Leading EA at UPenn. Rising sophomore. I find rationality difficult, yet I try.
Email: hazemh [at] upenn [dot] edu
hazemh
Karma: 19
I think another way to help elections (in addition to canvassing) is to recruit your friends to canvass with you. I got seven friends to join me (with varying counterfactual weights, from 50% to 100%; weighted sum >5.1), and that’s not including the three additional people they brought along. Some of them have even canvassed more hours than I have (40).
Sending 20 messages saying “come canvass with me” may have netted 5x more votes than my own canvassing. That said, this strategy was conditional on me canvassing myself, because “go canvass alone” is an impossible sell, whereas “come have fun with me” seems to work pretty well
In the race I’ve been involved with, canvassing seems to me to net 1/3rd of a vote each hour if you’re good at it, 1/10th if you’re not-so-good at it.
Agree! Having done 40+ hours of canvassing (and being somewhat calibrated), I think 0.1-0.8 counterfactual votes per hour of canvassing is my 90% CI estimate
In defense of advancing AI in philosophy: if moral realism is true and our best guess of what’s Good is wrong, then alignment to that will be really bad, possibly worse than extinction.
So:
Try to align to our best guess: very low p(Good), medium x-risk, high p(survival | non-Good)
Make AIs figure it out: higher p(Good), high x-risk, medium p(survival | non-Good)
If getting the Good is all that matters, then option 2 beats 1 because the timelines were we don’t find the Good are not… good, regardless of survival.