Incidentally though, asking "How many lives could have been saved if the hundreds of millions had been donated to other causes, like global health?" is an EA question!
Welcome to the community!👋 You should show up at the next EA Global conference☺️
While I appreciate the ultimate goal of effective altruism (which is to maximize the amount of good one does over the course of one's career, or something like that), I find it impossibly hard to prove that it works (i.e., given a set of largely aligned goals as nodes at the end of a graph, how do we ensure that people's actions as directed edges do not interact incoherently at certain intersections?) I prefer a "greedy approach" where we focus on doing good in our local communities, caring for friends, colleagues, families, and neighbors, which creates a kind of luminal and incremental growth as spheres. EA also feels a bit cultish, and a bit elitist (I could not bring myself to actually apply for a scholarship, although, God knows, I need some support in my life right now as I transition into AI safety, being a PhD already).
Given that the CEOs of all the big AI labs said "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." I am glad a lot of resources are being spent on this.
Probably I would like others to be spending money, but you only get what you get.
The first question to ask is: Are existential risks from AI real? Whether AI Safety merits funding rests on this point.
I liked this, fairly well informed.
Incidentally though, asking "How many lives could have been saved if the hundreds of millions had been donated to other causes, like global health?" is an EA question!
Welcome to the community!👋 You should show up at the next EA Global conference☺️
You've only scratched the surface on MIRI, Yudkowsky and Muehlhauser. Check these out:
https://archive.ph/Kvfus
https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buterin-ce4681a7dbe
While I appreciate the ultimate goal of effective altruism (which is to maximize the amount of good one does over the course of one's career, or something like that), I find it impossibly hard to prove that it works (i.e., given a set of largely aligned goals as nodes at the end of a graph, how do we ensure that people's actions as directed edges do not interact incoherently at certain intersections?) I prefer a "greedy approach" where we focus on doing good in our local communities, caring for friends, colleagues, families, and neighbors, which creates a kind of luminal and incremental growth as spheres. EA also feels a bit cultish, and a bit elitist (I could not bring myself to actually apply for a scholarship, although, God knows, I need some support in my life right now as I transition into AI safety, being a PhD already).
Given that the CEOs of all the big AI labs said "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." I am glad a lot of resources are being spent on this.
Probably I would like others to be spending money, but you only get what you get.
> Jaan Tallinn offered one reflection...
Maybe Jaan Tallinn should start reflecting about his own role in EA-scandals too since he kickstarted Alameda and FTX with his loan of 110 million dollars worth of ether: https://www.semafor.com/article/12/08/2022/alameda-research-lost-money-in-its-early-days