Relatedly: Sarah Constantin recently had a neat, short post on “Big-World Intuitions”, which are situations where “the market is much bigger than you, the problem is much bigger than your progress on it, the game is very far from being over, the environment is much bigger than your resource consumption, etc”.
In my few interactions with Shulman (and other very-high-IQ-yet-modest-people around in EA waters) I have felt this big-world framing to be a key part of their thinking, where many/most things happening in the world are done by ‘efficient markets’ and ‘efficient processes’, and as such you cannot expect to have much influence overall on the world, and can just focus on doing things with local benefit.
(Even though often the things described as efficient are not markets, but individual companies, or academic fields, both of which I strongly believe can be visibly and knowably stupid from time to time.)
In recent years this has been a justification for why it’s entirely ethical to invest in AI and to expect AI companies to be unassailable and to argue you should not cultivate public support for an AI pause, because these things are big and you are small and you could not possibly hope to challenge market incentives. (Of course, there are real forces there, but I don’t believe it’s the end of the story.)
Relatedly: Sarah Constantin recently had a neat, short post on “Big-World Intuitions”, which are situations where “the market is much bigger than you, the problem is much bigger than your progress on it, the game is very far from being over, the environment is much bigger than your resource consumption, etc”.
In my few interactions with Shulman (and other very-high-IQ-yet-modest-people around in EA waters) I have felt this big-world framing to be a key part of their thinking, where many/most things happening in the world are done by ‘efficient markets’ and ‘efficient processes’, and as such you cannot expect to have much influence overall on the world, and can just focus on doing things with local benefit.
(Even though often the things described as efficient are not markets, but individual companies, or academic fields, both of which I strongly believe can be visibly and knowably stupid from time to time.)
In recent years this has been a justification for why it’s entirely ethical to invest in AI and to expect AI companies to be unassailable and to argue you should not cultivate public support for an AI pause, because these things are big and you are small and you could not possibly hope to challenge market incentives. (Of course, there are real forces there, but I don’t believe it’s the end of the story.)