What do you use as a guide to “common sense” or “everyday ethics”?
I think people in EA often recommend against using EA to guide your everyday decision-making. I think the standard advice is “don’t sweat the small stuff” and apply EA thinking to big life decisions like your career choice or annual donations. EA doesn’t have much to say and isn’t a great guide to think about how you behave with your friends and family or in your community.
I’m curious, as a group of people who take ethics seriously, are there other frameworks or points of reference that you use to help you make decisions in your personal life?
I feel like “stoicism” is a common one and I’ve enjoyed learning about this. I suspect religion is another common answer for others. Are there others?
I feel like I have a much better sense of what the current approaches to alignment are, what people are working on and how underdeveloped the field is. In general, it’s been a while since I’ve spent time studying anything so it felt fun just to dedicate time to learning. It also felt empowering to take a field that I’ve heard a lot about at a high level and make it clearer in my mind.
I think doing the Week 0 readings are an easy win for anyone who wants to demystify some of what is going on in ML systems, which I think should be interesting to anyone, even if you’re not interested in alignment.
I became much more motivated to work on making AI go well over the period of the course, I think mainly because it made the problem more concrete but likely just spending more time thinking about it. That said, it’s hard to disentangle this increased motivation from recent events and other factors.
People often ask me how to get started with user interviews. Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez is unusually practical and helpful (particularly chapters 4-6).
Worth considering the Blue Dot course on AI Governance https://course.aisafetyfundamentals.com/governance