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Summary
- Many views, including even some person-affecting views, endorse the repugnant conclusion (and very repugnant conclusion) when set up as a choice between three options, with a benign addition option.
- Many consequentialist(-ish) views, including many person-affecting
Summary
- In this post, I hope to inspire other Effective Altruists to focus more on donation and commiserate with those who have been disappointed in their ability to get an altruistic job.
- First, I argue that the impact of having a job that helps others is complicated. In
Thanks for writing this, Elijah. I agree that it’s really difficult to get an “EA job” (it took me five years). I wish this felt more normalized, and that there was better scoped advice on what EA jobseekers should do. I wrote about this last year and included a section on ways to contribute directly to EA projects even without an EA job. I'd also recommend Aaron Gertler's post on recovering from EA job rejection, probably my favorite ever EA Forum post.
On Aaron Bergman's comment about finding a higher paying role, certain tipped positions can be surprisin...
People around me are very interested in AI taking over the world, so a big question is under what circumstances a system might be able to do that—what kind of capabilities could elevate an entity above the melange of inter-agent conflict and into solipsistic hegemony?
We theorize about future AI systems hiding their motives until they are in a position to take over the world, so they don’t get noticed and shut down beforehand.
But humans and their institutions aren’t very fixed. They might (arguably) have the same deep human values over time and space. But surface-level, sometimes they like little moustaches and the opera and delicate etiquette and sometimes they like ecstatic rock’n’roll re-negotiations of social reality. Sometimes they want big communal houses with their extended kin, and sometimes quiet condos. Eleven children or cushions that look like cats. The same person born in different...
This was originally posted on Nathaniel's and Nuno's substacks (Pending Survival and Forecasting Newsletter, respectively). Subscribe here and here!
Discussion is also occurring on LessWrong here (couldn't link the posts properly for technical reasons).
Introduction
When the...
I think the main reason that EA focuses relatively little effort on climate change is that so much money is going to it from outside of EA. So in order to be cost effective, you have to find very leveraged interventions, such as targeting policy, or addressing extreme versions of climate change, particularly resilience, e.g. ALLFED (disclosure, I'm a co-founder).
Carl Robichaud mentioned in his EAGxVirtual talk that the nuclear risk space is funding constrained. Dylan Matthews has also written about this at Vox.
There also seems to be a consensus that nuclear risk is higher than it has been in the recent past - with the Russia/Ukraine...
I would suggest the Back from the Brink campaign in the United States (www.preventnuclearwar.org) or the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (https://www.icanw.org/)
Both organizations are bringing a grassroots advocacy approach to push for multilateral efforts to prevent nuclear war. Grassroots advocacy is the most critically underfunded sector in the nuclear security space.
I am not confident that another FTX level crisis is less likely to happen, other than that we might all say "oh this feels a bit like FTX".
Changes:
- Board swaps. Yeah maybe good, though many of the people who left were very experienced. And it's not clear whether there are
- Little discussion of why or how the affiliation with SBF happened despite many well connected EAs having a low opinion of him
- Little discussion of what led us to ignore the base rate of scamminess in crypto and how we'll avoid that in future
For both of these comments, I want a more explicit sense of what the alternative was. Many well-connected EAs had a low opinion of Sam. Some had a high opinion. Should we have stopped the high-opinion ones from affiliating with him? By what means? Equally, suppose he finds skepticism from (say) Will et al, instead of a warm welcome. He probably still starts the FTX future fund, and probably still tries to make a bunch of people regranters. He probably still talks up EA in public. What would it have taken to prevent any of the resultant harms?
Likewise, what does not ignoring the base rate of scamminess in crypto actually look like? Refusing to take any money made through crypto? Should we be shunning e.g. Vitalik Buterin now, or any of the community donors who made money speculating?
For both of these comments, I want a more explicit sense of what the alternative was.
Not a complete answer, but I would have expected communication and advice for FTXFF grantees to have been different. From many well connected EAs having a low opinion of him, we can imagine that grantees might have been urged to properly set up corporations, not count their chickens before they hatched, properly document everything and assume a lower-trust environment more generally, etc. From not ignoring the base rate of scamminess in crypto, you'd expect to have seen stronger and more developed contingency planning (remembering that crypto firms can and do collapse in the wake of scams not of their own doing!), more decisions to build more organizational reserves rather than immediately ramping up spending, etc.
It's likely that no single answer is "the" sole answer. For instance, it's likely that people believed they could assume that trusted insiders were more significantly more ethical than the average person. The insider-trusting bias has bitten any number of organizations and movements (e.g., churches, the Boy Scouts). However, it seems clear from Will's recent podcast that the downsides of being linked to crypto were appreciated at some level. It would take a lot for me to be convinced that all that $$ wasn't a major factor.
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
For anyone wondering about the definition of macrostrategy, the EA forum defines it as follows:
...Macrostrategy is the study of how present-day actions may influence the long-term future of humanity.[1]
Macrostrategy as a field of research was pioneered by Nick Bostrom, and it is a core focus area of the Future of Humanity Institute.[2] Some authors distinguish between "foundational" and "applied" global priorities research.[3] On this distinction, macrostrategy may be regarded as closely related to the former. It is concerned with the assessment of
Super broad question, I know.
I've been going down the rabbit hole of critical psychiatry lately and I'm finding it fascinating. Parts of it seem convincing and anecdotally align with my (admittedly extensive) interactions with the psychiatric system. But the evidence in...
G'day Marissa! I'm admittedly not the best-versed in psychiatry specifically, since I've focused more on psychotherapy in the past. My general vibe from reading & research I've done is that (for pharmacotherapy only, can't speak to crisis care):
- Pharmacotherapy is robustly effective in the short-term with minimal deterioration
- It's no more effective than therapy, and is likely worse than therapy in the long-term
- Pharmacology & psychotherapy combined is better than both individually
- People might adapt to it, requiring higher and higher doses
- We don
At Giving What We Can, we're hoping to speak to people who are interested in taking the Giving What We Can Pledge at some point, but haven't yet.
We're conducting 45 min calls to understand your journey a bit more, and we'll donate $50 to a charity of your choice on our ...
Oh I thought I responded to this already!
I'd like to say that people often have very good reasons for not pledging, that are sometimes visible to us, and other times not - and no one should feel bad for making the right choice for themselves!
I do of course think many more people in our community could take the GWWC Pledge, but I wouldn't want people to do that at the expense of them feeling comfortable with making that commitment.
We should respect other people's journeys, lifestyles and values in our pursuits to do good.
And thanks Lizka for sharing your previous post in this thread too! Appreciate you sharing your perspective!
We should separate whether the view is well-motivated from whether it's compatible with "ethics being about affecting persons". It's based only on comparisons between counterparts, never between existence and nonexistence. That seems compatible with "ethics being about affecting persons".
We should also separate plausibility from whether it would follow on stricter interpretations of "ethics being about affecting persons". An even stricter interpretation would also tell us to give less weight to or ignore nonidentity differences using essentially the same a... (read more)