Regarding the TCS PhD, is it possible to work on it remotely from London?

Another relevant article on "machine psychology" https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13988 (interestingly, it's by a co-author of Peter Singer's first AI paper)

You seem to have written against proposing norms in the past. So apologies for my mistake and I'm glad that's not your intention. 

To be clear, I think we should be free to write as we wish. Regardless, it still seems to me that voicing support for an already quite popular position on restricting expression comes with the risk of strengthening associated norms and bringing about the multiple downsides I mentioned.

Among the downsides, yes, the worry that strengthening strong norms dealing with 'offensive' expression can lead to unfair punishments. This is not a baseless fear. There are historical examples of norms on restricting expression leading to unfair punishments; strong religious and political norms have allowed religious inquisitors and political regimes to suppress dissenting voices.

I don't think EA is near the worst forms of it. In my previous comment, I was only pointing to a worrying trend towards that direction. We may (hopefully) never arrive at the destination. But along the way, there are more mild excesses. There have been a few instances where, I believe, the prevailing culture has resulted in disproportionate punishment either directly from the community or indirectly from external entities whose actions were, in part, enabled by the community's behavior. I probably won't discuss this too publicly but if necessary we can continue elsewhere.

It seems that you, correct me if I'm wrong, along with many who agree with you, are looking to further encourage a norm within this domain (on the basis of at least one example, i.e. the one example from the blog post, that challenged it).

This might benefit some individuals by reducing their emotional distress. But strengthening such a norm that already seems strong/largely uncontroversial/to a large extent popular in the context of this community, especially one within this domain, makes me concerned in several ways:

• Norms like these that target expression considered offensive seem to often evolve into/come in the form of restrictions that require enforcement. In these cases, enforcement often results in:
  • "Assholes"/"bad people" (and who may much later even be labeled "criminals" through sufficient gradual changes) endure excessive punishments, replacing what could have been more proportionate responses. Being outside of people's moral circles/making it low status to defend them makes it all too easy.
  • Well-meaning people get physically or materially (hence also emotionally) punished for honest mistakes. This may happen often - as it's easy for humans to cause accidental emotional harm.
  • Enforcement can be indeed more directed but this is not something we can easily control. Even if it is controlled locally, it can go out of control elsewhere.
• Individuals who are sociopolitically savvy and manipulative may exploit their environment's aversion of relatively minor issues to their advantage. This allows them to appear virtuous without making substantial contributions or sacrifices.
  • At best, this is inefficient. At worst, to say the least - it's dangerous.
• Restrictions in one domain often find their way into another. Particularly, it's not challenging to impose restrictions that are in line with illegitimate authority as well as power gained through intimidation.
  • This can lead people to comfortably dismiss individuals who raise valid but uncomfortable concerns, by labeling them as mere "assholes". To risk a controversial, but probably illuminating example, people often unfairly dismiss Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an "Islamophobe".
  • This burdens the rest of society with those other restrictions and their consequences. Those other restrictions can range from being a mere annoyance to being very bad.

I'd be less worried (and possibly find it good) if such a norm was strengthened in a context where it isn't strong, which gives us more indication that the changes are net positive. However, it's evident that a large number of individuals here already endorse some version of this norm, and it is quite influential. Enthusiasm could easily become excessive. I sincerely doubt most people intend to bring about draconian restrictions/punishments (on this or something else), but those consequences can gradually appear despite that.

FWIW, Brian Tomasik does a fuzzies/utilons split thing too. One justification is that it helps avoid cognitive dissonance between near-term causes and, in his mind, more effective longtermist causes.

My position, in contrast, is that I acknowledge the epistemic force of far-future arguments but maintain some commitment to short-term helping as an intrinsic spiritual impulse. Along the lines of Occam's imaginary razor, this allows me to avoid distorting my beliefs about the far-future question based on emotional pulls to stop torture-level suffering in the present. In the face of emotion-based cognitive dissonance, it's often better to change your values than to change your beliefs.

It might be overly confusing to call it "changing [my ideal] values". It's more that I have preferences for both. Some that seem like ones I would ideally like to keep (minimizing suffering in expectation), but some that as a human, for better or worse, I have (drives to reduce suffering in front of me, sticking to certain principles...). 

If the price of a split in donations/personal focus results in me becoming more effective at the far-future stuff that I think is more important for utilons, in a way that makes those utilons go up, then that seems worth it.

Yeah, in a scenario with "nation-controlled" AGI, it's hard to see people from the non-victor sides not ending up (at least) as second-class citizens - for a long time. The fear/lack of guarantee of not ending up like this makes cooperation on safety more difficult, and the fear also kind of makes sense? Great if governance people manage to find a way to alleviate that fear - if it's even possible. Heck, even allies of the leading state might be worried - doesn't feel too good to end up as a vassal state. (Added later (2023-06-02): It may be a question that comes up as AGI discussions become mainstream.)

Wouldn't rule out both American and Chinese outside of respective allied territory being caught in the crossfire of a US-China AI race.

Political polarization on both sides in the US is also very scary.

I generally agree with the meritocratic perspective. It seems a good way (maybe the best?) to avoid tit-for-tat cycles of "those holding views popular in some context abuse power -> those who don't like the fact that power was abused retaliate in other contexts -> in those other contexts, holding those views results in being harmed by people in those other contexts who abuse power".

Good point about the priors. Strong priors about these things seem linked to seeing groups as monoliths with little within-group variance in ability. Accounting for the size of variance seems under-appreciated in general. E.g., if you've attended multiple universities, you might notice that there's a lot of overlap between people's "impressiveness", despite differences in official university rankings. People could try to be less confused by thinking in terms of mean/median, variance, and distributions of ability/traits more, rather than comparing groups by their point estimates.

Some counter-considerations:

• Religion and race seem quite different. Religion seems to come with a bunch of normative and descriptive beliefs that could affect job performance - especially in EA - and you can't easily find out about those beliefs in a job interview. You could go from one religion to another, from no religion to some religion, or some religion to no religion. The (non)existence of that process might give you valuable information about how that person thinks about/reflects on things and whether you consider that to be good thinking/reflection. 
  • For example, from a irreligious perspective, it might be considered evidence of poor thinking if a candidate thinks the world will end in ways consistent with those described in the Book of Revelation, or think that we're less likely to be in a simulation because a benevolent, omnipotent being wouldn't allow that to happen to us.
  • Anecdotally, on average, I find that people who have gone through the process of abandoning the religion they were raised with, especially at a young age, to be more truth-seeking and less influenced by popular, but not necessarily true, views.
• Religion seems to cover too much. Some forms of it seems to offer immunity to act in certain ways, and the opportunity to cheaply attack others if they disagree with it. In other communities, religion might be used to justify poor material/physical treatment of some groups of people, e.g. women and gay people. While I don't think being accepting of those religions will change the EA community too much, it does say something to/negatively affect the wider world if there's sufficient buy-in/enough of an alliance/enough comfort with them.

But yeah, generally, sticking to the Schelling point of "don't discriminate by religion (or lack-thereof)" seems good. Also, if someone is religious and in EA (i.e., being in an environment that doesn't have too many people who think like them), it's probably good evidence that they really want to do good and are willing to cooperate with others to do so, despite being different in important ways. It seems a shame to lose them.

I've been doing a 1-year "conversion master's" in CS (I previously studied biochemistry). I took as many AI/ML electives as I'm permitted to/can handle, but I missed out on an intro to RL course. I'm planning to take some time to (semi-independently) up-skill in AI safety after graduating. This might involve some projects and some self-study.

It seems like a good idea to be somewhat knowledgeable on RL basics going forward. I've taken (paid) accredited, distance/online courses (with exams etc.) concurrently with my main degree and found them to be higher quality than common perception suggests - although it does feel slightly distracting to have more on my plate.

Is it worth doing a distance/online course in RL (e.g. https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xcs234-reinforcement-learning ) as one part of the up-skilling period following graduation? Besides the Stanford online one that I've linked, are there any others that might be high quality and worth looking into? Otherwise, are there other resources that might be good alternatives?

So in my comment I was only trying to say that the comment you responded to seemed to point to something true about the preferences of women in general vs. the preferences of women who are "highly educated urban professional-managerial class liberals in the developed world".

Such perspectives seem easy to miss for people (in general/of all genders, not just women) belonging to the elite U.S./U.S.-adjacent progressive class - a class that has disproportionate influence over other cultures, societies etc., which makes it seem worthwhile to discuss in spaces where many belong to this class.

About your other point, I guess I don't have much of an opinion on it (yet), but my initial impression is that it seems like openness comes in degrees. Compared to other movements, I also rarely observe 'EA' openly declaring itself hostile to something (e.g. "fraud is unacceptable" but there aren't really statements on socialism, conservatism, religions, culture...).

There might be differences between identifying with feminism and 'being open to scholars of feminism, queer studies and gender studies' though. Most Americans probably aren't familiar with academia to know of its latest thinking.

And like how different people have different notions of what counts as discriminatory, racist, sexist, or not discriminatory, racist, sexist, it's possible that different people have different notions of what 'feminism' means. (Some might consider it a position supporting equal rights between the sexes - others a position supporting women's rights. They might be thinking of the second, third, or fourth wave etc.) 

The supplementary document containing the survey questions suggests the question asked was "How well, if at all, do each of the following describe you?" followed by "Environmentalist", "Feminist" and "A supporter of gun rights" (in random order), which doesn't seem to specify one specific notion of 'feminist' for survey participants to consider. 

Although, to be fair, maybe there's actually more agreement among Americans on the definition of feminist (in the year of the survey, 2020) than I'm expecting.

In any case, I expect the differences in preferences of elite Anglosphere/U.S. women, and not-necessarily-elite, non-Anglosphere/non-U.S. women in general (e.g., in Europe, Asia, South America) would still be quite large.