I sold all my NVIDIA stock, since their moat looks weak to me:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rBx9RmJdBJgHkjL4j/will-openai-s-o3-reduce-nvidia-s-moat

I think your reasoning is generally correct. Another argument: If you believe things look sufficiently grim under short timelines, maybe you should invest under the assumption that a recession, or something else, will pop the AI bubble and gives us longer timelines.

"AI bad" gets misgeneralized into skepticism about current and future AI capabilities.

This point is interesting. I almost wonder if it's better to not argue against this. If we argue against it, maybe the left gets attached to this position, and becomes slower to update even as unemployment increases.

One could also reason that the left can be counted on to be anti-AI going forwards, and the objective for EA should be to foster anti-AI forces on the right. The H1B split shows that tech leaders don't have ideological control over the right. Sam Altman and Elon Musk don't get along either. In fact, Sam Altman doesn't seem to have a strong popular constituency in either party at this point.

Maybe once Sam says it, Dario kinda has to say it to stay competitive for funding?

I guess my view is that low-effort sharing of new ideas is not rewarded/engaged with, and is undersupplied relative to what's optimal. When I have a new idea that seems like it could have a big impact, and I quickly post it on the EA Forum, it's much more out of a sense of duty than a sense of excitement.

I see the "Let’s think about slowing down AI" post as support for my position. We shouldn't have required a 45-minute read by a senior community member before slowing down AI was taken seriously as a possibility. In a world where Katja is too busy to make that effort-post, I think there's a chance that EA takes far longer to consider a pivot.

I think high-effort contributions for new ideas aren't necessarily optimal. I put a fair amount of effort into this post, which looks like a big waste of time in retrospect. In this case, Linch explicitly told me I put too much effort in, and his short comment to that effect got more upvotes than my effort-comment.

The upvote-snowballing mechanism means a small difference in the rate of vote-gaining creates a large difference in attention. It seems like the top 10% of vote-gainers tend to be high-effort, non-controversial stuff, which ideally has some sort of prestige affiliation ("10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious"). So we see a lot of that stuff on the Forum. People copy what's upvoted, and the Forum ends up rather bland.

The "10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious"-type posts tend to be ones where the author tries to anticipate and respond to every possible criticism or deficiency. An author can't necessarily predict in advance which axes readers will want more effort on. If you try to predict and address them all, I suspect that contributes to bland writing. It'd be better to address those issues through dialogue than monologue.

Maybe there is a good place for low-effort sharing of new EA ideas elsewhere, and I'm not aware of it. But there does seem to be a suspicious lack of new ideas on the Forum -- especially given how fast the world is changing, which should naturally produce new ideas for how to do good. I think lack of new ideas on the Forum is evidence that there's no good place for low-effort sharing of new EA ideas elsewhere. If EA was good at low-effort sharing of new ideas elsewhere, I would expect some of those ideas to trickle into high-effort "new idea" posts on the Forum, and I'm largely not seeing those posts.

Compare this comment with this comment. The second comment was posted about a week later. I'm glad the second comment was posted, and I'm glad the suggestion was packaged in a way that made it appealing to Forum users, but I do notice that the packaging seemed to matter a fair amount ("rigor" flavoring). I don't think overconfidence was a major factor here.

I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they don't generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized. And then I wrote the grandparent comment, where I got downvoted/disagreevoted for asking if there's a better place to post offbeat ideas, which is even more demoralizing. Like, what do you guys want from me?

I notice your framing

I would guess that weird EA ideas that were appropriately caveated would do reasonably well here

basically acknowledges that this is a hypothetical, and new ideas mostly don't get posted here. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of why! Again, maybe this is an OK or even desirable state of affairs. But I wish we could at least acknowledge it.

If it's literally a waste product, I don't see why that should matter. The costs should just be for processing and transportation, which would also apply to ordinary milk? Yet in my area whey protein powder costs about 30x as much as milk per unit weight.

It seems that users on this forum want to upvote content which is rigorous and true. So the way to gain karma is to write 10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious, as opposed to writing half a page introducing a thesis that is revolutionary.

That's not necessarily a problem. I feel like the EA Forum wants to be the end of an idea pipeline, the last step where ideas get final scrutiny, and are stamped for epistemic rigor and community consensus. Yet the beginning and middle of the pipeline sort of don't seem to exist? At least not on the public internet.

Anyway, let me know if there's a better place to post my weird EA ideas. My general sense is that weird ideas are not super welcome here.

If what you're saying is true, why is whey protein so expensive?

Do you know of anything which directly addresses the argument I made here?

My vague impression is that the optimism I see is based on outside-view type forecasts, and people have mostly not taken inside views. I haven't thought much about bird flu recently though.