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Next month, two EAGx events are happening in new locations: Austin and Copenhagen! Applications for these events are closing soon: * Apply to EAGxAustin by this Sunday, March 31 * Apply to EAGxNordics by April 7 These conferences are primarily for people who are at least familiar with the core ideas of effective altruism and are interested in learning more about what to do with these ideas. We're particularly excited to welcome people working professionally in the EA space to connect with others nearby and provide mentorship to those new to the space. If you want to attend but are unsure about whether to apply, please err on the side of applying! If you've applied to attend an EA Global or EAGx event before, you can use the same application for either event.
Social Change Lab has two exciting opportunities for people passionate about social movements, animal advocacy and research to join our team! Director (Maternity Cover) We are looking for a strategic leader to join our team as interim Director. This role will be maternity cover for our current Director (me!) and will be a 12-month contract from July 2024. As Director, you would lead our small team in delivering cutting-edge research on the outcomes and strategies of the animal advocacy and climate movements and ensuring widespread communication of this work to key stakeholders. Research and Communications Officer We also have a potential opportunity for a Research and Communications Officer to join our team for 12 months. Please note this role is dependent on how hiring for our interim Director goes, as we will likely only hire one of these two roles. Please see our Careers page for the full details of both roles and how to apply. If you have any questions about either role, please reach out to Mabli at mabli@socialchangelab.org
(This is a draft I wrote in December 2021. I didn't finish+publish it then, in part because I was nervous it could be too spicy. At this point, with the discussion post-chatGPT, it seems far more boring, and someone recommended I post it somewhere.) Thoughts on the OpenAI Strategy OpenAI has one of the most audacious plans out there and I'm surprised at how little attention it's gotten. First, they say flat out that they're going for AGI. Then, when they raised money in 2019, they had a clause that says investors will be capped at getting 100x of their returns back. > "Economic returns for investors and employees are capped... Any excess returns go to OpenAI Nonprofit... Returns for our first round of investors are capped at 100x their investment (commensurate with the risks in front of us), and we expect this multiple to be lower for future rounds as we make further progress."[1] On Hacker News, one of their employees says, > "We believe that if we do create AGI, we'll create orders of magnitude more value than any existing company." [2] You can read more about this mission on the charter: > "We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power. > > Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit."[3] This is my [incredibly rough and speculative, based on the above posts] impression of the plan they are proposing: 1. Make AGI 2. Turn AGI into huge profits 3. Give 100x returns to investors 4. Dominate much (most?) of the economy, have all profits go to the OpenAI Nonprofit 5. Use AGI for "the benefit of all"? I'm really curious what step 5 is supposed to look like exactly. I’m also very curious, of course, what they expect step 4 to look like. Keep in mind that making AGI is a really big deal. If you're the one company that has an AGI, and if you have a significant lead over anyone else that does, the world is sort of your oyster.[4] If you have a massive lead, you could outwit legal systems, governments, militaries. I imagine that the 100x return cap means that the excess earnings would go to the hands of the nonprofit; which essentially means Sam Altman, senior leadership at OpenAI, and perhaps the board of directors (if legal authorities have any influence post-AGI). This would be a massive power gain for a small subset of people. If DeepMind makes AGI I assume the money would go to investors, which would mean it would be distributed to all of the Google shareholders. But if OpenAI makes AGI, the money will go to the leadership of OpenAI, on paper to fulfill the mission of OpenAI. On the plus side, I expect that this subset is much more like the people reading this post than most other AGI competitors would be. (The Chinese government, for example). I know some people at OpenAI, and my hunch is that the people there are very smart and pretty altruistic. It might well be about the best we could expect from a tech company. And, to be clear, it’s probably incredibly unlikely that OpenAI will actually create AGI, and even more unlikely they will do so with a decisive edge over competitors. But, I'm sort of surprised so few other people seem at least a bit concerned and curious about the proposal? My impression is that most press outlets haven't thought much at all about what AGI would actually mean, and most companies and governments just assume that OpenAI is dramatically overconfident in themselves.  ---------------------------------------- (Aside on the details of Step 5) I would love more information on Step 5, but I don’t blame OpenAI for not providing it. * Any precise description of how a nonprofit would spend “a large portion of the entire economy” would upset a bunch of powerful people. * Arguably, OpenAI doesn’t really need to figure out Step 5 unless their odds of actually having a decisive AGI advantage seem more plausible. * I assume it’s really hard to actually put together any reasonable plan now for Step 5.  My guess is that we really could use some great nonprofit and academic work to help outline what a positive and globally acceptable (wouldn’t upset any group too much if they were to understand it) Step 5 would look like. There’s been previous academic work on a “windfall clause”[5] (their 100x cap would basically count), having better work on Step 5 seems very obvious. [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19360709 [3] https://openai.com/charter/ [4] This was titled a “decisive strategic advantage” in the book Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom [5] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cullen-okeefe-the-windfall-clause-sharing-the-benefits-of-advanced-ai/ ---------------------------------------- Also, see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/17/openais-altman-ai-will-make-wealth-to-pay-all-adults-13500-a-year.html Artificial intelligence will create so much wealth that every adult in the United States could be paid $13,500 per year from its windfall as soon as 10 years from now. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/258148/20210318/openai-give-13-500-american-adult-anually-sam-altman-world.htm https://moores.samaltman.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/m7cpyn/openais_sam_altman_artificial_intelligence_will/
[GIF] A feature I'd love on the forum: while posts are read back to you, the part of the text that is being read is highlighted. This exists on Naturalreaders.com and would love to see it here (great for people who have wandering minds like me)  
A periodic reminder that you can just email politicians and then meet them (see screenshot below).

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I’m Emma from the Communications team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). I want to flag a few media items related to EA that have come out recently or will be coming out soon, given they’ll touch on topics—like FTX—that I expect will be of interest to Forum readers...

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If EA currently

  1. is in the middle of a Dark Forest (e.g. news outlets systematically following emergent consumer interest in criticizing EA and everything it stands for)
  2. perceives themselves as currently being in the middle of a dark forest or at risk of already being in a dark forest (which might be hard to evaluate e.g. due to the dynamics described in Social Dark Matter
  3. expects to enter a dark forest at some point in the near future (or the world around them to turn into a dark forest e.g. if China invades Taiwan)

then I imagine that it would be prett... (read more)

1
2ndRichter
3h
It’s in the image on the lower far right— “After Bankman-Fried, effective altruists won’t be fooled again, Opinion by Zach Robinson.”
1
trevor1
41m
Ah, my bad, I did a ctrl + f for "sam"! Glad that it was nothing.

Identity

In theory of mind, the question of how to define an "individual" is complicated. If you're not familiar with this area of philosophy, see Wait But Why's introduction.

I think most people in EA circles subscribe to the computational theory of mind, which means that...

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If you were being tortured, and I created a copy of you being tortured identically, this seems horrible (all else equal). I don't see why it would matter any less, let alone somewhat less or, as implied here, not at all.

And if a copy of you were to be tortured in mental states X in the future, then it wouldn't be bad for you to be tortured in mental states X now. Or, you have to consider only simultaneous states or within some bands of time or discount some other way.

2
MichaelStJules
1h
Why is 10,000 meaingfully distinct shrimp minds at birth a reasonable estimate? Why is 1 million possible external environmental inputs to those minds a reasonable estimate? Also, the argument doesn't take into account uncertainty about these numbers. If there's a 1% chance that nearly all shrimp experiences are meaningfully distinct in practice, then we can just multiply through by 1% as a lower bound.
3
det
4h
The concrete suggestions here seem pretty wild, but I think the possible tension between computationalism and shrimp welfare is interesting. I don't think it's crazy to conclude "given x% credence on computationalism (plus these moral implications), I should reduce my prioritization of shrimp welfare by nearly x%." That said, the moral implications are still quite wild. To paraphrase Parfit, "research in [ancient Egyptian shrimp-keeping practices] cannot be relevant to our decision whether to [donate to SWP today]." The Moral Law keeping a running tally of previously-done computations and giving you a freebie to do a bit of torture if it's already on the list sounds like a reductio. A hazy guess is that something like "respecting boundaries" is a missing component here? Maybe there is something wrong with messing around with a water computer that's instantiating a mind, because that mind has a right to control its own physical substrate. Seems hard to fit with utilitarianism though.
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If you've read Leif's WIRED article or Poverty is No Pond & have questions for him, I'd love to share them with him & in turn share his answers here.

Thank you, M, for sharing this with me & encouraging me to connect.

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I thought he spelled out his ETG criticism quite clearly in the article, so I’ll paraphrase what I imbibed here.

I think he would argue that, for the same person in the same job, donating X% of their money is a better thing. However, the ETG ethos that has hung around in the community promotes seeking out extremely high-paying jobs in order to donate even more money. These jobs often bring about more harms in turn (both in an absolute sense but possibly also to the point that ETG is net-negative, for example in the case of SBF), especially if we live in an economic system that rewards behaviour that profits off negative externalities.

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David Mathers
13h
Questions designed to trip him up or teach him a lesson are emotionally tempting, but don't seem very useful to me. Better to ask him how he thinks practical stuff can be improved, or what he thinks particularly big mistakes of GiveWell or other EA orgs were in terms of funding decisions, not broad philosophy (we've all heard standard objections to consequentialism before.) I suspect he won't have any good suggestions, on the latter, but you never know.
25Answer by Jonathan Paulson18h
I am a GiveWell donor because I want to spend money to improve the world. Should I do something else with that money instead? If so, what?
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You'll get a weekly email with the best posts from the past week. The Forum team selects the posts to feature based on personal preference and Forum popularity, and also adds some announcements and a classic post.

This post was cross-posted from the substack Thing of Things with the permission of the author.


In defense of trying things out

The Economist recently published an article, “How poor Kenyans became economists’ guinea pigs,” which critiques development economists’ use of randomized...

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4
Arepo
8h
The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics strikes again.
8
huw
7h
It's wild for a news organisation that routinely witnesses and reports on tragedies without intervening (as is standard journalistic practice, for good reason) to not recognise it when someone else does it.

I hadn't even thought of that! Yeah, that's some pretty impressive hypocrisy.

Share your information in this thread if you are looking for full-time, part-time, or limited project work in EA causes[1]!

We’d like to help people in EA find impactful work, so we’ve set up this thread, and another called Who's hiring? (we did this last in 2022[2]).

Consider...

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1Answer by Seth Ariel Green11h
TLDR: I write meta-analyses on a contract basis, e.g. here, here, and here. If you want to commission a meta-analysis, and get a co-authored paper to boot, I'd love to hear from you.  Skills & background: I am a nonresident fellow at the Kahneman-Treisman Center at Princeton and an affiliate at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford. Previously I worked at Glo Foundation, Riskified, and Code Ocean. Location/remote: Brooklyn. Resume/CV/LinkedIn: see here. Email/contact: setgree at gmail dot com Other notes: I'm reasonably subject-agnostic, though my expertise is in behavioral science research.  
Elizabeth commented on AIM Animal Initiatives 5h ago
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25

TLDR: If you're an EA-minded animal funder donating $200K/year or more, we'd love to connect with you about several exciting initiatives that AIM is launching over the next several months.

AIM (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) has a history of incubating and supporting...

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Most of these are just "people in space knew this wouldn't work". Could you share more specific criticisms? As Aidan said, the biggest successes come from projects no one else would do, so without more information that seems like a very weak criticism. 

4
Jason
13h
Do you think there are additional steps you could/should take to make this philosophy / these limitations clearer to would-be to those who come across your reports? I strongly support more transparency and more release of materials (including less polished work product), but I think it is essential that the would-be secondary user is well aware of the limitations. This could include (e.g.) noting the amount of time spent on the report, the intended audience and use case for the report, the amount of reliance upon which you intend that audience to place on the report, any additional research you expect that intended audience to take before relying on the report, and the presence of any significant issues / weaknesses that may be of particular concern to either the intended audience or anticipated secondary users. If you specifically do not intend to correct any errors discovered after a certain time (e.g., after the idea was used or removed from recommended options), it would probably be good to state that as well.
11
Jason
13h
To the extent this view is both valid and widely-held, and the reports are public, it should be possible to identify at least some specific examples without compromising your anonymity. While I understand various valid reasons why you might not want to do that, I don't think it is appropriate for us to update on a claim like this from a non-established anonymous account without some sort of support.

Summary

As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fate of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs presented a new type of catastrophic risk: what would happen to all the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials, and the scientists who worked on them? The nuclear weapons were distributed across what were about to become four separate countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine). Plus, the thousands of experts in those weapons, many of whom went unpaid for months at a time as the Soviet economy collapsed, could be easily tempted to sell information to, or even work directly for, states who were then seeking to build out WMD programs such as Iran and North Korea.

But, by the end of the decade, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had agreed to dismantle or return all their nuclear weapons to Russia[1] and joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons...

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Yanni Kyriacos posted a Quick Take 5h ago

I have heard rumours that an AI Safety documentary is being made. Separate to this, a good friend of mine is also seriously considering making one, but he isn't "in" AI Safety. If you know who this first group is and can put me in touch with them, it might be worth getting across each others plans.

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This is a linkpost for http://Less.Online/

A Festival of Writers Who are Wrong on the Internet[1]

LessOnline is a festival celebrating truth-seeking, optimization, and blogging. It's an opportunity to meet people you've only ever known by their LessWrong username or Substack handle.

We're running a rationalist conference!

The ticket cost is $400 minus your LW karma in cents.

Confirmed attendees include Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Katja Grace, and Alexander Wales.

Less.Online

Go through to Less.Online to learn about who's attending, venue, location, housing, relation to Manifest, and more.

We'll post more updates about this event over the coming weeks as it all comes together.

If LessOnline is an awesome rationalist event,
I desire to believe that LessOnline is an awesome rationalist event;

If LessOnline is not an awesome rationalist event,
I desire to believe that LessOnline is not an awesome rationalist event;

Let me not become attached

...
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