I agree ideally one would do gut stuff right both practically and epistemically. In my case, the tradeoff of productivity loss and loss in general reasoning ability in exchange for some epistemic gains wasn't worth it.
I think it's plausible that for people in a similar situation to me - people who are good at making decisions based on just analytic reasoning and have reason to think that they might be vulnerable if they were to try to believe things on a gut level as well as an analytic one - should consider not engaging certain EA topics on a gut level (I don't restrict this to AI safety - I know people who've had similar reactions thinking about nuclear risk and I've personally made the decision not to think about s-risk or animal welfare on a gut level either.)
I do want to emphasise that there was a tradeoff here - I think I have somewhat better AI safety takes as a result of thinking about AI safety on a gut level. The benefit though was reasonably small and not worth the other costs from an impartial welfareist perspective.
To be clear, I'm not at all recommending changing one's beliefs here. My language of gut belief vs cognitive beliefs was probably too imprecise. I'm recommending that, for some people, particularly if one is able to act on beliefs one doesn't intuitively feel, it's better not to try to intuitively feel those beliefs.
For some people, this may come at a cost to their ability to form true beliefs, and this is a difficult tradeoff. For me, I think, all things considered, intuiting beliefs has made me worse at forming true beliefs.
I did the summer fellowship last year and found it extremely useful in getting research experience, having space to think about x-risk questions with others who were also interested in these questions, and making very valuable connections. I also found the fellowship very enjoyable.
My experience with Atlas fellows (although there was substantial selection bias involved here) is that they're extremely high calibre.
I also think there's quite a lot of friction in getting LTFF funding - it takes quite a long time to come through I think is the main one. I think there are quite large benefits to being able to unilaterally decide to do some project and having the funding immediately available to do it.
Yeah, I'm pretty sceptical of the judgement of experienced community builders on the sorts of questions like effect of different strategies on community epistemics. I think if I frame this as an intervention "changing community building in x way will improve EA community epistemic" I have a strong prior that it has no effect because most interventions people try to have no or small effect (see famous graph of global health interventions.)
I think the following are some examples of places where you'd think people would have good intuitions about what works well but they don't
Parenting. We used to just systematically abuse children and think it was good for them (e.g denying children the ability to see their parents in the hospital). There's a really interesting passage in Invisible China where the authors describe loving grandparents deeply damaging the grandchildren they care for by not giving them enough stimulation as infants.
Education. It's really really hard to find education interventions which work in rich countries. It's also interesting that in the US there's lots of opposition from teachers over teaching phonics despite it being one of the few rich country education interventions with large effect sizes (although it's hard to judge how much of this is for self-interested reasons)
I think it's unclear how well you'd expect people to do on the economics examples I gave. I probably would have expected people to do well with cash transfers since in fact lots of people do get cash transfers (e.g pensions, child benefits, inheritance) and do ok with minimum wage since at least some fraction of people have a sense of how the place they work for hires people.
Psychotherapy. We only good treatments that worked for specific mental health conditions (rather than to generally improve people's lives, I haven't read anything on this) other than mild-moderate depression when we started doing RCTs. I'm most familiar with OCD treatment specifically and the current best practice was only developed in the late 60s.
I suppose I think the example I gave where someone I know doing selections for an important EA program didn't include questions about altruism because they thought that adverse selection effects were sufficiently bad.
Maybe, I meant to pick examples where I thought the consensus of economists was clear (in my mind it's very clearly the consensus that having a low minimum wage has no employment effects.)
I agree ideally one would do gut stuff right both practically and epistemically. In my case, the tradeoff of productivity loss and loss in general reasoning ability in exchange for some epistemic gains wasn't worth it.
I think it's plausible that for people in a similar situation to me - people who are good at making decisions based on just analytic reasoning and have reason to think that they might be vulnerable if they were to try to believe things on a gut level as well as an analytic one - should consider not engaging certain EA topics on a gut level (I don't restrict this to AI safety - I know people who've had similar reactions thinking about nuclear risk and I've personally made the decision not to think about s-risk or animal welfare on a gut level either.)
I do want to emphasise that there was a tradeoff here - I think I have somewhat better AI safety takes as a result of thinking about AI safety on a gut level. The benefit though was reasonably small and not worth the other costs from an impartial welfareist perspective.
To be clear, I'm not at all recommending changing one's beliefs here. My language of gut belief vs cognitive beliefs was probably too imprecise. I'm recommending that, for some people, particularly if one is able to act on beliefs one doesn't intuitively feel, it's better not to try to intuitively feel those beliefs.
For some people, this may come at a cost to their ability to form true beliefs, and this is a difficult tradeoff. For me, I think, all things considered, intuiting beliefs has made me worse at forming true beliefs.
EA twitter is great.
I did the summer fellowship last year and found it extremely useful in getting research experience, having space to think about x-risk questions with others who were also interested in these questions, and making very valuable connections. I also found the fellowship very enjoyable.
Great post!
My experience with Atlas fellows (although there was substantial selection bias involved here) is that they're extremely high calibre.
I also think there's quite a lot of friction in getting LTFF funding - it takes quite a long time to come through I think is the main one. I think there are quite large benefits to being able to unilaterally decide to do some project and having the funding immediately available to do it.
Yeah this seems right.
I think I don't understand the point you're making with your last sentence.
Yeah, I'm pretty sceptical of the judgement of experienced community builders on the sorts of questions like effect of different strategies on community epistemics. I think if I frame this as an intervention "changing community building in x way will improve EA community epistemic" I have a strong prior that it has no effect because most interventions people try to have no or small effect (see famous graph of global health interventions.)
I think the following are some examples of places where you'd think people would have good intuitions about what works well but they don't
I suppose I think the example I gave where someone I know doing selections for an important EA program didn't include questions about altruism because they thought that adverse selection effects were sufficiently bad.
Maybe, I meant to pick examples where I thought the consensus of economists was clear (in my mind it's very clearly the consensus that having a low minimum wage has no employment effects.)