Tanaka Toshiko and Ogawa Tadayoshi, both Hibakusha (survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings) spoke at the closing ceremony for EAG London this year, although I couldn't find any explicit link between themselves and Nihon Hidankyo.

Have you considered talking/working with Sage on this? It sounds like something that would fit well with the other tools on https://www.quantifiedintuitions.org/

I'd be interested to see you weigh the pros and cons of making it easier to contribute - you don't explicitly say it in the post, but you imply that this would be a good thing by default. The forum is the way it is for a reason, and there are mechanisms put in place both by the forum team and by the community in order to try to keep the quality of the discussion high. 

For example, I would argue that having a high bar for posting isn't a bad thing, and the sliding-scale karma system that helps regulate that is, in extension, valuable. If writing a full post of sufficient quality is time consuming, then there is the quick takes section. 

The Alignment Forum has a significantly higher barrier to entry than this one does, but I think that is fairly universally regarded as an important factor in facilitating a certain kind of discussion either. I can see a lot of value in the EA forum trying to maintain it's current norms in order to mean it still has the potential for productive discussion between people who are sufficiently well-researched. I think meaningfully lowering the bar for participation would mean that the forum would lose some of its ability to generate anything especially novel or useful to the community and I think the quote you included:

For an internet forum it's pretty good. But it's still an internet forum. Not many good discussions happen on the internet.

Somewhat points to that too. I think there should be other forums for people less familiar with EA to participate in discussions, and I think whether or not those currently exist is an interesting discussion.

Having said all that, I do wonder if that leaves the current forum community particularly vulnerable to groupthink. I'm not really sure what the solution to that is though.

My biggest takeaway from EA so far has been that the difference in expected moral value between the consensus choice and its alternative(s) can be vastly larger than I had previously thought.

I used to think that "common sense" would get me far when it came to moral choices. I even thought that the difference in expected moral value between the "common sense" choice and any alternatives was negligible, so much so that I made a deliberate decision not to invest time into thinking about my own values or ethics. 

EA radically changed my opinion, and now I hold the view that the consensus view is frequently wrong, even when the stakes are high, and that is possible to make dramatically better moral decisions by approaching them with rationality, and a better-informed ethical framework.

Sometimes I come across people who are familiar with EA ideas but don't particularly engage with them or the community. I often feel surprised, and I think the above is a big part of why. Perhaps more emphasis could be placed on this expected moral value gap in EA outreach?

Thanks for the feedback - it has indeed been a long time since I did high school statistics!

I specified that the numbers I gave were "approximations to prove my point" is because I know that I do not have a technical statistical model in my head, and I didn't want to pretend that was the case. Given this is a non-technical, shortform post, I thought it was clear what I meant - apologies if that wasn't so.

This is a good idea, thanks for the suggestion! I've never really tried any of the CFAR stuff but this seems like a good place to start. 

I'll give it a go over the weekend and if I'm struggling then I'll let you know and we can do it together :)

It means something like "my 90% confidence interval is 80% - 95%, with 90% as the mean".

Thanks for the suggestion! I have actually spent quite a lot of time thinking about this - I had my 80k call last April and this was their advice. I've hesitated against doing this for a number of reasons:
 

• I'm worried that even if I do upskill in ML, I won't be a good enough software engineer to land a research engineering position, so part of me wants to improve as a SWE first
• At the moment I'm very busy and a marginal hour of my time is very valuable, upskilling in ML is likely 200-500 hours, at the moment I would struggle to commit to even 5 hours per week
• I don't know whether I would enjoy ML, whereas I know I somewhat enjoy at least some parts of the SWE work I currently do
• Learning ML potentially narrows my career options vs learning broader skills, so it's hard to hedge
• My impression is that there are a lot of people trying to do this right now, and it's not clear to me that doing so would be my comparative advantage. Perhaps carving out a different niche would be more valuable in the future.

There are probably good rebuttals to at least some of these points, and I think that is adding to my confusion. My intuition is to keep doing what I'm currently doing, rather than go try and learn ML, but maybe my intuition here is bad.

Edit: writing this comment made me realise that I ought to write a proper doc with the pros/cons of learning ML and get feedback on it if necessary. Thanks for helping pull this useful thought out of my brain :)

I suffer strongly from the following, and I suspect many EAs do too (all numbers are to approximations to illustrate my point):

1. I think that AGI is coming within the next 50 years, 90% probability, with medium confidence
2. I think that there is a ~10% chance that development of AGI leads to catastrophic outcomes for humanity, with very low confidence
3. I think there is a ~50% chance that development of AGI leads to massive amounts of flourishing for humanity, with very low confidence
4. Increasing my confidence in points 2 & 3 seems very difficult and time consuming, as the questions at hand are exceptionally complex, and even identifying personal cruxes will be a challenge
5. I feel a moral obligation to prevent catastrophes and enable flourishing, where I have the influence to do so
6. I want to take actions that accurately reflect my values
7. Given the probabilities above, not taking strong, if not radical, action to try to influence the outcomes feels like a failure to embody my values, and a moral failure.

I'm still figuring out what to do about this. When you're highly uncertain it's obviously fine to hedge against being wrong, but again, given the numbers it's hard to justify hedging all the way down to inaction.

I am trying to learn more about AI safety, but I'm not spending very much time on it currently. I'm trying to talk to others about it, but I'm not evangelising it, nor necessarily speaking with a great sense of urgency. At the moment, it's low down my de factor priority list, even though I think there's a significant chance it changes everything I know and care about. Is part of this a lack of visceral connection to the risks and rewards? What can I do to feel like my values are in line with my actions?

The CEO has been inconsistent over time regarding his position on releasing LLMs

I find this to be a pretty poor criticism, and its inclusion makes me less inclined to accept the other criticisms in this piece at face value.

Updating your beliefs and changing your mind in light of new evidence is undoubtedly a good thing. To say that doing so leaves you with concerns about Connor's "trustworthiness and character" seems not only unfair, but also creates a disincentive for people to publicly update their views on key issues, for fear of this kind of criticism.