EA is currently still the final frontier for every vegan everywhere, for example, including those in professional networks such as government policy.
EA is the ultimate destination for virtually all vegans in the world right now
I’m not that familiar with the vegan/animal rights community. What do you mean by this, can you elaborate? I thought animal rights was a large movement in its own right, separate from EA?
That all makes sense. It does feel like this is worth a larger conversation now that people are thinking about it, and I don’t think you guys are the only ones.
I’m reminded of this Sam Altman tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/sama/status/1621621724507938816
“The EA and rationality communities might be incredibly net negative” is a hell of a take to be buried in a post about closing offices.
:-(
Quick warning about The Steerswoman: It’s a wonderful series that is incomplete, with a pretty big cliffhanger at the end of the last book. That book came out in 2004, and the last mention I can find on Rosemary Kirstein’s blog is in 2021, saying that she was “taking a breather” on the next one.
Therapy is already technically possible to automate with ChatGPT. The issue is that people strongly prefer to get it from a real human, even when an AI would in some sense do a “better” job.
EDIT: A recent experiment demonstrating this: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/chatgpt-ai-experiment-mental-health-tech-app-koko-rcna65110
It’s hard to predict what careers will make sense in an AI-inflected world where we’re not all dead. Still, I have the feeling that certain careers are better bets than others: basically Baumol-effect jobs where it is essential (or strongly preferred) that the person performing the task is actually a human being. So: therapist, tutor, childcare, that sort of thing.
There’s no contradiction. There are two competing sides of the evolutionary process: one side is racing to understand intentions as well as possible, the other side is racing to obscure its intentions, in this case by not having them consciously.
This is a recent story of this type: https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad
MCTB also has some more descriptions of bad meditation experiences.
I don’t think “taking ideas too seriously” is what went wrong here. Their actions are just too insane and frankly random and nonsensical to fit that model.
We’re doing a followup weekly accountability video call on Sundays at 6pm for just 15 minutes. (I’ve scheduled it to be every week from now until mid-June.) You’re welcome to join for the accountability call even if you weren’t able to make it to the meetup today; just DM me your email so I can add you to the invite.
Reading this post was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me, because I read it and went “ohhh, that’s the thing other people are talking about happening to them when they talk about what an easy trap it is to fall into scrupulosity and stuff.” This might also explain why I don’t feel that much at home with the EA community even though I’m on board with basically all the main propositions and have donated a bunch.
My brain just doesn’t do the “get hijacked by other people’s values” thing anymore. I think it got burned too much by me doing that in my late teens / early twenties and getting super depressed as a result, so now anytime I see a project that part of me wants to get excited about and subsumed by, my brain goes “Nope. Nah. Not messing with that.” To the point where it’s kind of hard for me to contemplate ambitious projects at all, because the part of me that refuses to be ruled will not submit to it.
Seems worth mentioning that Screwtape is now the ACX/Rationality global meetups coordinator, which I feel gives him a certain degree of moral authority to run this (not to mention the other stuff he mentions about how the LW team was aware of his plans).
Please note that this has been POSTPONED two weeks to Feb 5th (I have COVID and don’t want to give it to all of you).
Feedback form for those who attended: https://forms.gle/NJUJYHNnN8G9h2go9
Thank you for writing these up! I think they are good guidelines for making discussion more productive.
Are these / are you planning to put these in a top level post as well?