tailed valence hypothesis: the human capacity for vast variation in pleasure/pain and how to test it (largely based on this EA Forum post: Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering).
Hi! I've been working full time in operations at EA orgs for 6 years (3.5 years at the Center on Long-Term Risk and 2.5 at the Legal Priorities Project). I rarely ever work past 6 pm and ~never on weekends, and have had colleagues with similar boundaries. Everyone I've worked with has been extremely respectful of those boundaries.
When deciding whether to take a job, I think it's possible to tell your potential employer something like "I'm willing to work X hours per week, I'm not willing to do Y, etc. Do you still want to hire me?" And let them decide. Similarly, I think recruiters should always share the worst parts about the job before hiring someone (more on this here). And if they don't, you can always ask.
Good luck!
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- The Legal Priorities Project team
Done! Thanks for sharing this!