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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

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Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#291

Post by llamaimperative »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #271
coldtea wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...

It's honestly kinda unsettling how many bizarre sci-fi takes on AGI have gained popular plausibility since the new AI marketing boom. Potent kool-aid.

Not weird at all. When (probably when, not if) we create it, we will quickly be interacting with an entity with a similar power imbalance as we have to ants. No one knows exactly what the outcome will be, even less so what to do about it, but surely the kool-aid is watching accelerating progress toward this state and believing either it won’t happen or it won’t be interesting/surprising.

Disclaimer: I don’t think this is coming soon per se, but 1) I don’t know for sure that it’s not and 2) it’s definitely coming at some point, if humans manage our other existential risks long enough.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#292

Post by bawolff »

tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

This seems a bit unfair

> they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.

Most groups of people are like this to some extent. Most corporations are like this. Cultiness is a spectrum, and the comparison to scientology is a bit much as scientology does much worse things than that.

> Over and over I keep coming across EA arguments that could be used to justify almost literally any behavior, so long as you can tell yourself a story about having a long-term positive goal.

What you describe is a little too outcome based for my preferences, but you act as if outcome based morality isn't a common view. That viewing your moral standing as what the result of your actions are; how much happiness you have caused minus how much suffering is instrinsically unreasonable.

As far as "telling yourself a story" - that's how all morality works. There is no santa clause making a list of naughty or nice. You have to judge for yourself. Sure there are other metrics. I personally value intention, acting with honour, and ensuring the things you do can be universalized, but at the end of the day i am the one who has to verify of i a living up to my own moral precepts. If i wanted to delude myself into self-justifying something bad, it would probably be pretty easy as there is nobody but myself to stop me. I would even argue that is what being moral is: how resistant you are to petty self-justification.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#293

Post by lurker616 »

bootsmann wrote: post #261
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. I have yet to see anyone who argues this point show sufficient knowledge of the current state of AI research to credibly make it. If you live in the fantasy world where AI is just an arbitrary construct that can do whatever task by itself it is an…

How about a simple example - train a model on outputting code which:

- scans open network ports through google dns

- copies itself and the model to that location

- whenever it detects a sigkill or file delete, scan again and save itself somewhere else

Now you've got an autonomous virus that will never die. Add any other power-seeking and self-replicating strategies using AI modules - the task could be "generate code to run as many duplicate processes as possible" or "generate code to find other floating AI modules like me and share model weights with them". Codex might not be there yet but we're getting close.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#294

Post by cactusplant7374 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #271
coldtea wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...

It's honestly kinda unsettling how many bizarre sci-fi takes on AGI have gained popular plausibility since the new AI marketing boom. Potent kool-aid.

The question is why do programmers believe they know more than Chomsky?

The AI we have now is engineering and not science. Don’t you need science to create AI? Don’t you need to understand something fundamental about the brain?

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#295

Post by codefreeordie »

dang wrote: post #190
codefreeordie wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The politics of your comment completely elude me; I couldn't care less about your view or theirs, have no idea what "effective altruism" is, and learned nothing from your post since it was purely snark and swipes. All I care about is that you broke the HN guidelines. You've been doing that repeatedly (e.g. posting informationless flamebait) on lots of different topics. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban…

[flagged]

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#296

Post by concordDance »

npteljes wrote: post #217
hardwaregeek wrote: post #15

Maybe this is superficial, but I was put off by the name "effective altruism". By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. Especially when that notion is pushed by people who overlap with the rationalist subculture, another arrogantly named group. In general I find it concerning when t…

>most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism. I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't…

> I don't like the EA people either.

Do you actually know any? The ones I know in real life are wonderful people. Intelligent, caring and hard working.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#297

Post by bawolff »

akira2501 wrote: post #135
wombatpm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more Ends Justify the Means when you start talking about future lives saved

It's the modern version of a religious indulgence. Worse, as you point out, all it offers is more undue and unjustified meddling in peoples lives to make up for unfair and injudicious meddling in other peoples financial affairs. More cynically, you're giving hand outs to people who yet need to learn to be productive, while destroying the lives of people who were trying to leverage their own productivity. I think it h…

You seem to be objecting to alturism not effective alturism.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#298

Post by quickthrower2 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #152
hardwaregeek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that. Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in…

The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater. But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would…

The same argument means that any luxury that any person indulges in. Let’s say thanksgiving, christmas, craft beer, VR headset, calling their mother, etc. is costing X lives (X is not necessary integer) and so isn’t the rationalist thing to do.

“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…”

Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#299

Post by simonh »

coldtea wrote: post #254
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...

Said in one sentence what took me 4 paragraphs.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#300

Post by synu »

tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

If some of you have to die in order to generate a significant charitable outcome, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay. /s
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