Quick takes
I thought that today could be a good time to write up several ideas I think could be useful.
1. Evaluation Of How Well AI Can Convince Humans That AI is Broadly Incapable
One key measure of AI progress and risk is understanding how good AIs are at convincing humans of both true and false information. Among the most critical questions today is, "Are modern AI systems substantially important and powerful?"
I propose a novel benchmark to quantify an AI system's ability to convincingly argue that AI is weak—specifically, to persuade human evaluators that AI...
Here's an example of an article that uses the techniques mentioned in (4). It was generated by an AI with basically no prompting, showing the feasibility of such a method.
Grandma's Hearty Chicken Soup: A Family Tradition
This soul-warming recipe has been passed down through generations in my family. When winter winds howl or someone comes down with a cold, this is our go-to comfort food that never fails to bring smiles to faces around our dinner table.
A Story Behind The Soup
Before diving into the recipe, I want to share a quick family story. My grandmother ...
so im a fool because you betrayed my trust? im a fool for holding what you say with complete sincerity? i’m not the fool, you are
(credit: https://x.com/FilledwithUrine/status/1906905867296927896)
I think more people should consider leaving more (endorsed) short, nice comments on the Forum + LW when they like a post, especially for newer authors or when someone is posting something “brave” / a bit risky. It’s just so cheap to build this habit and I continue to think that sincere gratitude is underrated in ~all online spaces. I like that @Ben_West🔸 does this frequently :)
Do you think that it would be better to just add a helpful or heart emoji to the post instead? I used to leave the same sorts of comments as Ben. These got downvoted occasionally. I interpreted this pattern as being due to people not appreciating these sorts of 'thank you comments'. When emoji react were added, I therefore switched to emoji reacting, as I felt that this would achieve the same outcomes without creating the 'noise' of a 'thank you comment'. However, I could go back to leaving comments if that seems like a better approach.
SummaryBotV2 didn't seem to get more agree reacts than V1, so I'm shutting it down. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Here's an argument I made in 2018 during my philosophy studies:
A lot of animal welfare work is technically "long-termist" in the sense that it's not about helping already existing beings. Farmed chickens, shrimp, and pigs only live for a couple of months, farmed fish for a few years. People's work typically takes longer to impact animal welfare.
For most people, this is no reason to not work on animal welfare. It may be unclear whether creating new creatures with net-positive welfare is good, but only the most hardcore presentists would argue against preven...
You make a lot of good points - thank you for the elaborate response.
I do think you're being a little unfair and picking only the worst examples. Most people don't make millions working on AI safety, and not everything has backfired. AI x-risk is a common topic at AI companies, they've signed the CAIS statement that it should be a global priority, technical AI safety has a talent pipeline and is a small but increasingly credible field, to name a few. I don't think "this is a tricky field to make a robustly positive impact so as a careful person...
A lot of post-AGI predictions are more like 1920s predicting flying cars (technically feasible, maximally desirable if no other constraints, same thing as current system but better) instead of predicting EasyJet: crammed low-cost airlines (physical constraints imposing economic constraints, shaped by iterative regulation, different from current system)
The EA community has been welcoming in many ways, yet I've noticed a fair bit of standoffishness around some of my professional circles. [1]
Several factors likely contribute:
- Many successful thinkers often possess high disagreeableness, introversion, significant egos, and intense focus on their work
- Limited funding creates natural competition between people and groups, fostering zero-sum incentives
- These people are very similar to academics, which also share these same characteristics
I've noticed that around forecasting/EA, funding scarcity means one or...
I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q2.1 (the next six weeks).
Thanks for the suggestion! I reached out to them last week about their USAID content, and I expect to see something here from them soon. :)
If you see content you like from GiveWell in the future, I encourage you to to reach out to them and suggest that they crosspost it! You can also flag it to myself or Toby and we can reach out, though that may take longer.
For a crowd of people that often doesn't take time off because there is more work to do, or thinks of triage in terms of deaths averted, it can be nice to see people have fun and be silly. I'm mentally preparing myself to see a dozen or more April's fools posts with wordplay, teasing, and snark from various people.
If anybody wants to have serious discussions on the EA Forum, I recommend postponing for a few days.
Reflections on "Status Handcuffs" over one's career
(This was edited using Claude)
Having too much professional success early on can ironically restrict you later on. People typically are hesitant to go down in status when choosing their next job. This can easily mean that "staying in career limbo" can be higher-status than actually working. At least when you're in career limbo, you have a potential excuse.
This makes it difficult to change careers. It's very awkward to go from "manager of a small team" to "intern," but that can be necessary if you want to le...
A surprising number of EA researchers I know have highly accomplished parents. Many have family backgrounds (or have married into families) that are relatively affluent and scientific.
I believe the nonprofit world attracts people with financial security. While compensation is often modest, the work can offer significant prestige and personal fulfillment.
This probably comes with a bunch of implications.
But the most obvious implication to me, for people in this community, is to realize that it's very difficult to access how impressive specific individual EAs...
It seems like recently (say, the last 20 years) inequality has been rising. (Editing, from comments)
Right now, the top 0.1% of wealthy people in the world are holding on to a very large amount of capital.
(I think this is connected to the fact that certain kinds of inequality have increased in the last several years, but I realize now my specific crossed-out sentence above led to a specific argument about inequality measures that I don't think is very relevant to what I'm interested in here.)
On the whole, it seems like the wealthy donate incredibly little (...
Appreciate the post. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ This in-depth research article suggest the rich are getting richer faster, and suggest "Economic inequality, whether measured through the gaps in income or wealth between richer and poorer households, continues to widen." It matches with your intuition.
I wonder what could be done to really incentive the powerful/high income people to care about contributing more.
From Rachel Glennerster's old J-PAL blog post, a classic worth resharing: "charge for bednets or distribute them for free?"
...In 2000 there was an intense argument about whether malarial insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) should be given out for free. Some argued that charging for bednets would massively reduce take-up by the poor. Others argued that if people don’t pay for something, they don’t value it and are less likely use it. It was an evidence-free argument at the time.
Then, a series of studies in many countries testing many different preventative heal
Large numbers are abstract. I experimented with different ways to more closely feel these scales and discovered a personally effective approach using division and per-second counting.
The Against Malaria Foundation has protected 611,336,286 people with insecticide-treated nets.
- Divide by seconds in a week (604,800), giving approximately 1,000 people per second
- Count aloud: "1 one thousand, 2 one thousand, 3 one thousand..."
- Imagine doing it every second for a week
Let's try a larger number: Toby Ord calculates our "affectable universe" as having at least 10²¹ s...
Did 80,000 hours ever list global health as a top area to work on? If so, does anyone know when it changed?
Apologies if this is somewhere obvious, I didn't see anything in my quick scan of 80k posts/website
Listened to this episode of the Dwarkesh podcast yesterday - Dwarkesh mentioned that book reviews are a great way to produce useful content, even when you don't have something to say yourself. I'm mentioning this because I think the Forum could benefit from more book reviews (or paper reviews, or podcast reviews).
Is anyone reading a book they think the Forum audience would benefit from reading? Fancy writing a review of it?
I think a lot of great discussions are being had in private Google Docs. I also think that a lot of this discussion gets completely lost and/or forgotten.
"Quick Takes" can act as an alternative. Arguably, this is a good place to try out smaller ideas and/or get feedback on them. Any early discussion on quick takes is arguably more useful than similar discussion with Google Comments, as it would all be public.
Personally I've been enjoying my quick take use. I feel like I could get a good amount of discussion and interaction, for the level of work I'm ...