There's lots of talk about how more EA-aligned funding will attract grifters. The Robin Hanson in me wondered what expensive or hard-to-fake signals exist for (human) alignment.
The first ideas that came to mind:
donating a kidney
vegan/vegetarian
non-profit work
donating a lot to effective charities
community engagement
I don't know whether folks should weight these highly in funding decisions. Probably they all collapse under sufficient pressure.
Fair point that the sequences do not strongly default towards inaction. I think the evidence gains from action mean that it 'is' favored, but this is an empirical prediction about the world, which I think you disagree with.
If increased information reduces our unawareness, that decreases the relevance of cluelessness arguments, no? In particular, the set of actions with overlapping credal sets would be reduced, and so there would be more dominated actions we could rule out for consideration. Unless you're making an argument that the information learned is too small to meaningfully constrain our predictions in expectation. In which case sure, that's an empirical claim I disagree with, but it is logically consistent.
I think most importantly we have an empirical disagreement about both how clueless we are of the longterm impacts of our actions, and how difficult it is to reduce that cluelessness. I'm trying to think about cruxes that might resolve that.
I think you disagree that increased predictive capability in shorter time horizons generalizes to long-time horizons [1]. For me, seeing bad short & medium term predictions 'would' cause me to give more credence to unawareness arguments. But you seem to have prevented the opposite evidence from swaying you in the other direction (unless I'm misunderstanding).
OOC, have you asked Fable to try to write a satire with 'Open Asteroid Impact' as a reference class? I had it do one for ALLFED, and IMO it was pretty funny. Much funnier than 'METR Time Horizon 2.0' (although I'm not sure how hard this post was optimizing for humor), pretty comparable to Open Asteroid Impact.
If you've tried this yourself with Fable and still feel it comes up short, that would be a little surprising to me.
Happy to share the example if you'd like, IMO it had a good degree of joke substructure. IE, strongly funny individual lines, good references, relevant puns.
It's also very possible that the humor is of a variety that quickly saturates & you're already saturated on it. Similar to how most folks find 'Cards Against Humanity' pretty funny the first time you play it, and then it goes downhill extremely sharply.
"The graph lists Microsoft Excel 1.0, but the benchmarks must have been run on a modern version of Excel. The worksheet limit of Excel 1.0 was only 16,384 rows rather than 1,048,576, plus it lacked many of the functions of modern Excel, so it would presumably fail more tasks."
Personally I thought this was a B- shitpost. If it was just a quick take of exactly the tldr text I would give it a B+. So IMO not bad, but I think I also read less LLM text than you so I'm probably not annoyed as quickly by it.
I admire the hustle and hope you succeed.
But as many others have said, this is a recipe for burnout. If a friend said they intended to do this, I would try quite hard to talk them down.
Sure, if you can directly measure what you actually want (positive impact), that is of course best :)
There's lots of talk about how more EA-aligned funding will attract grifters. The Robin Hanson in me wondered what expensive or hard-to-fake signals exist for (human) alignment.
The first ideas that came to mind:
I don't know whether folks should weight these highly in funding decisions. Probably they all collapse under sufficient pressure.
I feel like I've got a moral obligation to have true beliefs insofar as that leads to me having a positive impact.
If I had lower agency or power, I would whole heartedly endorse being ignorant & happy. Folks can of course choose for themselves here.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Anthony.
Fair point that the sequences do not strongly default towards inaction. I think the evidence gains from action mean that it 'is' favored, but this is an empirical prediction about the world, which I think you disagree with.
If increased information reduces our unawareness, that decreases the relevance of cluelessness arguments, no? In particular, the set of actions with overlapping credal sets would be reduced, and so there would be more dominated actions we could rule out for consideration. Unless you're making an argument that the information learned is too small to meaningfully constrain our predictions in expectation. In which case sure, that's an empirical claim I disagree with, but it is logically consistent.
I think most importantly we have an empirical disagreement about both how clueless we are of the longterm impacts of our actions, and how difficult it is to reduce that cluelessness. I'm trying to think about cruxes that might resolve that.
I think you disagree that increased predictive capability in shorter time horizons generalizes to long-time horizons [1]. For me, seeing bad short & medium term predictions 'would' cause me to give more credence to unawareness arguments. But you seem to have prevented the opposite evidence from swaying you in the other direction (unless I'm misunderstanding).
Like, what is something you could see happen tomorrow that would make you say 'whoa, we actually can know the long-term consequences of our actions'? Would it take something as extreme as https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3?
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZTz9BKxCys5DgaHQJ/ama-anthony-digiovanni-author-of-the-challenge-of?commentId=bcaWd275R3PXgivma)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ptQsRsreA5JWZEAF4/open-nuclear-winter-fable-written-satire
If you want to give it a read. IMO funnier than the Anthropic parody (although some parts miss), less funny than Open Asteroid Impact.
OOC, have you asked Fable to try to write a satire with 'Open Asteroid Impact' as a reference class? I had it do one for ALLFED, and IMO it was pretty funny. Much funnier than 'METR Time Horizon 2.0' (although I'm not sure how hard this post was optimizing for humor), pretty comparable to Open Asteroid Impact.
If you've tried this yourself with Fable and still feel it comes up short, that would be a little surprising to me.
Happy to share the example if you'd like, IMO it had a good degree of joke substructure. IE, strongly funny individual lines, good references, relevant puns.
It's also very possible that the humor is of a variety that quickly saturates & you're already saturated on it. Similar to how most folks find 'Cards Against Humanity' pretty funny the first time you play it, and then it goes downhill extremely sharply.
"The graph lists Microsoft Excel 1.0, but the benchmarks must have been run on a modern version of Excel. The worksheet limit of Excel 1.0 was only 16,384 rows rather than 1,048,576, plus it lacked many of the functions of modern Excel, so it would presumably fail more tasks."
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Personally I thought this was a B- shitpost. If it was just a quick take of exactly the tldr text I would give it a B+. So IMO not bad, but I think I also read less LLM text than you so I'm probably not annoyed as quickly by it.
Thanks for putting this together! IMO it is very helpful, and encouraged me to look at IFP's proposal program.