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This is a pretty good treatment. The shift from focusing on global poverty to focusing on keeping us from killing ourselves off is interesting and complex. (It
by jefftk 4y ago
This is a pretty good treatment. The shift from focusing on global poverty to focusing on keeping us from killing ourselves off is interesting and complex.
(It's also one I took a long time to come around to. For years I agreed in theory that trying to prevent civilizational catastrophe could be the most important thing to do, but didn't agree that there were tractable projects in this area. After deciding that there are, however, I quit my 'earning to give' job to go work on trying to catch future pandemics earlier.)
- ajross 4y ago> The shift from [conventional human welfare issues to whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy] is interesting and complex. It's... actually kind of not, which is why this is so upsetting. EA seemed to have a handle on a way to get libertarian-leaning, economically privileged, inward-focused men (and, yes, that's the demographic almost to a person) to think about ways to help people they'd never otherwise have given a passing thought to. Then roll the clock forward a few years and they're all back to sci-fi fandom arguments. This nonsense is exactly what you would have expected from these people. The notable part is that for one shining moment they pretended otherwise.
- shuckles 4y agoSincere question: how much of a benefit would it have been to the global poor if COVID never had an adverse impact? What if, as a side effect, other diseases were also mitigated? How are you going from a criticism of identity to the criticism of the aims? It’s very unclear to me.
- jefftk 4y agoThe global response to covid was far worse than it could have been, with millions dead, tens to hundreds of millions out of work, and billions having a pretty bad couple of years. Other pandemics have been much more deadly than covid and will likely be in the future. The speed of modern transportation, and the interconnectedness of the global economy are great overall, but do increase our exposure to pandemics and their consequences. This isn't 'whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy', this is something that has happened many times before.
- telotortium 4y agoIf you go back to the old 80,000 hours blog posts, they stress not getting into the most oversubscribed fields, given that the marginal contribution of a incoming do-gooder is likely to be minimal due to the great interest in those fields already attracting a lot of intelligent people. Before COVID, I might agree that EAs should get into pandemic prevention - Bill Gates was certainly concerned. After COVID, pandemic prevention is probably only second to climate change in the level of oversubscription. What is your alpha in pandemic prevention?
- jefftk 4y agoI might agree with you if pandemic prevention actually seemed oversubscribed. Instead, when I went looking for what needed doing I found lots of valuable potential projects that didn't have anyone working on them, and others that had been started but limited by hiring. One good list of projects: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/u5JesqQ3jdLENXBtB/concrete-biosecurity-projects-some-of-which-could-be-big-1 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/u5JesqQ3jdLENXBtB/... In any case, my 'alpha' was something like, I'm a software engineer and engineering manager willing to work in an academic environment well below market wages, in a situation where the organization needed someone with my skills.
- morelisp 4y agoReading this I'm dumbstuck by how much EA is just "the Chicago school, but for 'engineering' instead of 'economics'".
- jefftk 4y agoI'm not really sure what you mean by this? Which era of the Chicago School are you talking about?
- 11101010001100 4y agoPlease explain how AI risk is not oversubscribed.
- freddie_mercury 4y agoA bit saltier than I would put it but I mostly agree. Years ago when I read Peter Singer's book on effective altruism I emailed him asking why he named 20 men but only 5 women in the EA movement. He just said women were underrepresented in the movement but didn't really know why.
- arinlen 4y ago> A bit saltier than I would put it but I mostly agree. Years ago when I read Peter Singer's book on effective altruism I emailed him asking why he named 20 men but only 5 women in the EA movement. He just said women were underrepresented in the movement but didn't really know why. Where you trying to add a point? Your comment reads like a non-sequiturs over gender inequality that goes nowhere fast, to the point that it reads like something generated by a machine learning model in training.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoIf you want more context as to demographics, one of the main EA orgs does a survey regularly. I can't find a 2021 one, but here is one from 2020 which is probably pretty representative https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/...
- scarmig 4y ago> whackjob sci-fi apocalyptimancy... libertarian-leaning, economically privileged, inward-focused men (and, yes, that's the demographic almost to a person)... they'd never otherwise have given a passing thought to... sci-fi fandom arguments... for one shining moment they pretended otherwise. Why write angry rants about EA people? There's the broader 99%+ of people who don't donate to whatever you deem more worthy. In all likelihood, you're in that 99%--there's probably income you could spare to give.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoCan you expand on why you think it's nonsense? You seem to have very strong opinions on this and I'm just wondering why.
- ajross 4y agoIt's exasperation more than anything else. Again, these are people who came so close to thinking about genuine issues of welfare, put their money behind their blog posts, and then... walked back into the introvert weeds of worrying about "stuff that looks more fun to worry about". Now all those billions of dollars are going to do, what, fund speculative sci-fi about AI? I mean, I loved The Terminator too, but this isn't what we were promised.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoI mean, I also agree that I wish more people cared about global development but I'm pretty sure tremendous amounts of funding still go to those areas from the EA community (e.g. Givewell now directs hundreds of millions in funding that almost all go to more traditional development). I can't find the post but there was one recently breaking this down on the EA forum.
- kalkin 4y agoHow seriously have you thought about the arguments for AI risk being more than speculative scifi? My take as recently as a year ago was pretty much exactly yours, but I've had time to read and think a bit more recently and I am much less sanguine than I was.
- kalkin 4y agoA bit more specifically, "misalignment" is super common in existing ML, and models seem to be gaining capability (and knocking down targets that until recently seemed well beyond our reach) much more rapidly than we are gaining the ability to understand their internals or make guarantees of any kind about their worst-case or out-of-distribution behavior.
- 4y ago
- Joeboy 4y agoLast time I looked at what EAs actually donate to, a lot more of it looks like "conventional human welfare issues" than you might think. I guess sci-fi thought experiments are more accessible and fun than deworming or whatever, so they occupy a disproportionate amount of conversation.
- morelisp 4y agoIt's also the only part the rich loud ones are focused on. Musk has an awful to tweet about AGI risk and not so much deworming (or, a more poignant example, the Flint water crisis; or, a more direct example, Tesla's sales fraud leading to non-G AIs killing people). For the record, I don't think people like Musk, or, say, Andreesen or Altman are EAs themselves. But they are the kings picking court jesters like Yudkowsky who then have the resources to (re)define the movement.
- rbanffy 4y agoI believe the first big risk of AI is job loss due to automation and the consequences of that for economies. There is a point we run out of bullshit jobs. Also capitalism’s cyclic nature is getting more turbulent as cycles become shorter and start interfering with previous and future ones.
- jefftk 4y agoI don't think Yudkowsky's influence in EA has much to do with Musk or Altman. His LessWrong blogging was already pretty widely read within EA ten years ago. (I would also say his influence has decreased a lot over that time, as he is writing much less now, and there are a lot of other voices on AI risk.)
- rbanffy 4y ago> more accessible and fun than deworming It makes sense. We know how to deworm. That is an execution problem. The ones I find more interesting are in planning stages, such as how to we fix or supersede capitalism, how do we mitigate climate change, how do we persuade people in power those things need to be done before the problem is so big it becomes intractable.
- smk_ 4y agoSmart people tend to be libertarian-leaning. It is a most natural predisposition. Most people living in the west are economically privileged. Ajross, you don't seem to really believe what you are saying. Sci-fi arguments? Really? Since when is the risk from nuclear war, pandemics or artificial intelligence constrained to sci-fi? The Spanish flu, Black Death and the Plague. The Cold War. These events should all inform our way of thinking about risk.
- rbanffy 4y ago> Smart people tend to be libertarian-leaning. The smartest people I know are communists, but I imagine the end state of both is pretty similar - everybody enjoying a surplus economy where work is optional and done for the betterment of ourselves and others.
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- concordDance 4y agoJust because something that superficially resembles a topic (AI risk) was talked about in fiction does not mean it isn't worth worrying about. I don't know your specific reasons for thinking it nonesense, but as someone who has read up on AI risk and consumes a lot of sci-fi the resemblance is very superficial.
- imtringued 4y agoWhat if global poverty was easy to solve and world peace could be achieved within three decades? What if it required no change in human behaviour, no micromanagement of hundreds of thousands of problems, no need for charity nor donations, only two minor reforms that are internationally competitive?
- Ygg2 4y agoNo way it (world peace) can be that easy to solve. Different people, growing in different environments will want different things. As long as our wishes clash, it will cause fighting along the way. Also poverty is kinda a feature. You need worst performing people to be put in negative display.
- jefftk 4y agoIf that were true, I would consider that pretty good news, and publicizing those two minor reforms would be really valuable. Do you have reforms in mind, or is this intended as a hypothetical?
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoCarbon tax and UBI?
- bsenftner 4y agoSounds like the platform for a great grift, a con to make one rich while the world dies. Obvious but hated fact: the human race is nowhere as mature as it thinks it is, and until such time that the adult man-babies and woman-babies are identified, called out, and removed from positions of power we are helpless to their immature wealth and power driven stupid fantasies. The immature rule the world, even if they don't sit in positions of power, because the immature demonstrate their attitudes so loudly they overwhelm all public discourse.
- saulpw 4y agoEven leaving out the natural immaturity of the vast majority of humanity, this is also an unfortunate consequence of the bottom-heavy population pyramid. With constant population growth as we've experienced for the past 100s/1000s of years, there are literally always more young people than old people.