Good post, though I thought that it is a little too focused on money. It could say (more explicitly) what types of charity are best, and what types of action… and other ways to help that aren’t money.
In my opinion, some of the most efficient ways to achieve a positive difference are, foremost: (these are strategic priorities with more positive potential than all the rest) human genetic engineering and intelligence augmentation, artificial intelligence, and reduction of existential risks. In second order of importance: (these are ways to increase utility in the here and now) destroying animals and the environment (which are cause of huge suffering), producing artificial meat to replace cruel animal farming, promoting birth control among the poor.
Activities to achieve these goals include:
Becoming very rich and using the money to achieve them;
Convincing people with lots of money to donate to these causes, and any other people to become aware of them and contribute somehow, by various means, such as by writing books, articles, making movies, posting on websites, talking to them, encouraging them to do activities to achieve them;
Conducting research personally in fields such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial meat, birth control, etc., and convincing more people to do the same;
Helping or creating charity organizations directed towards birth control;
Fighting and discrediting religion, which is a significant hurdle to many of these efforts;
Convincing people about the right general framework of ideas that is compatible with these goals.
In my opinion, most other kinds of efforts to make a positive change, such as feeding the poor; preserving the environment; curing diseases; giving education to the poor; etc., are overrated and short-sighted, their effects in the long-term being relatively small. An increase in intelligence would produce an increase in the ability to do everything else, so it would be much more effective in the long-term; all these measures lose importance if our civilization and technological advancement be lost to some global catastrophe.
When AI starts working, several problems on which people work now will be rapidly solved (except those that require lengthy experiments). Therefore focusing on these problems now may be a waste of time, except for the meantime until their solution by AI.
Raising money seems like a matter of chance or luck. You’ll naturally try it but you can’t count on it, so it’s not a matter of deciding to do it. Raising public awareness and enthusiasm seems to be an action with a relatively high potential: you can potentially get many other people to raise money, do scientific research, and raise public awareness and enthusiasm in their turn, so this may be the action with the most potential, even though it only accomplishes indirectly. Doing scientific research personally seems to require high stakes, in career, life, and seems to depend a bit on the place you live and what are the things that you like to study and work in. This one is a hard decision, because it is sort of a gamble with your life.
I should add that a lot of people here agree with your stand except that there is a bigger risk from AI than there is benefit. That is, we’ll have to work on AI but first we should figure out how to make it friendly. That is what the SIAI is working on.
By the way, welcome to Less Wrong. You know me as Alexander Kruel on Facebook.
There seems to be a significant “risk” of making a much better world with much smarter agents and a lot less insanity and stupidity. A lot of people see that as a bad thing, however.
Looking at history, this sort of thing is fairly common. Most kinds of progress face resistance from various kinds of luddites- who would rather things stayed the way they were.
What? I don’t follow. Are you saying it would be a much better world if an unfriendly AI replaced humanity? I don’t think it’s luddite-ish to say I’d rather not die so something else can take my place.
I’d agree to AI “unfriendly” (whatever this means… it shouldn’t reason emotionally, it should just be sufficiently intelligent) replacing humanity… since we are the problem that we’re trying to solve. We feel pain, we suffer, we are stupid, susceptible to countless diseases, we aren’t very happy and fulfilled, etc. Eventually we’ll all need to be either corrected or replaced. An old computer can only take so many software updates before it becomes incompatible with newer operating systems, and this is our eventual fate. It is not logical to be against our own demise, in my viewpoint.
Hey, have you read this paper about cognitive enhancement? If not, you might like it.
Anyway, a lot of people have thought about this for years. This piece is a summary of that analysis. If you check the links in this article like thesetwo videos and then read just thesetwo articles, you might see more clearly why my article is organized the way it is and focuses heavily on donating while more or less ignoring other strategies.
And I agree with you that most efforts to make a positive change are overrated and short-sighted. That was kind of my point in #2 and #3. Most causes are inefficient at creating good outcomes or optimized for making you feel good, not creating good. I’m working on solutions versus maintenance, but if other people are determined to work on maintenance activities, it’s better if they do them wisely.
It sounds like you already know a good deal about existential risk and the potential of AI. If you want to help out SIAI, I’m the remote volunteer coordinator. You can email me at louie.helm@intelligence.org
Good post, though I thought that it is a little too focused on money.
The problem on Less Wrong is that there exists an unidentified subgroup who believes that 1.) the best you can do is support the SIAI 2.) most people can best support the SIAI by donating money. This view might not be the general consensus here, yet the most influential people certainly believe so.
What is necessary is a paper or article sequence that outlines a decision procedure and exemplifies rational choice by dissolving the question about the best (most effective) possible action(s) one can take to benefit humanity and possible help saving the world. This hasn’t been done. Supposedly you should be able to conclude an answer here by reading the sequences. That might be the case but isn’t very effective as it is at best treated as an marginal issue. How to save the world is not an explicit conclusion of the current sequences.
So I think it’s a decidedly uncharitable framing to imply that our analysis reduces everyone’s options down to the singular option of donating. An equally valid interpretation is that everyone now has unlimited options for how to save the world. You can be a computer programmer or an online poker player or a circus performer or anything else you love doing. Then you can turn the thing you love doing the most or what you’re best at (usually the same thing) into a vehicle for saving the world.
Characterizing all the millions of different ways to earn money for saving the world as just “donating” is like characterizing all books as “just paper” or all software as “just bits”. The means of transmission (paper, bits, donating) isn’t the important part for any of these. What we care about in practice is the content of those transmission mechanisms: the functioning of the software, the content of the book, or the career / economic activity that allows you to save the world.
I know you don’t argue explicitly against this, so I apologize for laying all this out in response to your comment. I hope you don’t mind me expounding on this here to try and develop a more helpful framing.
What is necessary is a paper or article sequence that outlines a decision procedure and exemplifies rational choice by dissolving the question about the best (most effective) possible action(s) one can take to benefit humanity and possible help saving the world.
As a point of detail that isn’t the kind of question you dissolve, just one you answer! :)
Does this phrase actually add clarifying detail to your premise?
How are we unidentified? It seems to me like the majority of posters on Less Wrong who strongly advocate a view along the lines of what you’re describing post under our real names. What more could we do to identify ourselves?
This phrase explicitly accuses the people you disagree with (or pretend to disagree with?? I can never tell with you) of being sinister and shadowy. It’s probably not warranted in the case of clearly identified people who share their views openly and honestly.
Since I am not sure who, and therefore how many people here share that opinion, but know that some do, I referred to them as unidentified subgroup. That labeling was solely reflective of my current state of knowledge and not supposed to be judgemental.
I’m often using a translator which outputs many different English words for a German concept. I suppose that might be one of the reasons what I am writing sometimes appears weird or inept.
As a very unrelated side note, I usually read your username as Chinese, where “xi du” is “to smoke/take drugs” so “xi xi du” would be something like “to casually try drugs” (the verb is doubled to reduce emphasis). I have no idea if that’s how you meant it.
I came up with that nickname at the age of 16 (in the year 2000). It is supposed to be a random sequence of letters that is pronounceable in German. A search gave no results, hence I naively suspected it to be unique. Only much later I learnt that many sequences of letters humans are able to pronounce do also bear a meaning in some language. Last year I learnt that xiximeanspissin Portuguese. Some native English speakers also asked me if it is supposed to mean sexy dude. But I can assure you that I never intended my nickname to signal a sexy dude who takes a piss and casually tries drugs. I was rather annoyed that many nicknames were already taken when I tried to register with various services. I also wanted to be uniquely identifiable. It pretty much worked, as almost all of the 46.100 results of a Google search for xixidu are related to myself.
Ksicksiduh—but I prefer to go by my real name (Alexander Kruel) when it comes to vocal communication.
I’ve neverbeenChinese. It wasn’t my intention at all to sound Asiatic. I looked at an instant messenger avatar of a Rubber duck when that particular sequence occurred to me.
Thanks—I pronounce people’s names in my head when I’m reading.
“Xi” is a letter combination that shows up in English transliterations of Chinese. That, plus your saying that English isn’t your first language, was what gave me the false impression.
I’ve always pronounced your nickname in my head as if it were a Pinyin transliteration of Chinese (much like the English words “she she do”), even though I had no idea what it might mean. Making every other letter uppercase also gives the impression of Chinese (where there can be disagreement between transliterations for words made of several characters, such as “pinyin” vs “pin-yin” vs “pin yin”, to take an example from my comment), even though nobody actually transliterates Chinese quite like that.
Oh, sorry to make such a big deal out of this then. Your English is good enough that I didn’t realize you were a non-native speaker/writer. I’ll take that into account when reading your comments in the future.
How are we unidentified? It seems to me like the majority of posters on Less Wrong who strongly advocate a view along the lines of what you’re describing post under our real names. What more could we do to identify ourselves?
Now I’m feeling username envy. I’m Cameron Taylor, from Melbourne! I can’t think of a better world saving option than the one in question, even if my advocacy is of the form ‘least bad’.
(I don’t know what the ‘unidentified subgroup’ idea was supposed to be. It makes no sense.)
You’re from Melbourne?? I’m American but I’ve been traveling in Australia the past few months. I’m in Byron Bay now. Do you know Patrick Robotham? I met him when I first got back here and stopped in Melbourne. He organizes the Less Wrong Meet-up at Don Tojo in Melbourne near the University. You guys actually have a surprisingly good number of LW rationalists there. Perhaps the most anywhere outside of the California Bay Area, New York, or London.
They’re brand new. Patrick only started organizing them after meeting with me and realizing how many other LWers there were in Melbourne. I think there has only been 1 or 2 of them but there is a large critical mass of attendants from what I heard from Patrick.
Good post, though I thought that it is a little too focused on money. It could say (more explicitly) what types of charity are best, and what types of action… and other ways to help that aren’t money.
In my opinion, some of the most efficient ways to achieve a positive difference are, foremost: (these are strategic priorities with more positive potential than all the rest) human genetic engineering and intelligence augmentation, artificial intelligence, and reduction of existential risks. In second order of importance: (these are ways to increase utility in the here and now) destroying animals and the environment (which are cause of huge suffering), producing artificial meat to replace cruel animal farming, promoting birth control among the poor.
Activities to achieve these goals include:
Becoming very rich and using the money to achieve them;
Convincing people with lots of money to donate to these causes, and any other people to become aware of them and contribute somehow, by various means, such as by writing books, articles, making movies, posting on websites, talking to them, encouraging them to do activities to achieve them;
Conducting research personally in fields such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial meat, birth control, etc., and convincing more people to do the same;
Helping or creating charity organizations directed towards birth control;
Fighting and discrediting religion, which is a significant hurdle to many of these efforts;
Convincing people about the right general framework of ideas that is compatible with these goals.
In my opinion, most other kinds of efforts to make a positive change, such as feeding the poor; preserving the environment; curing diseases; giving education to the poor; etc., are overrated and short-sighted, their effects in the long-term being relatively small. An increase in intelligence would produce an increase in the ability to do everything else, so it would be much more effective in the long-term; all these measures lose importance if our civilization and technological advancement be lost to some global catastrophe.
When AI starts working, several problems on which people work now will be rapidly solved (except those that require lengthy experiments). Therefore focusing on these problems now may be a waste of time, except for the meantime until their solution by AI.
Raising money seems like a matter of chance or luck. You’ll naturally try it but you can’t count on it, so it’s not a matter of deciding to do it. Raising public awareness and enthusiasm seems to be an action with a relatively high potential: you can potentially get many other people to raise money, do scientific research, and raise public awareness and enthusiasm in their turn, so this may be the action with the most potential, even though it only accomplishes indirectly. Doing scientific research personally seems to require high stakes, in career, life, and seems to depend a bit on the place you live and what are the things that you like to study and work in. This one is a hard decision, because it is sort of a gamble with your life.
I should add that a lot of people here agree with your stand except that there is a bigger risk from AI than there is benefit. That is, we’ll have to work on AI but first we should figure out how to make it friendly. That is what the SIAI is working on.
By the way, welcome to Less Wrong. You know me as Alexander Kruel on Facebook.
There seems to be a significant “risk” of making a much better world with much smarter agents and a lot less insanity and stupidity. A lot of people see that as a bad thing, however.
Looking at history, this sort of thing is fairly common. Most kinds of progress face resistance from various kinds of luddites- who would rather things stayed the way they were.
What? I don’t follow. Are you saying it would be a much better world if an unfriendly AI replaced humanity? I don’t think it’s luddite-ish to say I’d rather not die so something else can take my place.
I’d agree to AI “unfriendly” (whatever this means… it shouldn’t reason emotionally, it should just be sufficiently intelligent) replacing humanity… since we are the problem that we’re trying to solve. We feel pain, we suffer, we are stupid, susceptible to countless diseases, we aren’t very happy and fulfilled, etc. Eventually we’ll all need to be either corrected or replaced. An old computer can only take so many software updates before it becomes incompatible with newer operating systems, and this is our eventual fate. It is not logical to be against our own demise, in my viewpoint.
Welcome to Less Wrong!
Hey, have you read this paper about cognitive enhancement? If not, you might like it.
Anyway, a lot of people have thought about this for years. This piece is a summary of that analysis. If you check the links in this article like these two videos and then read just these two articles, you might see more clearly why my article is organized the way it is and focuses heavily on donating while more or less ignoring other strategies.
And I agree with you that most efforts to make a positive change are overrated and short-sighted. That was kind of my point in #2 and #3. Most causes are inefficient at creating good outcomes or optimized for making you feel good, not creating good. I’m working on solutions versus maintenance, but if other people are determined to work on maintenance activities, it’s better if they do them wisely.
It sounds like you already know a good deal about existential risk and the potential of AI. If you want to help out SIAI, I’m the remote volunteer coordinator. You can email me at louie.helm@intelligence.org
I can always use more help.
The problem on Less Wrong is that there exists an unidentified subgroup who believes that 1.) the best you can do is support the SIAI 2.) most people can best support the SIAI by donating money. This view might not be the general consensus here, yet the most influential people certainly believe so.
What is necessary is a paper or article sequence that outlines a decision procedure and exemplifies rational choice by dissolving the question about the best (most effective) possible action(s) one can take to benefit humanity and possible help saving the world. This hasn’t been done. Supposedly you should be able to conclude an answer here by reading the sequences. That might be the case but isn’t very effective as it is at best treated as an marginal issue. How to save the world is not an explicit conclusion of the current sequences.
A less collapsed summary of the view you describe is:
1) Saving lives is good 2) X-risk reduction is a surprisingly high leverage way to save lives 3) Using money gives you more options for how to contribute to a cause, not less
So I think it’s a decidedly uncharitable framing to imply that our analysis reduces everyone’s options down to the singular option of donating. An equally valid interpretation is that everyone now has unlimited options for how to save the world. You can be a computer programmer or an online poker player or a circus performer or anything else you love doing. Then you can turn the thing you love doing the most or what you’re best at (usually the same thing) into a vehicle for saving the world.
Characterizing all the millions of different ways to earn money for saving the world as just “donating” is like characterizing all books as “just paper” or all software as “just bits”. The means of transmission (paper, bits, donating) isn’t the important part for any of these. What we care about in practice is the content of those transmission mechanisms: the functioning of the software, the content of the book, or the career / economic activity that allows you to save the world.
I know you don’t argue explicitly against this, so I apologize for laying all this out in response to your comment. I hope you don’t mind me expounding on this here to try and develop a more helpful framing.
As a point of detail that isn’t the kind of question you dissolve, just one you answer! :)
Does this phrase actually add clarifying detail to your premise?
How are we unidentified? It seems to me like the majority of posters on Less Wrong who strongly advocate a view along the lines of what you’re describing post under our real names. What more could we do to identify ourselves?
This phrase explicitly accuses the people you disagree with (or pretend to disagree with?? I can never tell with you) of being sinister and shadowy. It’s probably not warranted in the case of clearly identified people who share their views openly and honestly.
Since I am not sure who, and therefore how many people here share that opinion, but know that some do, I referred to them as unidentified subgroup. That labeling was solely reflective of my current state of knowledge and not supposed to be judgemental.
I’m often using a translator which outputs many different English words for a German concept. I suppose that might be one of the reasons what I am writing sometimes appears weird or inept.
As a very unrelated side note, I usually read your username as Chinese, where “xi du” is “to smoke/take drugs” so “xi xi du” would be something like “to casually try drugs” (the verb is doubled to reduce emphasis). I have no idea if that’s how you meant it.
I came up with that nickname at the age of 16 (in the year 2000). It is supposed to be a random sequence of letters that is pronounceable in German. A search gave no results, hence I naively suspected it to be unique. Only much later I learnt that many sequences of letters humans are able to pronounce do also bear a meaning in some language. Last year I learnt that xixi means piss in Portuguese. Some native English speakers also asked me if it is supposed to mean sexy dude. But I can assure you that I never intended my nickname to signal a sexy dude who takes a piss and casually tries drugs. I was rather annoyed that many nicknames were already taken when I tried to register with various services. I also wanted to be uniquely identifiable. It pretty much worked, as almost all of the 46.100 results of a Google search for xixidu are related to myself.
How do you pronounce your nickname?
I’d vaguely assumed the name was Chinese, with some presupposition that you were, too.
Ksicksiduh—but I prefer to go by my real name (Alexander Kruel) when it comes to vocal communication.
I’ve never been Chinese. It wasn’t my intention at all to sound Asiatic. I looked at an instant messenger avatar of a Rubber duck when that particular sequence occurred to me.
Thanks—I pronounce people’s names in my head when I’m reading.
“Xi” is a letter combination that shows up in English transliterations of Chinese. That, plus your saying that English isn’t your first language, was what gave me the false impression.
I’ve always pronounced your nickname in my head as if it were a Pinyin transliteration of Chinese (much like the English words “she she do”), even though I had no idea what it might mean. Making every other letter uppercase also gives the impression of Chinese (where there can be disagreement between transliterations for words made of several characters, such as “pinyin” vs “pin-yin” vs “pin yin”, to take an example from my comment), even though nobody actually transliterates Chinese quite like that.
But now I’ll do German instead.
Doubled to reduce emphasis? Now that is unintuitive!
Oh, sorry to make such a big deal out of this then. Your English is good enough that I didn’t realize you were a non-native speaker/writer. I’ll take that into account when reading your comments in the future.
Now I’m feeling username envy. I’m Cameron Taylor, from Melbourne! I can’t think of a better world saving option than the one in question, even if my advocacy is of the form ‘least bad’.
(I don’t know what the ‘unidentified subgroup’ idea was supposed to be. It makes no sense.)
Hey Cameron!
You’re from Melbourne?? I’m American but I’ve been traveling in Australia the past few months. I’m in Byron Bay now. Do you know Patrick Robotham? I met him when I first got back here and stopped in Melbourne. He organizes the Less Wrong Meet-up at Don Tojo in Melbourne near the University. You guys actually have a surprisingly good number of LW rationalists there. Perhaps the most anywhere outside of the California Bay Area, New York, or London.
I haven’t made it to one of the meet ups yet. I must at some stage. I didn’t realize they were so well attended!
They’re brand new. Patrick only started organizing them after meeting with me and realizing how many other LWers there were in Melbourne. I think there has only been 1 or 2 of them but there is a large critical mass of attendants from what I heard from Patrick.