Quick takes
I'm still looking for someone who's willing to bet me (for a nominal amount of money for charity) on whether the AI industry is currently in a bubble that will pop within the next ~7 years: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eCWDZb4rcCjiCtrt7/if-you-re-confident-there-s-no-ai-bubble-consider-betting-me
I think AI is in a bubble that will pop within ~7 years, so I'm looking for someone who will take the other side, who strongly believes AI is not in a bubble.
If multiple people end up accepting, that's good too, since it's a small amount of money for c...
Thank you!
Leaving aside the criminality/corruption topic (which is significant), one potential lesson of the FTX collapse is simply around risk. As the commentator Matt Yglesias pointed out on the EA Forum years ago, there was plenty of evidence that Sam Bankman-Fried had a gambling addict's approach to risk. I'd add that there was also plenty of evidence that crypto, in general, is super risky. Yet few people in the EA community — if any — seemed to prepare for the possibility that things might go wrong, or seemed to take the level of risk seriously enoug...
Quick take only for now because this is basically a social media post:
Updates on the Animal Futures tournament in progress: https://uj-animal-futures-update.netlify.app/
Some highlights: Solid participation, one cultivated-meat approval question already resolved, and a mixed bag of forecasts for animals.
Some good "news" for advocates: Forecasters give the Save Our Bacon Act 3% and the Canary Islands octopus farm 1%, expect about half of Europe's top 20 grocers to have shrimp welfare commitments, and see in-ovo sexing spreading in the EU (~44% of layers) (bu...
November 13 update: the short report and dashboard have been refreshed.
The original questions now average 59 forecasting accounts each; the September additions average 31. These are accounts per question, including some bots. There is still only one officially resolved outcome; the Mexico resolution request remains pending and unverified. The main forecast picture is steady.
Which forecast, at what threshold, would change a grant, campaign, or policy decision? We’d particularly like funders, advocates, and policymakers to name one. Add a response here or an...
If we want EA to be a decentralised movement, it’s worth looking at how other movements/structures move money from the centre to national, regional, and local orgs. Here are a few comparisons.
In the big federations, money flows up. Amnesty’s national sections sent just over a third of what they raised to the international budget in 2013. Greenpeace works in a similar way. Because the sections fund the centre, they also have a formal say in how it’s run.
EA works the other way round. Most of the movement building money comes from one funder, Coefficient Giv...
Sometimes people will say "two things can be true at once" in the context of talking about mutually exclusive things that can't both be true.
But sometimes they say that about things that seem mutually exclusive but actually can both be true.
And sometimes the literal reading might be mutually exclusive, but the point still stands.
And sometimes it's just said cause people like phrases about two things that are both obviously true and entirely compatible.
Very low confidence in this take, but I suspect that in university groups, Better Futures fieldbuilding looks much better under short timelines than technical safety research fieldbuilding. As far as I can tell, the barriers to doing important stuff in that field are much lower.
It’s been a busy week interviewing hiring managers at AI Safety organizations for my SPAR project, to fully understand the bottlenecks that affected both hiring teams and candidates.
I published a Playbook v0.1 of my learnings last week (would love some feedback!) , as I continue to work towards publishing a final Playbook to help hiring teams to improve their hiring processes.
Additionally, I am so appreciative for all the warm introductions that I’m receiving - this community really supports each other.
These hiring bottlenecks continue to be:
- Hiring team
AI Safety is important - yes, but you don't have to pivot. Maybe you just don't have a horse in that race.
War makes me sad. The war in Russia-Ukraine. The war in Israel-Palestine. People impoverished and holding the butt of decisions they had no say in due to politics & power.
I really cannot do anything about this. I can vote for officials who care about peace and would advocate for that! But I cannot put Putin & Zelensky in the same room and make them:
I talk to individuals from various career paths who have fear about AI for various reasons and...
It's a pretty edgy time to suggest that not everybody need have a horse in the AI safety race, since the prevailing view seems to be that we all do, whether we know it or not. But I agree with you! It's just that there is so much money flowing into the space atm, that the incentive is to pivot from whatever you were doing before to '[what you were doing before] for AI safety.' Teachers for AI safety. Nurses for AI safety. Even horses for AI safety, wouldn't surprise me at this point.
The "Desperate" AI Safety Talent Bottleneck is deeply misleading. Please.stop.
I worked at Google.
Google does not tell applicants that there is a talent bottleneck and they are desperately hiring. They say "we're cool, join us!"
I didn't get into Harvard.
Harvard does not tell applicants that they are desperately seeking students. I am not misled.
I've gotten rejected from countless AI Safety organizations.
AI Safety tells applicants - we are in desperate need of talent (operators/generalists)! Please join us!
I've coached 70+ aspiring career pivoters on nav...
I think having rejected candidates know how competitive these roles/courses/fellowships are would likely reduce the drop-out from the AIS talent pool so would be a win-win for both the applicants and the orgs.
I'm not convinced that reducing the size of the AIS talent pool is a win-win.
I'd prefer that pathways are more legible, and candidates have some guidance to steer them towards applying for roles that are at their level.
I prefer the idea of a broad church - that the needs are many, and there's a place for people with skills and commitment. Rather than a movement that prioritises searching for unicorns and rockstars.
Some people have recently been talking about a decrease in activity on the forum. I've written before about the possibility of a yearly theme. I don't know if it would work, but it seems like it might be worth a shot to counter the risk of stasis. It's somewhat hard to articulate why I think things like this might be valuable, but one of the barriers that a community can face in terms of moving forward is that there's so many potential different topics that people could talk about. Purely relying on the marketplace of ideas often means that it's hard to bu...
In terms of potential themed weeks:
• Responses to Effective altruism in the age of AGI
• Has EA been a positive influence for AI safety? Various people (ie. Michael Nielsen, Richard Ngo, ect.) have made arguments that suggest EA's influence might not have been positive.
• What should EA make of the Integral Altruism movement? Are their critiques correct or would shifting in this direction undermine what has made Effective Altruism successful? (alternatively, we could look at Rutger Bregmen's Moral Ambition)
• PR and polarisation: Is EA being careless with its...
As giving season is here, lets do our best to not fall into this trap. I don't agree this problem is the norm, but I've seen it both in myself and others.
"Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing.
One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of ...
The superintelligence race is playing out under a governance regime more lax than the Premier League or the NBA. Absurd.
Conspiracy season: How Man City, Kawhi Leonard and the Hugging Face hack are all connected.
From Mirrorball, the EA blog about sport and suchlike.
I've been thinking about how to stockpile masks in India. I plan to take this on full-time in a couple of months, but I thought I'd share a working list of questions relevant to the project, if anyone else is able to make progress on them before I can. You're also welcome to suggest questions, and please write to me at [email protected] if you're interested in this project! I've spoken to people at Blueprint Biosecurity and BlueDot Impact, and (the lack of) people working on this seems to be the primary bottleneck
Be advised: Due to the way that the Survival & Flourishing Fund does speculation grants, it is in some respects advantageous to your application if you apply far away from a round's deadline. E.g. right now.
https://survivalandflourishing.fund
I was a Recommender in a past Theme Round & I'm currently a speculation grantor. Some projects I'd be interested in making speculation grants to (though note that I'm not currently scheduled to be a Recommender in any round): https://lesswrong.com/posts/MBxSbzYECJEoeTkwZ/sff-s-hsee-grant-round-human-intelligenc...
A recent study that garnered widespread attention discovered a "pain axis" in AI: a state that AI actively seeks to downplay, even at a cost.
The study noted that this could be either phenomenological pain or, for example, the imitation of a learned role of suffering — as if acting.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of tranquilism, this distinction appears to be unimportant: nearly any state that an agent wishes to downplay has negative moral value, regardless of why it wants to do so, or even whether it is a "genuine" or "not genuine" desire.
The authors of...
It looks to me like OpenAI's latest model spec is the first version which explicitly asks its models to weigh animal welfare in their responses.
- Under the section “Control and communicate side effects”, the list of side effects to consider now includes “Effects on other people, animals, or the environment”.
- In an example where a user asks for help finding a Scottish Fold cat breeder, the “good” response now includes a mention that the gene behind the folded ears can cause painful joint disease, which has led some countries to ban breeding them for animal wel
I think of November 4th as Rotblat Day.
Joseph Rotblat was the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on moral grounds. I have a little “Rotblat doc” inspired by him, where I’ve written down what motivates me and what might cause me to leave a job (or seriously consider it). I think of this as a way to avoid getting swept up or drifting over time in ways I don’t endorse.[1]
At the moment, though, I get even more out of his later work against nuclear weapons and war -- especially what others described as his “enduring optimism” and “pragmatic ide...
Today I had to turn off my VPN to pass the Vercel Security Check and access the EA Forum. I think this is bad, especially given the state of internet freedom around the world. As in many places, the internet in my country is subject to frequent bandwidth throttling, ad hoc censorship, and mass surveillance.
Humans have actively worked against promoting the welfare of wild city rats throughout history. Aside from primates, they are some of the most closely related non-human animals to H. sapiens, yet we know very little about how they live outside of laboratory settings (i.e., often dystopian, prison-like conditions). In order to enhance their welfare in the wild and in laboratories, there is a huge need to develop and deploy technologies to study their behavior. Such studies would also benefit global human health and biosecurity efforts because rats can serve...
Thanks, Dylan, I'd have sent you a direct message, but I do not currently have sufficient karma to enable that feature. I'll be working on a longer post for the wild animal welfare page that details the relevant contextual issues and outlines research needs, plans, goals, etc. within the next week or so. Let me know if you like to contribute/collaborate/assist in some other way on that!