Well, we're back in the game with a spicy one. Was EA a front for AI safety from the beginning? Did the leaders care not a wit for global poverty? Is Ben going to throw himself out window if Vaden keeps this up?

We discuss

• Feedback on our introspection episode
• The motives of the EA founders
• The felicia forum
• Is this a conspiracy theory?
  
• EA's strategic ambiguity
• Bostromism, transhumanism, and AI safety
• EA funding
• The public/core divide and the funnel model

Quotes

new effective altruists tend to start off concerned about global poverty or animal suffering and then hear, take seriously, and often are convinced by the arguments for existential risk mitigation
- Will MacAskill

Existential risk isn’t the most useful public face for effective altruism – everyone inc[l]uding Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees about that
- Scott Alexander, 2015

Utilitymonster: GWWC is explicitly poverty-focused but high impact careers (HIC) is not. In fact, hardcore members of GWWC are heavily interested in x-risk, and I estimate that 10-15% of its general membership is as well. I’d take them seriously as a group for promoting utilitarianism in general.
I’m a GWWC leader.
[Redacted]: but HIC always seems to talk about things in terms of “lives saved”, ive never heard them mentioning other things to donate to. […]
Utilitymonster: That’s exactly the right thing for HIC to do. Talk about lives saved with their public face, let hardcore members hear about x-risk, and then, in the future, if some excellent x-risk opportunity arises, direct resources to x-risk.
- From felicia forum.

References

• Gleiberman's paper: https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/files/8518/61565cb6-e056-4e35-bd2e-d14d58e35231.pdf
• Old EA wikipedia page (web archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20170409171350/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
• Old CEA webpage (web archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20161219031827/https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/fundraising/

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Let us funnel you into the core group of super secret patreon supporters. Send us an email at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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You can find Nick's podcast on institutional design here, and his substack here.

We discuss:

• The lack of feedback loops in longtermism
• Whether quantifying your beliefs is helpful
• Objective versus subjective knowledge
• The difference between prediction and explanation
• The difference between Bayesian epistemology and Bayesian statistics
• Statistical modelling and when statistics is useful

Links

• Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics by Andrew Gelman and Cosma Shalizi
• EA forum post showing all forecasts beyond a year out are uncalibrated.

• Vaclav smil quote where he predicts a pandemic by 2021:

  The following realities indicate the imminence of the risk. The typical frequency of influenza pan- demics was once every 50–60 years between 1700 and 1889 (the longest known gap was 52 years, between the pandemics of 1729–1733 and 1781–1782) and only once every 10–40 years since 1889. The recurrence interval, calculated simply as the mean time elapsed between the last six known pandemics, is about 28 years, with the extremes of 6 and 53 years. Adding the mean and the highest interval to 1968 gives a span between 1996 and 2021. We are, probabilistically speaking, very much inside a high-risk zone.

  - Global Catastropes and Trends, p.46

• Reference for Tetlock's superforecasters failing to predict the pandemic. "On February 20th, Tetlock’s superforecasters predicted only a 3% chance that there would be 200,000+ coronavirus cases a month later (there were)."

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Errata

• At the beginning of the episode Vaden says he hasn't been interviewed on another podcast before. He forgot his appearence on The Declaration Podcast in 2019, which will be appearing as a bonus episode on our feed in the coming weeks.

Sick of hearing us talk about this subject? Understandable! Send topic suggestions over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Photo credit: James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine

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We discuss:

• Whether longtermism is actionable
• Whether the book is a faithful representation of longtermism as practiced
• Why humans are actually cool, despite what you might hear
• Some cool ideas from the book including career advice and allowing vaccines on the free market
• Ben's love of charter cities and whether he's is a totalitarian at heart
• The plausability of "value lock-in"
• The bizarro world of population ethics

References:
"Bait-and-switch" critique from a longtermist blogger: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9Y6Y6qoAigRC7A8eX/my-take-on-what-we-owe-the-future

Quote: "For instance, I’m worried people will feel bait-and-switched if they get into EA via WWOTF then do an 80,000 Hours call or hang out around their EA university group and realize most people think AI risk is the biggest longtermist priority, many thinking this by a large margin."

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

How long is your termist? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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We discuss:

• Lulie's recent experience at EA Global
• Bayesianism and how it differs from critical rationalism
• Common arguments in favor of Bayesianism
• Taking Children Seriously
• What it was like for Lulie growing up without going to school
• The Alexander Technique, Internal Family Systems, Gendlin's Focusing, and Belief Reporting

References

• EA Global
• Taking Children Seriously
• Alexander Technique
• Internal Family Systems
• Gendlin Focusing

Social Media Everywhere
Follow Lulie on Twitter @reasonisfun. Follow us at @VadenMasrani, @BennyChugg, @IncrementsPod, or on Youtube.

Report your beliefs and focus your Gendlin's at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Lulie Tanett.

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• The potential pitfall of having goodness as a core value
• Aspects of Effective Altruism (EA) that put it on the cultishness spectrum
• Does EA focus on good over truth?
• Ben's experience with EA
• Making criticism a core value
• How does one resist the allure of groupthink?
• How to (mis)behave at parties
• How would one create a movement which doesn't succumb to cult-like dynamics?
• Weird ideas as junk food

Error Correction intro segment

• Scott Alexander pointing out that Ivermectin works indirectly via:

There’s a reason the most impressive ivermectin studies came from parts of the world where worms are prevalent, he says. Parasites suppress the immune system, making it more difficult for the human body to fight off viruses. Thus, getting rid of worm infections makes it easier for COVID-19 patients to bounce back from the virus.

See full post below and summary news article here

• Czechoslovakia was not a part of the USSR
• @lukeconibear pointing out some climate models and data are publicly available. See for instance
  • Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) Chem model: https://github.com/geoschem/geos-chem
  • Community Earth System Model (CESM): https://github.com/ESCOMP/CESM
  • Energy Exascale Earth System model: https://github.com/E3SM-Project/E3SM
• @PRyan pointing out we were confused about the difference between economic growth, division of labour, and free trade

Join the movement at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Follow us on twitter at @IncrementsPod and on Youtube.

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Special Guests: Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti.

Support Increments

• The Case for Strong Longtermism, by Greaves and MacAskill
• Vaden's EA forum post on longtermism
• The reddit discussion surrounding Vaden's piece
• Ben's piece on longtermism (which he has hidden in the depths of Medium because he's scared of the EA forum) 
• Ben on Pascal's Mugging and Expected Values
• Gwern and Robin Hanson making fun of Ben's piece 

Yell at us on the EA forum, on Reddit, on Medium, or over email at incrementspodcast@gmail.com. 

Support Increments