EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

4 years ago GWWC announced that 5,000 people had signed the pledge to donate 10% of annual income to effective charities. I am surprised that number has not doubled since then.

For EAs who have not yet taken the pledge, I am curious why.

Separate but related, if you have taken the pledge, but are not using the new diamond symbol to promote it, I am curious why. I have been surprised to see that people who had advocated for giving 10 percent to effective charities have not been using the 🔸, but maybe it's because they have not yet gotten around to doing it.

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I'm often asked about how the existential risk landscape has changed in the years since I wrote The Precipice. Earlier this year, I gave a talk on exactly that, and I want to share it here.

Here's a video of the talk and a full transcript.

In the years since I wrote The Precipice, the question I’m asked most is how the risks have changed. It's now almost four years since the book came out, but the text has to be locked down a long time earlier, so we are really coming up on about five years of changes to the risk landscape.

I’m going to dive into four of the biggest risks — climate change, nuclear, pandemics, and AI — to show how they’ve changed. Now a lot has happened over those years, and I don’t want this to just be recapping the news in fast-forward. But [...]

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Outline:

(01:30) Climate Change

(01:58) Carbon Emissions

(03:18) Climate Sensitivity

(06:43) Nuclear

(06:46) Heightened Chance of Onset

(08:16) Likely New Arms Race

(09:54) Funding Collapse

(10:53) Pandemics

(10:56) Covid

(16:03) Protective technologies

(18:59) AI in Biotech

(20:32) AI

(20:50) RL agents ⇒ language models

(24:59) Racing

(27:05) Governance

(30:14) Conclusions

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There seems to be a widely-held view in popular culture that no physicist really understands quantum mechanics. The meme probably gained popularity after Richard Feynman famously stated in a lecture (transcribed in the book “The Character of Physical Law”) “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics”, though many prominent physicists have expressed a similar sentiment. Anyone aware of the overwhelming success of quantum mechanics will recognize that the seeming lack of understanding of the theory is primarily about how to interpret its ontology, and not about how to do the calculations or run the experiments, which clearly many physicists understand extremely well. But even the ontological confusion is debatable. With the proliferation of interpretations of quantum mechanics—each varying in terms of, among others, which classical intuitions should be abandoned—at least some physicists seem to think that there isn’t anything weird or mysterious about the quantum [...]

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Outline:

(06:06) Not all computers are computers

(09:21) The problem of single-cell organisms

(10:32) Using “functionally equivalent” silicon neurons

(14:29) The binding problem

(20:35) Most things are fuzzy, but not all things are fuzzy

(26:13) A note on emergence

(28:23) Parting thoughts

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Introduction:

The (highly interrelated) effective altruist and Rationalist communities are very small on a global scale. Therefore, in general, most intelligence, skill and expertise is outside of the community, not within it.

I don’t think many people will disagree with this statement. But sometimes it's worth reminding people of the obvious, and also it is worth quantifying and visualizing the obvious, to get a proper feel for the scale of the difference. I think some people are acting like they have absorbed this point, and some people definitely are not.

In this post, I will try and estimate the size of these communities. I will compare how many smart people are in the community vs outside the community. I will do the same for people in a few professions, and then I will go into controversial mode and try and give some advice that I [...]

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Introduction

This post is a write-up of a panel discussion held at EA Global: Boston 2023 (27–29 October). The panel was moderated by Matthew Gentzel. Matthew currently co-leads Longview Philanthropy's program on nuclear weapons policy and co-manages the organization's Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund.

He was joined by two other experts on US-China relations and related catastrophic risks:

• Tong Zhao, Senior Fellow for the Nuclear Policy Program and Carnegie China, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Bill Drexel, Fellow for the Technology and National Security Program, Center for a New American Security

Below is a transcript of the discussion, which we’ve lightly edited for clarity. The panelists covered the following main topics:

• Opening remarks summarizing the panelists’ general views on the US-China relationship and related risks, with an initial focus on nuclear security before exploring other risks and dangerous technologies
• How to address different norms around sharing information
• Problems resulting from risk compensation
• [...]

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Outline:

(00:06) Introduction

(01:35) Opening remarks

(20:55) How to address different norms around sharing information

(24:36) Problems resulting from risk compensation

(27:24) Overhyped and underhyped risks

(30:25) AI governance structures, the Chinese defense minister's dismissal, and the US's semiconductor export policies

(34:45) Ideas for calibrating how the US cooperates and/or competes with China

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(PDF available)

I show how a standard argument for advancing progress is extremely sensitive to how humanity's story eventually ends. Whether advancing progress is ultimately good or bad depends crucially on whether it also advances the end of humanity. Because we know so little about the answer to this crucial question, the case for advancing progress is undermined. I suggest we must either overcome this objection through improving our understanding of these connections between progress and human extinction or switch our focus to advancing certain kinds of progress relative to others — changing where we are going, rather than just how soon we get there.[1]

Things are getting better. While there are substantial ups and downs, long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people's lives longer, freer, and more prosperous. We could represent this as a graph of quality of life over time, giving [...]

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Summary

This post reports on data about the personality psychology of EAs from the 2018 EA Survey.

• We observe some differences between our EA sample and the general population:
  • Younger male EAs and older female EAs score higher on conscientiousness compared to the general population.
  • Male EAs score lower on neuroticism than the general public.
  • EAs score high on need for cognition, and relatively higher than a US and UK general population sample.
    • Though this may be partially due to demographic differences between the samples.
  • EAs appear to be slightly lower in empathic concern than a sample of US undergraduates.
    • But this seems attributable to demographic differences between the samples, in particular gender.
  • Small differences were observed regarding maximization and alternative search compared to other samples.
  • Generally, the lack of population norms of various personality traits makes comparisons between samples difficult.
• Overall, we found only small associations between [...]

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Outline:

(00:07) Summary

(01:59) Introduction

(02:57) Big Five

(06:26) Need for Cognition

(08:33) Interpersonal Reactivity Index

(11:20) Maximization

(14:03) Personality traits and donations

(15:55) Personality traits and cause prioritization

(17:22) Appendix

(17:25) Big Five item distributions

(17:59) Alternative IRI comparison

(18:54) Acknowledgments

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We estimate that, as of June 12, 2024, OpenAI has an annualized revenue (ARR) of:

$1.9B for ChatGPT Plus (7.7M global subscribers),
$714M from ChatGPT Enterprise (1.2M seats),
$510M from the API, and
$290M from ChatGPT Team (from 980k seats)

(Full report in https://app.futuresearch.ai/reports/3Li1, methods described in https://futuresearch.ai/openai-revenue-report.)

We looked into OpenAI's revenue because financial information should be a strong indicator of the business decisions they make in the coming months, and hence an indicator of their research priorities.

Our methods in brief: we searched exhaustively for all public information on OpenAI's finances, and filtered it to reliable data points. From this, we selected a method of calculation that required the minimal amount of inference of missing information.

To infer the missing information, we used the standard techniques of forecasters: fermi estimates, and base rates / analogies.

We're fairly confident that the true values are relatively close to what [...]

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This is a linkpost for https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin, posted in full here given its relevance to this community. Gerard has been one of the longest-standing malicious critics of the rationalist and EA communities and has done remarkable amounts of work to shape their public images behind the scenes.

Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others. As always, I write aiming to provide a thorough and honest picture, but this should be read as the view of a close onlooker who has known about much within this story for years and has strong opinions about the matter, not a disinterested observer coming across something foreign and new. If you’re curious about the backstory, I encourage you to read my companion article after this one.

Introduction: Reliable Sources

Wikipedia administrator David Gerard cares a great deal about Reliable Sources. For the past half-decade, he has torn [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) Introduction: Reliable Sources

(06:00) Gerard's Standards for Reliable Sources

(13:48) Who Is David Gerard?

(16:49) The Early Romantic Years

(27:52) Gerard's fling with LessWrong in the twilight of the old internet

(37:44) The bitter end

(45:19) The Vindictive Ex

(49:53) LessWrong

(01:04:08) Effective Altruism

(01:07:47) Scott Alexander

(01:16:14) Conclusion

(01:21:49) Companion article: A Young Mormon Discovers Online Rationality

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Summary

The purpose of this research is to understand the experiences of job seekers who are looking for high-impact roles, particularly roles at organizations aligned with the Effective Altruism movement (hereafter referred to as ”EA job seekers” and “EA organizations,” respectively).[1]

Organizations such as 80,000 Hours, Successif, High Impact Professionals, and others already provide services to support professionals in planning for and transitioning into high-impact careers. However, it's less clear how successful job seekers are at landing roles that qualify as high impact. Anecdotally, prior EA Forum posts suggest that roles at EA organizations are very competitive, even for well-qualified individuals, with an estimated range of ~47-124 individuals rejected for every open role.

Given that some EA thought leaders (Ben West, for example) have suggested working in high-impact roles as a pathway to increasing one's individual lifetime impact (in addition to “earning to give”), it seems important [...]

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Outline:

(00:08) Summary

(02:56) Research Questions

(03:20) Existing Evidence

(05:14) Methods

(06:43) Survey Results

(06:46) Career stage

(07:22) Feelings about job search

(08:22) Barriers to finding the right job

(09:41) Helpful resources and supports

(10:45) Interview Results

(11:38) Barrier 1: Employer Hiring Practices

(11:44) Lack of transparency

(13:22) Inconsistent definitions

(14:36) Lack of feedback

(15:41) Barrier 2: Preferences for Elite, Western Talent

(15:47) Lack of elite credentials

(16:27) Lack of connections

(17:03) Economic barriers

(18:10) Geographic barriers

(19:27) Solution 1: Actions for Job Seekers

(19:33) Prioritize networking

(20:38) Look for “side doors”

(21:20) Solution 2: Actions for Support Organizations

(22:19) Solution 3: Actions for Hiring Organizations

(24:44) Conclusion

(25:39) Limitations and Mistakes

(26:24) Appendix

(26:27) Additional helpful resources

(27:06) Additional survey data

(28:45) About the researcher

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