To fight this disadvantage of innovating and having unpopular views, we should have a prize for people who do it and are then proven right.
You could try to do something like prediction markets about EA stuff, but more important than money, I think we should instrumentalize more the strong drive for social status that exists to foster specific things we'd like to see in EA.
This could be done by awarding symbolic physical prizes in EAGs, for example. If it were like rare yearly things and the prizes said things like "You were right" or "You were less wrong" or "Apology form to..." I can see them being cherished.
Analysing specific interventions externally and from inside the organisations which implement the intervention could lead to a better understanding of present and potential systemic change.
Strong agree. I think concrete examples of how systemic change thinking allowed/ increased the impact of an intervention would cause people to update on its importance.
Systemic change interventions should be mentioned as a category of things EA works on when introducing EA and categorizing EA work, outside the "countermeasure" interventions that are done to solve more specific problems (animal suffering, x-risks, global h&d, etc) and meta-work.
I think this would help clarify the idea that EA tries to analyze systemic change proposals and puts money and work on them sometimes.
They would include causes like improving institutional decision-making, happiness research, etc, and even new ideas like making AIs' character good.
I think there are a lot of people who want to do good, but just if they think they're fixing "the system". We can attract these people and give them answers to what we believe is better to do and incorporate their ideas if good.
In principle, they are of course great because of the positive feedback loops that systems could provide and that could make the impact of the interventions grow exponentially. Maybe the community could be thinking more about them.
Bettering social media platforms could be a top-tier systemic intervention.
My understanding is that EA puts most systemic change / solutions S-rated in terms of impact but F-rated in terms of neglectedness and tractability.
Is this the case for social media? Is it super hard and attempted to make the platforms, either internally or through policy, to not maximize for engagement? What about popularizing (and building if necessary) platforms that reward for what would be "useful" for people (or society at large)?
Because I think it's the most impactful systemic leverage I can think of. Unlike reforms to traditional media, entertainment, education and even politics, changes to them would reach and make at least small changes to most most of the demographics of most countries. And we need to add to this that they are not just replacing those sources of influence to individuals (except education I guess?), but also replacing the last bastion of influence: social circles.
People give 'The Day After' as an example of a movie that motivated nuclear disarmament and it would be good to have something similar for AIXR and I agree and I think there's something important to learn about that case.
That movie and 'Threads' are about the catastrophe *happening*, and about how absolutely terrible that would be. It forces you to put yourself there and that makes a strong emotional impact.
I think this type of intuition pump is the most powerful of them; people get the most motivated to change their lives when they think about their last moments and what they could regret then. Same thing happens when people think of their loved ones dying; they feel motivated to tell them that they love them or protect them.
The end of the world is basically both of those things at once.
Making people put themselves in that scenario is something AIXR comms hasn't tried much IMO. Only examples I remember are John Sherman once in his podcast and a book, and one tweet from Michael Trazzi.
When a lot of people (like me) say “#notallEAs” they are probably not saying it anecdotally to refer to themselves, as you are implying. They’re just pointing to the overlap. So I think that part of the post is misguided.
Even if the last question is misguided, if I, a supporter of PAI, were to consider myself an EA, why would that be? There are several possible reasons: I changed my career plans because of it; I work and have been working thanks to EA funding (by working at PauseAI lmao); I’ve been in the EA hotel for a bunch of months and plan to go back to it or the PauseAI Hotel (which is right next to it); I’ve attended conferences, received grants, and read a couple of books; I check out the forum here and there, agree with the philosophy, agree with the median EA in models of the world and ethics more than with any other median X; I plan to donate to EA orgs soon and want to keep engaging with the community, etc. The list seems pretty big in contrast to “but the core funders and leaders aren’t supporting the advocacy for an AI moratorium.”
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I also don’t think any of your arguments are good enough to justify disengaging with the EA movement if a specific person agrees with the philosophy and has only a handful of disagreements or problems with the EA median member/ movement. This applies to Rationalist spaces too, to a certain extent.
It’s not like there are better alternatives to it for people who are trying to figure out important things about the world and how to improve it. Even if you think a lot of them have a huge bias in some specific regard, you can still interact with them with that in mind, and you are still less likely to find other biases in them than in any other big community by a large margin. You’re still much more likely to find people who are very knowledgeable + kind + smart + dedicated to doing good in EA than in any other space that I know of. People who can change your mind, fund part of your work, or help you on your path to having a better impact in the world in other ways.
It’s really good to be mindful of the ways some groups have some control over the community and their potential biases and personal interests. But if the response to that is disengaging with the community instead of defending your disagreements here and there, then you’re giving them more power.
I don’t think this framing that either everyone/ a majority in EA needs to support X tactic/ cause/ org or they’re all against it is fair or useful at all. As others have mentioned, there’s a bunch of overlap between PauseAI and EA, of people, of donors, of beliefs… I don’t think most of the opinions in the post represent the opinions of the people who I’ve met at PauseAI.
I’m surprised that a post that overgeneralizes so much while making a bunch of ad hominems attacks is net positive votes-wise.
"Models more powerful than GPT-4" are potential AGIs. That's what all the big AI companies are trying to build. Capitalism will push for large context window agents that can replace the workforce. The further we are from that, the further we are from x-risks.
To fight this disadvantage of innovating and having unpopular views, we should have a prize for people who do it and are then proven right.
You could try to do something like prediction markets about EA stuff, but more important than money, I think we should instrumentalize more the strong drive for social status that exists to foster specific things we'd like to see in EA.
This could be done by awarding symbolic physical prizes in EAGs, for example. If it were like rare yearly things and the prizes said things like "You were right" or "You were less wrong" or "Apology form to..." I can see them being cherished.
Strong agree. I think concrete examples of how systemic change thinking allowed/ increased the impact of an intervention would cause people to update on its importance.
I haven't seen anyone ever writing in the forums with the general public as their target audience
Systemic change interventions should be mentioned as a category of things EA works on when introducing EA and categorizing EA work, outside the "countermeasure" interventions that are done to solve more specific problems (animal suffering, x-risks, global h&d, etc) and meta-work.
I think this would help clarify the idea that EA tries to analyze systemic change proposals and puts money and work on them sometimes.
They would include causes like improving institutional decision-making, happiness research, etc, and even new ideas like making AIs' character good.
I think there are a lot of people who want to do good, but just if they think they're fixing "the system". We can attract these people and give them answers to what we believe is better to do and incorporate their ideas if good.
In principle, they are of course great because of the positive feedback loops that systems could provide and that could make the impact of the interventions grow exponentially. Maybe the community could be thinking more about them.
Bettering social media platforms could be a top-tier systemic intervention.
My understanding is that EA puts most systemic change / solutions S-rated in terms of impact but F-rated in terms of neglectedness and tractability.
Is this the case for social media? Is it super hard and attempted to make the platforms, either internally or through policy, to not maximize for engagement? What about popularizing (and building if necessary) platforms that reward for what would be "useful" for people (or society at large)?
Because I think it's the most impactful systemic leverage I can think of. Unlike reforms to traditional media, entertainment, education and even politics, changes to them would reach and make at least small changes to most most of the demographics of most countries. And we need to add to this that they are not just replacing those sources of influence to individuals (except education I guess?), but also replacing the last bastion of influence: social circles.
People give 'The Day After' as an example of a movie that motivated nuclear disarmament and it would be good to have something similar for AIXR and I agree and I think there's something important to learn about that case.
That movie and 'Threads' are about the catastrophe *happening*, and about how absolutely terrible that would be. It forces you to put yourself there and that makes a strong emotional impact.
I think this type of intuition pump is the most powerful of them; people get the most motivated to change their lives when they think about their last moments and what they could regret then. Same thing happens when people think of their loved ones dying; they feel motivated to tell them that they love them or protect them.
The end of the world is basically both of those things at once.
Making people put themselves in that scenario is something AIXR comms hasn't tried much IMO. Only examples I remember are John Sherman once in his podcast and a book, and one tweet from Michael Trazzi.
When a lot of people (like me) say “#notallEAs” they are probably not saying it anecdotally to refer to themselves, as you are implying. They’re just pointing to the overlap. So I think that part of the post is misguided.
Even if the last question is misguided, if I, a supporter of PAI, were to consider myself an EA, why would that be?
There are several possible reasons: I changed my career plans because of it; I work and have been working thanks to EA funding (by working at PauseAI lmao); I’ve been in the EA hotel for a bunch of months and plan to go back to it or the PauseAI Hotel (which is right next to it); I’ve attended conferences, received grants, and read a couple of books; I check out the forum here and there, agree with the philosophy, agree with the median EA in models of the world and ethics more than with any other median X; I plan to donate to EA orgs soon and want to keep engaging with the community, etc.
The list seems pretty big in contrast to “but the core funders and leaders aren’t supporting the advocacy for an AI moratorium.”
—
I also don’t think any of your arguments are good enough to justify disengaging with the EA movement if a specific person agrees with the philosophy and has only a handful of disagreements or problems with the EA median member/ movement. This applies to Rationalist spaces too, to a certain extent.
It’s not like there are better alternatives to it for people who are trying to figure out important things about the world and how to improve it.
Even if you think a lot of them have a huge bias in some specific regard, you can still interact with them with that in mind, and you are still less likely to find other biases in them than in any other big community by a large margin. You’re still much more likely to find people who are very knowledgeable + kind + smart + dedicated to doing good in EA than in any other space that I know of. People who can change your mind, fund part of your work, or help you on your path to having a better impact in the world in other ways.
It’s really good to be mindful of the ways some groups have some control over the community and their potential biases and personal interests. But if the response to that is disengaging with the community instead of defending your disagreements here and there, then you’re giving them more power.
I don’t think this framing that either everyone/ a majority in EA needs to support X tactic/ cause/ org or they’re all against it is fair or useful at all. As others have mentioned, there’s a bunch of overlap between PauseAI and EA, of people, of donors, of beliefs… I don’t think most of the opinions in the post represent the opinions of the people who I’ve met at PauseAI.
I’m surprised that a post that overgeneralizes so much while making a bunch of ad hominems attacks is net positive votes-wise.
"Models more powerful than GPT-4" are potential AGIs. That's what all the big AI companies are trying to build. Capitalism will push for large context window agents that can replace the workforce. The further we are from that, the further we are from x-risks.
Can you give examples in politics where you think putting up a fight was worse than not doing anything?
And also, how common do you think that is?