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This is an anonymous account (Ávila is not a real person). I am posting on this account to avoid potentially negative effects on my future job prospects.
SUMMARY:
- I've been rejected from 18 jobs or internships, 12 of which are "in EA."
- I briefly spell out my background information
Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI’s closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow.
...Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision. This document is the reverse
It wasn't carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/wrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people I'd worked with ('parasitic egregore/siphon money').
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic e...
Disclaimer: While I criticize several EA critics in this article, I am myself on the EA-skeptical side of things (especially on AI risk).
Introduction
I am a proud critic of effective altruism, and in particular a critic of AI existential risk, but I have to admit that a ...
I must admit I did not have time to re-read your post carefully, but thought it worth pointing out that after reading it I am left a bit confused by the multiple "culture wars" references. Could you please expand on this a bit?
I guess my confusion is that "culture wars" seem to be "attention grabbing" words you used in the beginning of your post, but I feel that after reading the full post that they were not fully addressed. I would be keen to understand if you only meant these to be rhetorical devices to make the reading more captivating, or if you have o...
Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1.
Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 Mana to 1 USD:1000 Mana on May 1. Thankfully, the 10k USD/month charity cap will not be in place until then.
I think it would be good if lots of EAs answered this twitter poll, so we could get a better sense for the communities views on the topic of Enlightenment / Awakening: https://twitter.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1782525718586413085?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Crosspost of my blog.
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger is worth that kind of cruelty. However, not all animals are the same. Contra Napoleon in Animal Farm, all animals are not equal.
Cows are big. The average person eats 2400 chickens but only 11 cows in their life. That’s mostly because chickens are so many times smaller than cows, so you can only get so many chicken sandwiches out of a single chicken. But how much worse is chicken than cow?
Brian Tomasik devised a helpful suffering calculator chart. It has various columns—one for how sentient you think the animals are, compared to humans, one for how long the animals lives, etc. You can change the numbers around if you...
How much weight should we give the long-term future, given that nobody may be around to experience it? Both economists and philosophers see extinction risk as a rationale for discounting future costs and benefits. David Thorstad has recently claimed it poses a major challenge...
Quote from VC Josh Wolfe:
Biology. We will see an AWS moment where instead of you having to be a biotech firm that opens your own wet lab or moves into Alexandria Real Estate, which is you know, specializes in hosting biotech companies, in in all these different regions approximate to academic research centers. You will be able to just take your experiment and upload it to the cloud where there are cloud-based robotic labs. We funded some of these. There's one company called Stratios.
There's a ton that are gonna come on wave, and this is exciting because you can be a scientist on the beach in the Bahamas, pull up your iPad, run an experiment. The robots are performing 90% of the activity of Pouring something from a beaker into another, running a centrifuge, and then the data that comes off of that.
And this is the really cool part. Then the robot and the machines will actually say to you, “Hey, do you want to run this experiment but change these 4 parameters or these variables?” And you just click a button “yes” as though it's reverse prompting you, and then you run another experiment. So the implication here is that the boost in productivity for science, for generation of truth, of new information, of new knowledge, That to me is the most exciting thing. And the companies that capture that, forget about the societal dividend, I think are gonna make a lot of money.
Paul Graham had a nice take on this:
I think "actually really want to apply" is not enough of a correlation to base decisions on. The fact is that even qualified+motivated applicants would need to apply to a dozen+ places, and often EA application questions require a lot of thought anyway.
To give an example, lots of EAs are from top unis, and I'm pretty sure the meta-strategy for applying to selective uni... (read more)