I'm considering of doing a sort of pub quiz (quiz night, trivia night, bar trivia) for EA in the future. If you have some random trivia knowledge that you think would be good for such an occasion, please send it to me.

I'm not so much looking for things along the lines of "prove how brilliantly intelligent" you are, but more so fun/goofy/silly trivia with a bit of EA vibes mixed in. Hard/obscure questions are okay,^[1] easy questions are okay, serious questions are okay,^[2] goofy questions are okay^[3], and tricky questions without any clear answer are welcome.^[4] Questions with pedantic, and debatable answers are also okay.

Ideally, the questions will have some sort of EA-relevance, but I'm not planning to be strict about this. Some questions that are more 'general knowledge' might end up happening. Maybe this would be online, or maybe it would be at an in-person event; that is yet to be decided.

1. ^{^}

   Immanuel Kant was a man of habit. Every morning he did the same thing. There was one day which he broke his routine habits; why?

2. ^{^}

   What for-profit company has done the most to decrease human access to food, water, and medicine?

3. ^{^}

   What percent of EAG attendees wear animal costumes (either partial or full) while attending EAG?

4. ^{^}

   Which country has the longest coastline?

That strikes me as very reasonable, especially considering the likelihood and foreseeability. Especially since the education examples you mentioned really are currently capable of transforming parts of the world.

I suspect this might be two distinct uses of "AI" as a term. While GPT-type chatbots can be helpful (such as in the educational examples you refer to), they are very different from artificial general intelligence of the type that most AI alignment/safety work is expecting to happen.

To paraphrase AI Snake Oil,^[1] it is like one person talking about vehicles while discussing about how improved spacecraft will open up new possibilities for humanity, and a second person mentions how vehicles are also helping his area because cars are becoming more energy efficient. While they do both fall under the category of "vehicles," they are quite different concepts. So I'm wondering if this might be verging near to talking past each other territory.

1. ^{^}

   The full quote is this: "Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun “vehicle.” They use that word to refer to cars, buses, bikes, spacecraft, and all other ways of getting from place A to place B. Conversations in this world are confusing. There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks. There is a breakthrough in rocketry, but the media focuses on how vehicles have gotten faster—so people call their car dealer (oops, vehicle dealer) to ask when faster models will be available. Meanwhile, fraudsters have capitalized on the fact that consumers don’t know what to believe when it comes to vehicle technology, so scams are rampant in the vehicle sector. Now replace the word “vehicle” with “artificial intelligence,” and we have a pretty good description of the world we live in."

I don't have an answer to your question, but this post from a few years ago might help build context and understanding.

The 2013 debate between Gary Francione and Bruce Friedrich was also quite illuminating  to watch (although I need to remind myself that just because one side is represented by a person who appears more composed or who is a better debater, it doesn't demonstrate that side's truth/accuracy).

Superficially, it sounds similar to the idea of charter cities. The idea does seem (at face value) to have some merit, but I suspect that the execution of the idea is where lots of problems occur.

So, practically aside, it seems like a massive amount of effort/investment/funding would allow a small country to progress rapidly toward less suffering and better life.

My general impression is that "we don't have a randomized control trial to prove the efficacy of this intervention" isn't the most common reason why people don't get helped. Maybe some combination of lack of resources, politics & entrenched interests, and trade-offs are the big ones? I don't know, but I'm sure some folks around here have research papers and textbooks about it.

My gut likes the idea. (but I tend to be biased in favor of community-building, fun, complementary things)

The two concerns that leap to mind are:

• How to prevent this from simply being a popularity contest? What criteria would the voting/selection be based off of?
• Would this simply end up rewarding people who have been lucky enough to be born in the right place, or to have chosen the right college major?

I suspect that there are ways to avoid these stumbling blocks, but I don't know enough about the context/field/area to know what they are. Overall, I'd like to see people explore it and see if it would be workable.

I'm not sure if "fun" is quite what I would want on the EA Forum... but maybe something like "friendliness" or "welcomingness"? It is possible that the best situation would be have the EA Forum be 2/10 on this metric, and various EA Facebook groups or Slack workspaces be 5/10 on this metric, and in-person meetups be 8/10 on this metric.

I do think that the reactions on the EA Forum of heart, helpful, insightful, and changed my mind have made the EA forum a bit more friendly. It makes it easy for people to give small compliment or to express gratitude.

I want to provide a little bit of narrative. At an AVA Conference I took some silly pictures with people; we still wanted to cause change in food systems and reduce the number of animals that suffer, and we took 60 seconds to giggle and pose for pictures. At an EA book discussion group folks were smiling and friendly while discussing moral philosophy and career issues. At an EAG conference I got a group of people together to have afternoon tea and we had light-hearted chitchat, even through we all desperately wanted to reduce suffering in the world. At an EAGx conference folks got together for drinks and dinner, with lots of laughter and non-serious topics.

Tentatively, I want to say that it is possible for serious pursuits and for enjoyment/fun to co-exist, although I'm less confident if is is realistic to expect a large number of strangers to do so on an internet forum. The type of fun probably matters a lot: I don't want to see the EA Forum become filled with memes and jokes, even if they are EA-relevant.

I try not to do too much self-promotion, but I genuinely think that the book clubs I run are good options, and I'd be happy to have you join us. Libraries sometimes have in-person book clubs, so if you want something away from the internet you could ask your local librarian about book clubs. And sometimes some simple Googling is helpful too: various cities have some variation of 'book club in a bar,' 'sci-fi book club,' 'professional development book club,' etc. But I think it is fairly uncommon to have a book club that is online and relatively accessible, so I think that mine are a bit special (although I am certainly not unbiased).

I've browsed through bookclubs.com a bit, but my memory is that the majority of the book clubs on there seem to be some combination of fiction, local to a specific place, focused on topics that aren't interesting to me, or defunct.

Another option that I haven't really tried: instead of having a regular club, you could just occasionally make a post "I want to read [BOOK] and talk about it with people, so I'll make a Google Calendar event for [DATE]. If you want to read it and talk about it, please join." At least one person is doing that in the EA Anywhere Slack workspace in the #book-club channel. The trick is to find a book that is popular enough, and then to accept the fact that 50% to 80% of the people who RSVP simply won't show up. But it could be a more iterative/incremental approach to get started.

I'd be curious to learn a little more about this. Do you have any vague impressions about leftist perceptions of EA as conservative? Would these be perspectives like the following? (none of the following are real quotes, nor are things I believe; they are my simplistic minimum viable attempt to have a placeholder for leftist perceptions of EA as conservative)

EAs think it is okay to eat meat if you don't cause any pain to the animal (such as dumpster diving or eating roadkill), and eating meat is inherently a conservative-coded thing.

EAs don't focus on identity politics as much as I think is appropriate, and thus they are conservative.

EAs allow people to speak even if they disagree with the perspectives, and any good liberal would protest and de-platform a speaker with contrary opinions.

EAs like Peter Singer, who I interpret as saying we should kill disabled people because their lives are worth less

EAs are associated with Bay Area progressive tech culture, which is often conservative and regressive.