Tristan W
Bio
Participation6
I hope you've smiled today :)
I really want to experience and learn about as much of the world as I can, and pride myself on working to become a sort of modern day renaissance man, a bridge builder between very different people if you will. Some not-commonly-seen-in-the-same-person things: I've slaughtered pigs on my family farm and become a vegan, done HVAC (manual labor) work and academic research, been a member of both the Republican and Democratic clubs at my university.
Discovering EA has been one of the best things to happen to me in my life. I think I likely share something really important with all the people that consider themselves under this umbrella. EA can be a question, sure, but I hope more than that that EA can be a community, one that really works towards making the world a little better than it was.
Below are some random interests of mine. I'm happy to connect over any of them, and over anything EA, please feel free to book a time whenever is open on my calendly.
- Philosophy (anything Plato is up my alley, but also most interested in ethical and political texts)
- Psychology (not a big fan of psychotropic medication, also writing a paper on a interesting, niche brand of therapy called logotherapy that analyses its overlap with religion and thinking about how religion, specifically Judaism, could itself be considered a therapeutic practice)
- Music (Lastfm, Spotify, Rateyourmusic; have deep interests in all genres but especially electronic and indie, have been to Bonnaroo and have plans to attend more festivals)
- Politics (especially American)
- Drug Policy (current reading Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt)
- Gaming (mostly League these days, but shamefully still Fortnight and COD from time to time)
- Cooking (have been a head chef, have experience working with vegan food too and like to cook a lot)
- Photography (recently completed a project on community with older people (just the text), arguing that the way we treat the elderly in the US is fairly alarming)
- Meditation (specifically mindfulness, which I have both practiced and looked at in my RA work, which involved trying to set forth a categorization scheme for the meditative literature)
- Home (writing a book on different conceptions of it and how relationships intertwine, with a fairly long side endeavor into what forms of relationships should be open to us)
- Speaking Spanish (Voy a Espana por un ano a dar clases de ingles, porque quiero hablar en Espanol con fluidez)
- Traveling (have hit a fair bit of Europe and the US, as well as some random other places like Morocco)
- Reading (I think I currently have over 200 books to read, and have been struggling getting through fantasy recently finding myself continually pulled to non-fiction, largely due to EA reasoning I think)
How I can help others
I don't have domain expertise by any means, but I have thought a good bit about AI policy and next best steps that I'd be happy to share about (i.e. how bad is risk from AI misinformation really?). Beyond EA related things, I have deep knowledge in Philosophy, Psychology and Meditation, and can potentially help with questions generally related to these disciplines. I would say the best thing I can offer is a strong desire to dive deeper into EA, preferably with others who are also interested. I can also offer my experience with personal cause prioritization, and help others on that journey (as well as connect with those trying to find work).
Posts 24
Comments167
What sort of things did the AIS group do that gave the impression they were taking ideas more seriously? Was it more events surrounding taking action (e.g. Hackathons)? Members engaging more with the ideas in the time outside of the club meetings? More seriousness in reorienting their careers based on the ideas?
At a previous EAG, one talk was basically GovAI fellows summarizing their work, and I really enjoyed it. Given that there's tons of fellowships that are slated to start in the coming months, I wonder if there's a way to have them effectively communicate about their work on the forum? A lot of the content will be more focused on traditional AIS topics, but I expect some of the work to focus on topics more amenable to a post-AGI governance framing, and that work could be particularly encouraged.
A light touch version might just be reaching out to those running the fellowships and having them encourage fellows to post their final product (or some insights for their work if they're not working on some singular research piece) to the forum (and ideally having them include a high-quality executive summary). The medium touch would be having someone curate the projects, e.g. highlighting the 10 best from across the fellowships. The full version could take many different forms, but one might be having the authors then engage with one another's work, encouraging disagreement and public reasoning on why certain paths might be more promising.
Just as one random bit of advice, I'd say don't feel like you have to be sure you can make the 10% every year before you can take it. I took the pledge as a student, and have had some years where I've fallen behind, but will work to compensate for those in the years where I make more.
Ah okay yeah, the idea is that the success of the business itself is something they'll be apt to really care about, and on top of that there's a huge upside for positive impact if there's financial success because they can then deploy that towards further charitable ends.
Do you know off the top of your head how big a stake Dustin has in Anthropic? I think the amount would play a significant role here.
I make a similar point in my piece about the overfocus on research, arguing for increased focus on advocacy rather than protesting specifically.