Why do you assume that if a post is AI-written then it's low-quality? Maybe it's because you assume that AI is not currently capable of coming up with good ideas/discoveries. I don't know if that's true, but even if that's the case, then I used AI for writing because it was able to convey something in words better and the idea/discovery was made by me. If I write it myself, it wouldn't be of higher quality (except for the fact that sometimes AI misses some points and it doesn't represent what I wanted to say perfectly)
"Applicant fit: Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?
How competent are they? Do I think they can execute this proposal well?
What do their references look like? How strongly do people they’ve worked with endorse them?"
I have few thoughts:
"Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?" - I believe that it is difficult to say that, so if I was making grants, I would invest in many projects a small number of money (because of diminishing returns) rather than to invest a lot of money in someone who has good credentials. I think it's a mistake to reject people who don't have good credentials.
" What do their references look like? How strongly do people they’ve worked with endorse them?" - I don't think that references are reliable way to judge that. People don't have almost any incentive to be honest when giving references, and people are self-interested. Additionally, often people who worked with them don't have information how likely they would succeed at a project. For example, people who worked with a person as a software engineer don't know if that person would do well as a founder.
" Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?" - it's way more difficult to judge whether a person will do a good job than it is to tell if a person did a good work. That's why people should switch to retroactive funding instead of normal funding.
There was a mistake in "Empirical verification" section. Part of the suggested question/prompt was missing, and the reasoning didn't make sense because of that. I have now corrected the question/prompt.
I agree that something like that needs to be done. I did something similar myself for EA forum posts, but apparently people didn't like it because it didn't get any upvotes here (I don't know why).
My main question/feedback is:
"EA Forum paper links" - what exactly is that? Are these EA posts that link to a paper? If so, then why not include all posts, why only papers?
It omits the most important mechanism that I mentioned in my post. The mechanism is to reward rewarding itself. This is really the most important part of my post that has been completely omitted from the summary.
"Epistemic status: This is a speculative, normative proposal relying on assumptions about behavioral adaptation, future technology, and long-term incentives; key uncertainties include whether coordination dynamics will shift as described and whether sufficient adoption can occur."
This is not speculative, it's based on a theoretical justification that makes logical sense. If it doesn't make sense to someone else, please point out why.
It's definitely not normative, in a sense that it doesn't tell people what to do, but it offers a solution.
Key uncertainty, in my opinion:
Whether people understand the reasoning behind the solution.
Whether people have sufficient observability of people's actions for that to work.
I actually proposed a similar idea in a few places months ago (links below). I plan to post about related topics, e.g. my future posts might help to understand how such deals could be enforced, so if you are interested, then follow me
I believe that artificial intelligence and other resources will have diminishing marginal utility. If that's the case, then it should be possible to do so that both humans and future digital minds are close to their maximum level of utility/happiness by splitting resources between them. The idea of "both digital minds and humans are important" would be therefore significantly more attractive for humans and realistic to accomplish than the idea of "digital minds are all of what matters".
On moral patience:
Morality is subjective.
The criteria for moral patience are subjective. You can say that a human is a moral patient, you can say that AI agent is a moral patient, or you can say that a stone is a moral patient. There's no objective truth about that.
However, we can define moral patience as "if I want to maximize my happiness/utility, whose happiness/utility should I care about when choosing my actions"? That is objective.
If a human wants to maximize their happiness, who should they care about?
Firstly, we need to answer what are the reasons why a human would have an interest to care about someone/something else.
The reasons are:
Game-theoretic - especially direct and indirect reciprocity.
Importantly, I think that agents have interest to care about weaker agents (ask me if you want to know why).
I also think that it's in the interest of a human to care about other sentient life, at least to some extent, because:
It's a norm that is useful - if we live by that norm, then we have that guarantee that we won't end up terribly, because as long as we are sentient, someone will care about us.
It's a norm that has a historical precedent and it's easier to sustain a norm than to establish a new one. But the historical precedent is that humans care about existing sentient life, not potential sentient life.
If the norm of respecting sentient life implied that humans have to commit all their resources for the benefit of future digital minds / AI agents, then that norm would stop to be useful to humans, so that norm would either become weaker to the point where human lives matter, or humans would stop creating new AI agents.
Emotional - you care about someone because you simply want them to be happy.
I think it's likely that there are game-theoretic and/or emotional reasons why we should care about AI agents / digital beings, but not to the point that they are all that we should care about and that we should ignore other agents or beings.
On number of agents:
How to count the number of agents? If we have multiple agents on different computers that cooperate and exchange knowledge, and then we have one agent that is distributed among many computers, then what's the difference between them? Does that count as one agent or many?
Let's suppose that we define agents by their goals (i.e. two computers with AI on it are considered different agents, if they aim to achieve different goals). If there are multiple agents with different goals (either human or AIs), then the best thing that they can do is to create one AI agent that will be optimized for the cumulative utility/happiness all of them. So, I expect that there won't be many separate agents with different goals in the future.
I think I've selected a time that is not suitable for many people (especially the US West Coast). I'm going to change it to Saturday 5 pm GMT. I hope it won't cause a problem for anyone.
Okay.
Why do you assume that if a post is AI-written then it's low-quality? Maybe it's because you assume that AI is not currently capable of coming up with good ideas/discoveries. I don't know if that's true, but even if that's the case, then I used AI for writing because it was able to convey something in words better and the idea/discovery was made by me. If I write it myself, it wouldn't be of higher quality (except for the fact that sometimes AI misses some points and it doesn't represent what I wanted to say perfectly)
"Applicant fit: Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?
How competent are they? Do I think they can execute this proposal well? What do their references look like? How strongly do people they’ve worked with endorse them?"
I have few thoughts:
There was a mistake in "Empirical verification" section. Part of the suggested question/prompt was missing, and the reasoning didn't make sense because of that. I have now corrected the question/prompt.
I agree that something like that needs to be done. I did something similar myself for EA forum posts, but apparently people didn't like it because it didn't get any upvotes here (I don't know why).
My main question/feedback is: "EA Forum paper links" - what exactly is that? Are these EA posts that link to a paper? If so, then why not include all posts, why only papers?
This is not an accurate summary.
It omits the most important mechanism that I mentioned in my post. The mechanism is to reward rewarding itself. This is really the most important part of my post that has been completely omitted from the summary.
"Epistemic status: This is a speculative, normative proposal relying on assumptions about behavioral adaptation, future technology, and long-term incentives; key uncertainties include whether coordination dynamics will shift as described and whether sufficient adoption can occur."
This is not speculative, it's based on a theoretical justification that makes logical sense. If it doesn't make sense to someone else, please point out why.
It's definitely not normative, in a sense that it doesn't tell people what to do, but it offers a solution.
Key uncertainty, in my opinion:
My solution was mostly this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7EAwiAopjtAdD8hsn/most-impactful-posts-on-effective-altruism-forum-from-13th
But it didn't work. People didn't upvote that. My problem/frustration continues.
I actually proposed a similar idea in a few places months ago (links below). I plan to post about related topics, e.g. my future posts might help to understand how such deals could be enforced, so if you are interested, then follow me
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3rDfScbBNhbsk93gF/how-to-stop-inequality-from-growing
https://theoreticalexplorer.com/Alignment+between+humans/Equality/How+to+stop+inequality+from+growing
My thoughts.
On implications of diminishing marginal utility:
On moral patience:
On number of agents:
I think I've selected a time that is not suitable for many people (especially the US West Coast). I'm going to change it to Saturday 5 pm GMT. I hope it won't cause a problem for anyone.