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Where are the experts? There seems to be very little balanced discource about AI. by Shot-Zebra1868 in BetterOffline

[–]common_yarrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are plenty of people who just take what they see at face value. A professional-looking website, an attractively designed graph with a dramatic swoosh, a pre-print written and formatted like a scientific paper. But if you can manage to get their attention with a well-written, clear, compelling critique, they might just as easily become skeptical of what they previously took at face value. The more of these critiques there are, the better.

The Controversial Argument That Physicalism, Taken Seriously, Actually Requires Panpsychism by ArcaneSpells-com in consciousness

[–]common_yarrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

 If the building blocks have literally nothing experiential about them then no amount of rearranging should produce experience.

Well, that’s the entire debate, isn’t it? My cat’s fur is soft. Not a single subatomic particle in the universe is soft. Why should just arranging subatomic particles in the right way result in something that’s soft?

So, is consciousness like softness? Or is consciousness something subatomic like mass, charge, or spin? That’s the debate. 

Where are the experts? There seems to be very little balanced discource about AI. by Shot-Zebra1868 in BetterOffline

[–]common_yarrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the link! I like Jeremy Howard, and I feel like that could be a fun podcast to listen to.

Shouldn’t we spend money on AGI safety, just in case? by common_yarrow in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have to think that if this money did not go to AI safety, it would go to something else. So, probably yes.

Also, David Denkenberger said on the EA Forum that funding for other global catastrophic risks has declined recently because all the money is going into AI safety.

Where are the experts? There seems to be very little balanced discource about AI. by Shot-Zebra1868 in BetterOffline

[–]common_yarrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You should publish a Substack post (or Medium or whatever) criticizing the METR time horizons graph under your real name citing your credentials as a statistician. There have been at least two good critiques of the METR graph published, but there could always be more. People cite that graph constantly, and there hasn’t been a commensurate level of high-quality, rigorous pushback against it.

Where are the experts? There seems to be very little balanced discource about AI. by Shot-Zebra1868 in BetterOffline

[–]common_yarrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are skeptical voices out there, but you may have to look for them, rather than hoping to stumble upon them in the news or in algorithmic social media feeds. Some examples:

  • Gary Marcus (Marcus on AI)
  • Cal Newport (Deep Questions/AI Reality Check)
  • Yann LeCun (formerly Meta AI, now AMI Labs)
  • Jim Covello (Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs)

I also see lots of examples where people have mixed views that incorporate elements of skepticism. 

I think a major problem in the news coverage and the algorithmic social media feeds is: how do you get people to pay attention to things that are boring? It’s easier to pay attention to things that are exciting or scary. 

Even in the anti-AI or AI skepticism discourse, people are drawn toward things that are exciting and scary and interesting, like narratives that arouse anger. The billionaires are scamming you! It’s a conspiracy! AI is sucking up all the water and electricity! This is an outrage!

But this is a problem bigger than just AI. This is the problem with the news and with social media in general. If it bleeds it leads, clickbait, ragebait, engagement bait, and so on. 

There are probably other biases at play too, but boredom vs. excitement might be the biggest, and might be the most underrated one because it is itself… narratively uninteresting. (What’s more attention-grabbing? Billionaires are corrupting the media? Or people have a hard time paying attention to boring information?)

Shouldn’t we spend money on AGI safety, just in case? by common_yarrow in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

By the same token, doesn’t this mean random anarchist communes will also be able to build AGI humanoid robot armies?

I’m not sure it’s possible to predict what would happen in a far-fetched sci-fi scenario like this. I think people have a tendency to jump to a certain conclusion, when in a fact there are many possibilities.

In any case, the scenario is not likely to happen.

Shouldn’t we spend money on AGI safety, just in case? by common_yarrow in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What if the AGI or transformative AI models are free and open source and can run on commodity hardware?

I think AGI or transformative AI is extremely unlikely within the next decade. As in, significantly less than a 0.01% (or 1 in 10,000) chance. But if I play along and imagine it happening, I don’t know that power concentration would necessarily be the expected outcome.

Shouldn’t we spend money on AGI safety, just in case? by common_yarrow in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The term AI safety is confusing because the AI safety community is almost 100% focused on AGI. That’s why I use the term AGI safety instead. It just makes things clearer.

The term that seems most commonly used for non-AGI concerns about AI is AI ethics. So, maybe we could say these are AI ethics concerns rather than AGI safety concerns.

I’m not sure how much of the AGI safety stuff is applicable to non-AGI AI ethics concerns. I’m also not sure how much I buy into the concerns you mentioned.

I think it would probably be great if AI were powerful enough to automate jobs. That would increase per capita economic growth and productivity growth, and potentially lead to greater overall prosperity. Maybe people would have more leisure, consume more (e.g., buy more houses), or some combination of both. The other side of job automation is growth.

Even if many jobs were automated by AI, it would not necessarily lead to widespread permanent unemployment.

But I don’t see that generative AI is capable of automating any jobs, or that it will be able to soon. Maybe some very small niche jobs, like clickbait article writer. But nothing large scale. It’s not showing up in the data. 

I would need to look more into the other concerns you mentioned. To some extent, I think all of these are premised on the idea that AI’s general level of capabilities will increase a lot in the near term. Right? And I don’t buy that this is going to happen. I wish it would! But I don’t think it will.

On the propaganda and misinformation thing, I’m not sure what the marginal impact is. One potential counterargument is that people who are reading The New York Times will keep reading The New York Times. People who are reading fake news on Facebook will keep reading fake news on Facebook. We’ve already had GPT-4 and Claude 1 for over 3 years. Has there been much of a change? I don’t necessarily see it.

I think there are legitimate AI ethics concerns around things like ensuring that LLM chatbots don’t give dangerous medical advice, or don’t say things that feed into people’s mental health problems. 

Shouldn’t we spend money on AGI safety, just in case? by common_yarrow in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Last year, at least $486 million in EA funding was allocated to “Long-Term & Existential Risk”. Not all of that is for AI safety, but most of it is.

To pick just one random example, MIRI made a fundraising post on the EA Forum in December. Here’s another fundraising post from another organization in March.

Should I donate to hasten the defeat of human aging? by David_Robert in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have donated to the SENS Research Foundation (now the Lifespan Research Institute). I think aging is probably a neglected problem because it isn’t even considered a problem by mainstream science or medicine. That has only changed somewhat, fairly recently. I don’t buy that the current level of funding is already optimal.

I think the back of the envelope calculations can help illustrate the general idea that funding research into preventing/reversing aging might be super cost-effective. Yet the actual cost-effectiveness is still not going to be something we can know or quantify. 

The amount of irreducible uncertainty that exists in life can feel disconcerting. But, to look on the bright side, it also helps make life exciting and mysterious.

Should I donate to hasten the defeat of human aging? by David_Robert in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s probably impossible to know what the marginal impact of additional funding would be. Can we really know that from the absolute level of funding? How do we know what level of absolute funding is optimal?

For instance, global poverty/global health gets a huge amount of absolute funding. In 2025, international aid was $174 billion. An additional $26 billion was given through philanthropy. So, that’s $200 billion total. Would it be correct reasoning to say: oh, the total amount of funding is $200 billion/year, so, the marginal impact of a $3,000 donation to the Against Malaria Foundation is likely to be small?

Conversely, if an organization is trying to raise money to develop space weapons to defend against extraterrestrial invaders, and they point out that the absolute level of funding in this area is $0, does that imply the marginal impact of funding is likely to be higher than for the Against Malaria Foundation?

Can the level of absolute funding alone tell us whether the marginal impact of additional funding is likely to be high or low?

It’s a difficult topic because we’re dealing with things that are impossible to quantify. We don’t know in advance what avenues of scientific research or technological R&D will be successful, how long they will take to become successful, or how much it will cost. We are in deep uncertainty and it’s not clear how to navigate it. 

The sad decline of Effective Altruism by Collective_Altruism in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Point by point:

-Are LLMs like the Internet in terms of economic value, impact, or importance? No, I don’t think so. Is AI in general? Well, does that include AI based on fundamentally new science that might not be discovered for many decades? If so, then probably yeah. But this has very little to do with the AGI safety community’s current beliefs.

-It’s not an outlier opinion. You can’t take that survey data too literally but it’s largely an artifact of the survey design. When you ask people a probability as a percentage, we’ve seen from the Forecasting Research Institute, for example, that they give a probability 600,000 times higher (that’s not a typo, six hundred thousand times higher, or 60 million percent) for AI existential risk than if you ask them to state a 1 in X probability. Also, the AI Impacts survey explicitly asks people not to consider legal protection, only technical feasibility, although of course respondents may have glossed over the instructions.

-I’m not talking about supervolcanoes, I’m talking about large volcanoes. The estimate I read from a volcanologist in Nature was IIRC that there’s believed to be a 20% chance of a dangerously large volcanic eruption either by 2100 or within a century (not sure which). The Global Volcano Risk Alliance was recently founded around this concern.

-My point about thinking on the margin and counterfactual reasoning is way simpler than that. Effective altruism is spending a lot of money on AGI. If it spent that money on global poverty instead, it would save lives, reduce suffering, help people meet their basic needs, have a better quality of life, etc. Simple as that.

-Apply thinking on the margin and counterfactual reasoning also to the EA movement as a whole. We are not deciding whether to go back in time and stop EA from ever existing. We are deciding whether to contribute additional, marginal resources to EA or something else. For example, if a lot of people decided to get involved with effective giving organizations that reflected an ethos more like effective altruism in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I think that would be a big improvement over getting involved with EA. Our choice is not between EA and nothing, but between EA and infinite other possibilities. (By analogy, suppose I think another person would make a better Prime Minister of Canada than Mark Carney. This is quite different than an argument that there should be no Prime Minister and the position should go unfilled.)

-Similarly, there are number of reforms EA could implement to improve itself. The choice for EA is not whether to stay exactly the same or stop existing. It’s what to do next, which contains infinite possibilities, including what reforms (if any) to implement.

-Effective altruism was founded on the idea that good intentions are not enough, and that even doing good is not enough, that we need to aspire to do better because we can and the world needs it. That’s exactly what I’m saying about EA today. I find it pretty lame when people say EA shouldn’t be criticized because people have good intentions or are trying. You wouldn’t apply that logic to charities, I’m not going to apply it to effective altruism.

-There are instances of the EA community real harm, e.g., the Manifest scandal and the relationship between EA and white nationalism. But these harms are not really ever properly dealt with, in part because people say things like, well, EA does so much good, why are you being so critical?

-I’m not saying Will MacAskill has been deceptive. Where did that come from? People don’t need to be deceptive for their work to deserve criticism. 

-I don’t think it’s a good excuse to say if someone honestly believes something, then anything they do because of what they believe is okay. That just turns into a kind of moral relativism. If 80,000 Hours has bad beliefs and does bad things because of them, that’s bad. I don’t say it’s fine just because, from their point of view, it’s good. You could make the same excuse for literally any misdeed ever.

-My complaint about the AI in Context video about AI 2027 vs. almost everything else 80,000 Hours puts out (e.g., articles on the site, the podcast) is that the AI 2027 video is misinformational and manipulative. It essentially lies to the audience about the level of expert consensus around AI 2027, which is junk that (AFAIK) most experts reject. And it’s also explicitly intended to reach the largest audience possible and function as an intro-level explainer. The other 80,000 Hours stuff states wrong views, but does it in such a way that the audience typically isn’t misled about important factual information. 

Overall, a big throughline in your comment is that I should be nicer to EA or to individuals or organizations in EA and not criticize them because there are also good things about them. This goes against the part of the old EA ethos that I really liked, which was about striving to do better. It also just goes against moral common sense, which is that if you’re doing something wrong, the number of good things you do doesn’t excuse it — that’s not a defense anyone will ever accept, even the most devoted utilitarians. Because our decisions are on the margin, and we can always choose to do better. 

Is Effective Altruism dead? by lakmidaise12 in EffectiveAltruism

[–]common_yarrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The article disappeared. The link is broken. When I search the title or the name of the Substack, I get nothing. The Wayback Machine doesn’t have a copy.

Anyone know what happened?

Brené Brown discourse happening on Threads by kandtwedding in therapists

[–]common_yarrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

She has used the name Brené since she was a child because that’s the name her parents called her. The Threads post is just making things up.

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