If Open Phil is unwilling to fund some/most of the best orgs, that makes earning to give look more compelling.
(There are some other big funders in AI safety like Jaan Tallinn, but I think all of them combined still have <10% as much money as Open Phil.)
I should add that I don’t want to dissuade people from criticizing me if I’m wrong. I don’t always handle criticism well, but it’s worth the cost to have accurate beliefs about important subjects. I knew I was gonna be anxious about this post but I accepted the cost because I thought there was a ~25% chance that it would be valuable to post.
A few people (i.e. habryka or previously Benquo or Jessicata) make it their thing to bring up concerns frequently.
My impression is that those people are paying a social cost for how willing they are to bring up perceived concerns, and I have a lot of respect for them because of that.
Thanks for the reply. When I wrote “Many people would have more useful things to say about this than I do”, you were one of the people I was thinking of.
AI Impacts wants to think about AI sentience and OP cannot fund orgs that do that kind of work
Related to this, I think GW/OP has always been too unwilling to fund weird causes, but it’s generally gotten better over time: originally recommending US charities over global poverty b/c global poverty was too weird, taking years to remove their recommendations for US charities that were ~100x less effective than their global poverty recs, then taking years to start funding animal welfare and x-risk, then still not funding weirder stuff like wild animal welfare and AI sentience. I’ve criticized them for this in the past but I liked that they were moving in the right direction. Now I get the sense that recently they’ve gotten worse on AI safety (and weird causes in general).
I’ve been avoiding LW for the last 3 days because I was anxious that people were gonna be mad at me for this post. I thought there was a pretty good chance I was wrong, and I don’t like accusing people/orgs of bad behavior. But I thought I should post it anyway because I believed there was some chance lots of people agreed with me but were too afraid of social repercussions to bring it up (like I almost was).
What are the norms here? Can I just copy/paste this exact text and put it into a top-level post? I got the sense that a top-level post should be more well thought out than this but I don’t actually have anything else useful to say. I would be happy to co-author a post if someone else thinks they can flesh it out.
Edit: Didn’t realize you were replying to Habryka, not me. That makes more sense.
I get the sense that we can’t trust Open Philanthropy to do a good job on AI safety, and this is a big problem. Many people would have more useful things to say about this than I do, but I still feel that I should say something.
My sense comes from:
Open Phil is reluctant to do anything to stop the companies that are doing very bad things to accelerate the likely extinction of humanity, and is reluctant to fund anyone who’s trying to do anything about it.
People at Open Phil have connections with people at Anthropic, a company that’s accelerating AGI and has a track record of (plausibly-deniable) dishonesty. Dustin Moskovitz has money invested in Anthropic, and Open Phil employees might also stand to make money from accelerating AGI. And I agree with Bryan Caplan’s recent take that friendships are often a bigger conflict of interest than money, so Open Phil higher-ups being friends with Anthropic higher-ups is troubling.
A lot of people (including me as of ~one year ago) consider Open Phil the gold standard for EA-style analysis. I think Open Phil is actually quite untrustworthy on AI safety (but probably still good on other causes).
I don’t know what to do with this information.
As a frequent oatmeal-eater, I have a few miscellaneous comments:
You mentioned adding fruit paste, fruit syrup, and fruit pulp to oatmeal, but I’m surprised you didn’t mention what I consider the best option: whole fruit. I usually use blueberries but sometimes I mix it up with blackberries or sliced bananas.
I buy one-minute oats. You don’t actually need them to cook them for a minute, you can just pour boiling water onto them and they’ll soften up by the time they’re cool enough to eat.
I wouldn’t eat oats for the protein, they have more than rice but still not very much. I mix 80g (1 cup) of oatmeal with 25g of soy protein powder, which brings the protein up from 10g to 30g.
I don’t get the appeal of overnight oats. I have to microwave it anyway to get it to a reasonable temperature, and it tends to stick to the jar which greatly increases cleanup time. (I think the stickiness comes more from the protein powder than the oats.)
Relatedly, I see a lot of people use mediocre AI art when they could just as easily use good stock photos. You can get free, watermarkless stock photos at https://pixabay.com/.
The mnemonic I’ve heard is “red and yellow, poisonous fellow; red and black, friend of Jack”
I was reading some scientific papers and I encountered what looks like fallacious reasoning but I’m not quite sure what’s wrong with it (if anything). It does like this:
Alice formulates hypothesis H and publishes an experiment that moderately supports H (p < 0.05 but > 0.01).
Bob does a similar experiment that contradicts H.
People look at the differences in Alice’s and Bob’s studies and formulate a new hypothesis H’: “H is true under certain conditions (as in Alice’s experiment), and false under other conditions (as in Bob’s experiment)”. They look at the two studies and conclude that H’ is probably true because it’s supported by both studies.
This sounds fishy to me (something like post hoc reasoning) but I’m not quite sure how to explain why and I’m not even sure I’m correct.
Suppose an ideology says you’re not allowed to question idea X.
I think there are two different kinds of “not questioning”: there’s unquestioningly accepting an idea as true, and there’s refusing to question and remaining agnostic. The latter position is reasonable in the sense that if you refuse to investigate an issue, you shouldn’t have any strong beliefs about it. And I think the load-bearingness is only a major issue if you refuse to question X while also accepting that X is true.
There’s an argument for cooperating with any agent in a class of quasi-rational actors, although I don’t know how exactly to define that class. Basically, if you predict that the other agent will reason in the same way as you, then you should cooperate.
(This reminds me of Kant’s argument for the basis of morality—all rational beings should reason identically, so the true morality must be something that all rational beings can arrive at independently. I don’t think his argument quite works, but I believe there’s a similar argument for cooperating on the prisoner’s dilemma that does work.)
If I want to write to my representative to oppose this amendment, who do I write to? As I understand, the bill passed the Senate but must still pass Assembly. Is the Senate responsible for re-approving amendments, or does that happen in Assembly?
Also, should I write to a representative who’s most likely to be on the fence, or am I only allowed to write to the representative of my district?
5 minute super intense cardio, as a replacement for long, low intensity cardio. It is easier to motivate oneself to do 5 minutes of Your-Heart-Might-Explode cardio than two hours of jogging or something. In fact it takes very little motivation, if you trick yourself into doing it right after waking up, when your brain is on autopilot anyway, and unable to resist routine.
Interesting, I had the complete opposite experience. I previously had the idea that exercise should be short and really hard, and I couldn’t stick with it. Then I learned that it’s better if the majority of your exercise is very easy. Now I go for hour-long walks and I get exercise every day. (Jogging is too hard to qualify as easy exercise.)
What’s the deal with mold? Is it ok to eat moldy food if you cut off the moldy bit?
I read some articles that quoted mold researchers who said things like (paraphrasing) “if one of your strawberries gets mold on it, you have to throw away all your strawberries because they might be contaminated.”
I don’t get the logic of that. If you leave fruit out for long enough, it almost always starts growing visible mold. So any fruit at any given time is pretty likely to already have mold on it, even if it’s not visible yet. So by that logic, you should never eat fruit ever.
They also said things like “mold usually isn’t bad, but if mold is growing on food, there could also be harmful bacteria like listeria.” Ok, but there could be listeria even if there’s not visible mold, right? So again, by this logic, you should never eat any fresh food ever.
This question seems hard to resolve without spending a bunch of time researching mold so I’m hoping there’s a mold expert on LessWrong. I just want to know if I can eat my strawberries.
I don’t understand how not citing a source is considered acceptable practice. It seems antithetical to standard journalistic ethics.
we have found Mr Altman highly forthcoming
He was caught lying about the non-disparagement agreements, but I guess lying to the public is fine as long as you don’t lie to the board?
Taylor’s and Summers’ comments here are pretty disappointing—it seems that they have no issue with, and maybe even endorse, Sam’s now-publicly-verified bad behavior.
I was just thinking not 10 minutes ago about how that one LW user who casually brought up Daniel K’s equity (I didn’t remember your username) had a massive impact and I’m really grateful for them.
There’s a plausible chain of events where simeon_c brings up the equity > it comes to more people’s attention > OpenAI goes under scrutiny > OpenAI becomes more transparent > OpenAI can no longer maintain its de facto anti-safety policies > either OpenAI changes policy to become much more safety-conscious, or loses power relative to more safety-conscious companies > we don’t all die from OpenAI’s unsafe AI.
So you may have saved the world.
This is a good and important point. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether you’re right, but one counterpoint: AI companies are already well-incentivized to figure out how to control AI, because (as Wei Dai said) controllable AI is more economically useful. It makes more sense for nonprofits / independent researchers to do work that AI companies wouldn’t do otherwise.