weird stuff rationalists/EAs say

Learnings from a week in the wet lab — LessWrong

I work on biosafety evals for LLMs, but have never set foot in a wet lab. This seems kind of silly, so this week I decided to change that.  …

Action Plan to increase the safety and security of advanced AI

The first U.S. government-commissioned assessment on catastrophic national security risks from advanced AI on the path to AGI.

Towards a Weaker Longtermism

A key (new-ish) proposition in EA discussions is "Strong Longtermism," that the vast majority of the value in the universe is in the far future, and…

Overcoming Bias : Tiptoe Or Dash To Future?

To test who should TA elite classes, new physics grad students at U Chicago in ’81 were asked to pick a physics problem and explain its solution to the group.  I did well by picking the question: should you walk fast or slow if you want to get the least water on your front while moving a certain distance in the rain.  The answer is: move as fast as you can.

I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried.

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Anonymous EA comments

After seeing some of the debate last month about effective altruism's information-sharing / honesty / criticism norms (see Sarah Constantin's follow-…

Effective Altruism is self-recommending

Recently we bought my 3-year-old daughter a "behavior chart," in which she can earn stickers for achievements like not throwing tantrums, eating fruits and vegetables, and going to sleep on time. We successfully impressed on her that a major goal each day was to earn as many stickers as possible.

Effective Altruism: doing transhumanism better

Effective Altruism (EA) is a Trojan horse for transhumanism, through which EA movement leaders and funders aim to naturalize transhumanism as the logical extension of the existing global aid and development sector. This paper traces transhumanism's mainstreaming, first via its rebranding as a humanitarian effort to save lives, protect vulnerable populations, and ensure global flourishing (what I term transhumanitarianism), and later by embedding transhumanitarianism in EA (now under the rubric of longtermism). A key component of this strategy was inverting transhumanism's techno-optimism to instead focus on safety and preventing existential risks ( x-risk ) from emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology, while simultaneously advocating for the creation of these same technologies. The paper focuses on some components of this strategy: the use of inoculation, speculative ethics, anticipatory governance, and the mobilization of apocalyptic discourse as means for producing material outcomes in the form of policy and research agendas.

Effective Altruism’s Bait-and-Switch: From Global Poverty To AI Doomerism

The Effective Altruism movement Effective Altruism (EA) is typically explained as a philosophy that encourages individuals to do the “most good” with their resources (money, skills). Its “effective…