EA - EA and LW Forums Weekly Summary (21 Aug - 27 Aug 22’) by Zoe Williams

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (21 Aug - 27 Aug 22’), published by Zoe Williams on August 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Supported by Rethink Priorities Sunday August 21st - Saturday August 27th The amount of content on the EA and LW forums has been accelerating. This is awesome, but makes it tricky to keep up with! The below hopes to help by summarizing popular (>40 karma) posts each week. It also includes announcements and ideas from Twitter that this audience might find interesting. This will be a regular series published weekly - let me know in the comments if you have any feedback on what could make it more useful!If you'd like to receive these summaries via email, you can subscribe here. Methodology This series originated from a task I did as Peter Wildeford’s executive research assistant at Rethink Priorities, to summarize his weekly readings. If your post is in the ‘Didn’t Summarize’ list, please don’t take that as a judgment on its quality - it’s likely just a topic less relevant to his work. I’ve also left out technical AI posts because I don’t have the background knowledge to do them justice. My methodology has been to use this and this link to find the posts with >40 karma in a week for the EA forum and LW forum respectively, read / skim each, and summarize those that seem relevant to Peter. Those that meet the karma threshold as of Sunday each week are considered (sometimes I might summarize a very popular later-in-the-week post in the following week’s summary, if it doesn’t meet the bar until then). For twitter, I skim through the following lists: AI, EA, Forecasting, National Security (mainly nuclear), Science (mainly biosec). I’m going through a large volume of posts so it’s totally possible I’ll get stuff wrong. If I’ve misrepresented your post, or you’d like a summary edited, please let me know (via comment or DM). EA Forum Philosophy and Methodologies Critque’s of MacAskill’s ‘Is it Good to Make Happy People?’ Discusses population asymmetry, the viewpoint that a new life of suffering is bad, but a new life of happiness is neutral or only weakly positive. Post is mainly focused on what these viewpoints are and that they have many proponents vs. specific arguments for them. Mentions that they weren’t well covered in Will’s book and could affect the conclusions there. Presents evidence that people’s intuitions tend towards needing significantly more happy people than equivalent level of suffering people for a tradeoff to be ‘worth it’ (3:1 to 100:1 depending on question specifics), and that therefore a big future (which would likely have more absolute suffering, even if not proportionally) could be bad. EAs Underestimate Uncertainty in Cause Prioritization Argues that EAs work across too narrow a distribution of causes given our uncertainty in which are best, and that standard prioritizations are interpreted as more robust than they really are.As an example, they mention that 80K states “some of their scores could easily be wrong by a couple of points” and this scale of uncertainty could put factory farming on par with AI. The Repugnant Conclusion Isn’t The repugnant conclusion (Parfit, 1984) is the argument that enough lives ‘barely worth living’ are better than a much smaller set of super duper awesome lives. In one description of it, Parfit said the barely worth it lives had ‘nothing bad in them’ (but not much good either). The post argues that actually makes those lives pretty awesome and non-repugnant, because nothing bad is a high bar. A Critical Review of Givewell’s 2022 Cost-effectiveness Model NB: longer article - only skimmed it so I may have missed some pieces. Suggestions for cost-effectiveness modeling in EA by a health economist, with Givewell as a case study. The author believes the overall approach to be good, with the follow...