JP Addison🔸

5739 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Cambridge, MA, USA
jpaddison.net

Bio

Head of the CEA Online Team, which runs this Forum.

A bit about me, to help you get to know me: Prior to CEA, I was a data engineer at an aerospace startup. I got into EA through reading the entire archive of Slate Star Codex in 2015. I found EA naturally compelling, and donated to AMF, then GFI, before settling on my current cause prioritization of meta-EA, with AI x-risk as my object-level preference. I try to have a wholehearted approach to morality, rather than thinking of it as an obligation or opportunity. You see my LessWrong profile here.

I love this Forum a bunch. I've been working on it for 5 years as of this writing, and founded the EA Forum 2.0. (Remember 1.0?) I have an intellectual belief in it as an impactful project, but also a deep love for it as an open platform where anyone can come participate in the project of effective altruism. We're open 24/7, anywhere there is an internet connection.

In my personal life, I hang out in the Boston EA and Gaymer communities, enjoy houseplants, table tennis, and playing coop games with my partner, who has more karma than me.

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Fair, I was probably too loose there. I believe specifically that posts which were copied from google docs[1] failed to wrap at the screen width. But I wasn't a much of a mobile reader at the time.

Also thank you! I didn't realize you were the one who added mobile support.

  1. ^

    IIRC, maybe it was some other cause that affected a subset of posts

I like the branching tree metaphor, and I like the attempt to framework these intro conversations — good post.

Thanks, Lizka. I think this is one of the best retirement presents I could have gotten.

Nice, I like this. Have you considered crossposting the full content? Usually those get a lot more people reading them, and more visibility, though do note the CC-BY restriction.

Good ideas, thank you!

JP Addison🔸
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We're issuing @NobodyInteresting a warning for the above comment. The comment does not meet the expectations for civility and engaging in good faith. I would not recommend a public warning for this comment on it's own (though I would downvote it for the above reasons, and recommend a discrete DM), but we have less tolerance for users who have not yet shown that they can engage productively.

I think this is a good and useful point. And one that's underappreciated in general.

I expect that "labs" usefully communicates to most of my interlocutors that I'm talking about the companies developing frontier models and not something like Palantir. There's a lot of hype-based incentive for companies to claim to be "AI companies", which creates confusion. (Indeed, I didn't know before I chose Palantir as an example, but of course they're marketing themselves as an AI company.)

—

That said, I agree with the consideration in your post. I don't claim which is the bigger consideration, only that they trade off.

Why don't you consider the reduction as part of of your donations? Unlike taking a direct-work job (where the counterfactual and non-monetary compensation questions are complicated and any estimate will involve a lot of guesswork)[1] your salary reduction is from a known very well-understood baseline.

I'm sympathetic overall to your desire for this not to become a norm in EA, due to the concerns you listed, but I would (and do) count it towards my donation target, and would generally advise others to do so.

  1. ^

    There's an argument in your case that your counterfactual salary is extremely clear. I would expect for most people taking a salary reduction, the answer is much harder. I'd estimate that half of people I've heard of leaving EtG jobs would have had a hard time being happy at that job any more, and many more people are like me where I haven't worked in industry for 7 years and so I would have to guess, which makes it a bit of a weird norm question if a peer of mine gets to claim a 50% reduction, but I have no idea if I could have made double my (reduced) salary in industry in a very distant counterfactual world.

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