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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   34650 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Replying to myself with a literal shower thought: From first principles, you wouldn't expect the existential risk/AI people to be in the same movement as the animal welfare/bednets people, but you would expect the existential risk/AI people to have more tech billionaire funding, and you would expect the animal welfare/bednets people to have a higher proportion of women. Putting them in the same movement allows the AI people to get dates from the bednets people, and gives the bednets people access to tech billionaire funding. Aesthetically, such an arrangement seems deformed and ugly, but it could plausibly be mutually beneficial to the causes themselves as well as the people within them. The AI funding lost to bednets and animal welfare could easily be made up for if working on AI alignment provided a much easier way to get sex/dates/married than a higher-paid job in AI capabilities, allowing the field to attract better talent than it would even if all of the available EA funding went to alignment.

From first principles, you wouldn't expect the existential risk/AI people to be in the same movement as the animal welfare/bednets people, but you would expect the existential risk/AI people to have more tech billionaire funding

I'm not sure I agree. The first principals of EA are more or less utilitarianism, and the thing uniting the EA grab bag of areas of concern is that they have high potential to affect overall utility of humans and other beings capable of suffering.

I also think that, for all the attention it gets, the existential risk/AI part is just a loud but marginal part of EA. Most people associated with EA donate to the more tangible "bednets to prevent malaria" or animal welfare stuff, and not the more esoteric causes, if I remember polling from a while back.

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