They’re also not “random people”. I understand if you prefer to only read arguments from high prestige people rather than evaluating them on their merits, one has limited time after all. The Effective Altruist movement was founded by Toby Ord, an Oxford professor, and the associated Future of Humanity and Global Priorities Institutes are based there. Rob Wiblin, the founder of 80,000 hours has interviewed Rachel Glennerster, head of the UK’s Department for International Development and former director of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab and an effective altruist as well as Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. You can be confident that they’re not “random people”.
> Because if so, most likely there is little coherence between any of these pieces, meaning that people will really just listen to whichever article they agree with.
That’s ok. If people are persuaded they should work on important problems there are lots to go round. The world is getting better and better but we have a long way to go before fully automated space communism.
> Also, lot of this advice in particular, sucks:
"Reverse engineer the paths of famous people" - too bad these paths often start very young due to privilege and wealth, and also have huge amounts of luck involved.
But they don’t always. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Richard Branson did not grow up rich. There are in fact lessons in “You can start a business” or “Computer Science is a great area to study if you want to make enormous piles of money.”
> The two things you can't really control in this world: how rich your parents are, and how lucky you are.
How lucky you are is not entirely in your control but you can certainly influence it. Do more things, meet more people, work on hard problems; those are possible for a great many people and if you do them you will come across more opportunities. More generally “The harder I work the luckier I get.” as Samuel Goldwyn said.
> "Work to solve problems that aren't popular" - his/her advice is, work on an un-important problem because no one cares about it, so at least you'll make big contributions. But, ummm, no one will care. This goes common advice, which is to seek leverage in your role - that is, big effects through small contributions.
If you want to do good rather than gain plaudits working on neglected problems is great advice. Climate change has UN panels and mass demonstrations, detecting and reflecting potential asteroid impacts has the next best thing to nothing. If you work on the latter problem the chances of you making a big marginal impact are a great deal higher. More research money and researcher time goes to breast cancer than to curing ageing. The world has insane priorities and it’s entirely possible to make a big impact by working in a field that’s neglected.
> But they don’t always. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Richard Branson did not grow up rich.
Richard Branson was the son of a barrister....a career, in the UK, not known to be short of money. He was also sent to public school from an early age. I'll leave it at that.
Sergey Brin...well
"His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[5][8][9]" Hardly a blue collar career.
Lattry Page...again:
From the first para of his "early life" in wikipedia you can clearly see he had a fairly good advantage over the rest of us in his family life.
None of these folks may have been "rich" but they weren't poor either, and they had some fairly good connections to get them started in business life.
I fail to see how a barrister father helps with Branson’s first successful business venture, a magazine. Larry Page I absolutely concede, he seems to have had not just highly educated parents but a father in the field he eventually went into. Sergey Brin’s parents arrived in the US when he was six, as penniless refugees. If that qualifies as starting life on third base there are a lot of people endowed with similar or greater privilege.
I'm just kinda pointing out that he didn't exactly come from the the "black stuff"[0]. I'd be curious to know how much his fairly well off father loaned/donated to his Student magazine. Also:
"His grandfather, the Right Honourable Sir George Arthur Harwin Branson, was a judge of the High Court of Justice and a Privy Councillor. Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School, a prep school in Surrey, before briefly attending Cliff View House School in Sussex."
So, c'mon his family likely wasn't short of a bob or two.
> Sergey Brin’s parents arrived in the US when he was six, as penniless refugees.
Sure, but made pretty good due to financing by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They already by western standards had an academic prowess, and thus giving Sergey a fairly decent start in life educationally. By Soviet standards these were effectively middle class parents until the state caught wind of his father's intention to emigrate in 78 and by 79 they were in the US. Now I'm not suggesting this was an easy time for them, but they were hardly "penniless refugees" (and skill-less) upon arrival to the US.
They started out with some really good ideas a few years back, but the whole "effective altruism" movement seems to have been hijacked by a weird focus on avoiding a hypothetical malevolent AI. It's absolutely bizarre to me.
At least planet-killing asteroids are a real thing that's known to exist.
Not malevolent, indifferent. There are vastly more possible goals that lead to everyone dying than there are of something that takes account of human values at all whether to maximise negative or positive utility in some fashion. AI safety was one of the first EA causes but it’s hardly hijacked the community, just look at the last ten episodes of the podcast. One of the ways to be effective is to focus on neglected problems, and avoiding “everyone dies” even with small probability may have a lot of money allocated to it but it’s not enough and it’s not distributed by expected value, at all.
> #57 – Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in government
> #56 – Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it
> #55 – Mark Lutter & Tamara Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end poverty
> #54 – Askell, Brundage & Clark from OpenAI on publication norms, malicious uses of AI, and general-purpose learning algorithms
> #53 – Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism
> #52 – Prof Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society
> #51 – Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age
> #50 – Dr David Denkenberger on how to feed all 8 billion people through an asteroid/nuclear winter
> #49 – Dr Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for under $1 and other development best buys
> #48 – Brian Christian on better living through the wisdom of computer science
> #47 – Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles
The point is there's zero evidence to show "AI kills everyone" is even a small risk.
By your logic, my plan to dedicate $100m to making offerings to Beelzebub to spare humanity is outstanding value for money dedicated to a neglected long-tail risk. Beelzebub has very few worshipers, and the odds of his choosing to exterminate mankind are low, but if he did, it would be very bad for us.
No, it’s mostly moral philosophy arguments about why you should work on big, important problems
https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/
research on what those problems are
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
and career guides with 40-100 hours of research on some areas where people who want to make an impact could work
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
as well as a jobs board advertising open positions for people who want to do that.
https://80000hours.org/job-board/
They’re also not “random people”. I understand if you prefer to only read arguments from high prestige people rather than evaluating them on their merits, one has limited time after all. The Effective Altruist movement was founded by Toby Ord, an Oxford professor, and the associated Future of Humanity and Global Priorities Institutes are based there. Rob Wiblin, the founder of 80,000 hours has interviewed Rachel Glennerster, head of the UK’s Department for International Development and former director of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab and an effective altruist as well as Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. You can be confident that they’re not “random people”.
> Because if so, most likely there is little coherence between any of these pieces, meaning that people will really just listen to whichever article they agree with.
That’s ok. If people are persuaded they should work on important problems there are lots to go round. The world is getting better and better but we have a long way to go before fully automated space communism.
> Also, lot of this advice in particular, sucks: "Reverse engineer the paths of famous people" - too bad these paths often start very young due to privilege and wealth, and also have huge amounts of luck involved.
But they don’t always. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Richard Branson did not grow up rich. There are in fact lessons in “You can start a business” or “Computer Science is a great area to study if you want to make enormous piles of money.”
> The two things you can't really control in this world: how rich your parents are, and how lucky you are.
How lucky you are is not entirely in your control but you can certainly influence it. Do more things, meet more people, work on hard problems; those are possible for a great many people and if you do them you will come across more opportunities. More generally “The harder I work the luckier I get.” as Samuel Goldwyn said.
https://lifehacker.com/the-harder-i-work-the-luckier-i-get-5...
> "Work to solve problems that aren't popular" - his/her advice is, work on an un-important problem because no one cares about it, so at least you'll make big contributions. But, ummm, no one will care. This goes common advice, which is to seek leverage in your role - that is, big effects through small contributions.
If you want to do good rather than gain plaudits working on neglected problems is great advice. Climate change has UN panels and mass demonstrations, detecting and reflecting potential asteroid impacts has the next best thing to nothing. If you work on the latter problem the chances of you making a big marginal impact are a great deal higher. More research money and researcher time goes to breast cancer than to curing ageing. The world has insane priorities and it’s entirely possible to make a big impact by working in a field that’s neglected.