JoshYou

Data Analyst @ Epoch AI
588 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Brooklyn, NY, USA

Comments
74

I'm not proposing any sort of hard rule against concluding that some people's lives are net negative/harmful. As a heuristic, you shouldn't think it's bad to save the lives of ordinary people who seem to be mostly reasonable, but who contribute to harmful animal agriculture.

The pluralism here is between human viewpoints in general. Very naively, if you think every human has equal insight into morality you should maximize the lifespan and resources that go to any and all humans without considering at all what they will do. That's too much pluralism, of course, but I think refraining from cheaply saving human lives because they'll eat meat is too far in the other direction.

Answer by JoshYou11
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I think if you put some weight on viewpoint pluralism you should mostly not conclude that other peoples' lives aren't valuable because those people will make the wrong moral choices.

Toby Ord's existential risk estimates in The Precipice were for risk this century (by 2100) IIRC. That book was very influential in x-risk circles around the time it came out, so I have a vague sense that people were accepting his framing and giving their own numbers, though I'm not sure quite how common that was. But these days most people talking about p(doom) probably haven't read The Precipice, given how mainstream that phrase has become.

Also, in some classic hard-takeoff + decisive-strategic-advantage scenarios, p(doom) in the few years after AGI would be close to p(doom) in general, so these distinctions don't matter that much. But nowadays I think people are worried about a much greater diversity of threat models.

Answer by JoshYou10
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I'm probably "on the clock" about 45 hours per week - I try to do about 8 hours a day but I go over more often than not. But maybe only about 25-35 hours of that is focused work, using a relatively loose sense of "focused" (not doing something blatantly non-work, like reading Twitter or walking around outside). I think my work output is constrained by energy levels, not clock time, so I don't really worry about working longer hours or trying to stay more focused, but I do try to optimize work tasks and non-work errands to reduce their mental burdens.

Thanks for writing this, I think it's important that people at least understand the basics. EA blogs used to contain much more personal finance advice. In the past I've wondered whether EAs who joined more recently were less likely to know about personal finance as a result.

Answer by JoshYou9
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I think the benefits of living in a hub city (SF, NYC, Boston, or DC) are very large and are well worth the higher costs, assuming it's financially feasible at all, especially if you currently have no personal network in any city. You'll have easy access to interesting and like-minded people, which will have many many diffuse impact and personal benefits.

Also, those are probably the only American cities besides maybe Chicago and Philly where's it is easy to live without a car (and arguably it's only NYC). 

I loved this Wikitravel article about American culture for this same reason.

Answer by JoshYou1
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What makes someone good at AI safety work? How does he get feedback on whether his work is useful, makes sense, etc?

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