Daniel Eth's guest appearances

Daniel Eth

EA Talks

The Nonlinear Library

The Nonlinear Library: EA Forum

Zachary Robinson

Max Daniel

Jaan Tallinn

Paul Christiano

Duncan Sabien

Aaron Gertler

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Robin Hanson

Peter Singer

Will MacAskill

Jeff Kaufman

Buck Shlegeris

Luke Freeman

Nick Beckstead

Alexis Carlier

OwlTail

Welcome 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: Avoid the abbreviation "FLOPs" – use "FLOP" or "FLOP/s" instead, published by Daniel Eth on July 10, 2022 on LessWrong.Especially in discussions about AI, the abbreviation "FLOPs" is being used for both "floating point operations per second" (a measure of computational power) and "floating point operations" (a measure of total computations, and equivalent to the previous term times seconds). This is ambiguous and confusing. For clarity, I propose people avoid this specific abbreviation and instead use the alternatives of "FLOP" (for floating point operations) and "FLOP/s" (for floating point operations per second).Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome 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: Avoid the abbreviation "FLOPs" – use "FLOP" or "FLOP/s" instead, published by Daniel Eth on July 10, 2022 on LessWrong. Especially in discussions about AI, the abbreviation "FLOPs" is being used for both "floating point operations per second" (a measure of computational power) and "floating point operations" (a measure of total computations, and equivalent to the previous term times seconds). This is ambiguous and confusing. For clarity, I propose people avoid this specific abbreviation and instead use the alternatives of "FLOP" (for floating point operations) and "FLOP/s" (for floating point operations per second). Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit <a href="http://nonlinear.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">nonlinear.org</a>.

LW - Avoid the abbreviation "FLOPs" – use "FLOP" or "FLOP/s" instead by Daniel Eth

Welcome 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: Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid, published by Daniel Eth on May 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The primary for Oregon’s 6th congressional district is now over, and it’s looking like Carrick is going to lose, coming in second out of nine candidates. That Carrick lost is a real shame. My sense is if Carrick had won, he could have done a lot of good – in particular, advancing pandemic prevention (e.g., via participating in bill markups), with an outside chance of getting Biden’s pandemic prevention plan enacted. As a silver lining, I think the value of information from this race was quite high, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the information this race provides will be valuable enough to EA that it outweighs the costs associated with the race.First off, I want to applaud Carrick for taking the plunge and running; as a general rule, I think EAs should be more ambitious, especially in novel situations where the value of information is high, and it’s nice to see someone really following through with this. Carrick, his wife Kathryn, and their whole team put it in an enormous amount of work, faced many obstacles outside of their control, and withstood unfair public criticism, all in the service of improving the world.Below are what I believe to be some of the more important lessons that we should take away from this race. For transparency sake, I started jotting down notes and sketching part of a draft of this piece before the day of the race – I didn’t write the piece entirely today. I also got feedback on this post from a few people in my network, and I strongly recommend others who plan on writing further posts on this topic similarly get feedback from other EAs before posting, in order to ensure that the post embodies community ideals, both to those reading it from within our community and those who may be looking in from the outside, especially right now as more external attention is being directed at EA. Personally, some of the feedback I got from others led me to rephrase certain things in ways I hadn’t considered and for which I think was helpful for reducing misunderstandings of EA.Lesson 1: EAs can seriously compete for open congressional seats, and preparing to run well in advance of a race probably would significantly further improve the odds of winningYes, Carrick lost. But he came in second out of nine, despite several factors pushing pretty strongly against him. Had things shaken out differently on a few key factors, he could have won.Here’s a partial list of factors that were pushing against Carrick:lack of local political connections, which led local political actors to strongly fight against himrelative lack of practice/training in talking like a politician, which understandably led to politically costly misstatementsrunning in a state that he had very recently moved back to (he moved back after COVID hit), which appears to have led to some skepticisma combination of the above factors led to unfavorable media coverageSalinas (the winner of the primary) benefitting from $1M of Super PAC money herself from BOLD PAC.Most of the items on that list seem avoidable by any future EA candidate who preps for a political career far ahead of time instead of first beginning to think about running when a seat opens up – even the adversarial Super PAC spending (the least controllable item on the list) may be reduced by having better long-term relationships with the political community. For instance, if Carrick had held local office before running for the House, I think he would have been in a much stronger position for this race (I think he probably would have won). To be clear, this point is not a criticism of Carrick running for the House directly – I actually agree with the decision, given that Congressional seats only open u...

Welcome 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: Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid, published by Daniel Eth on May 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The primary for Oregon’s 6th congressional district is now over, and it’s looking like Carrick is going to lose, coming in second out of nine candidates. That Carrick lost is a real shame. My sense is if Carrick had won, he could have done a lot of good – in particular, advancing pandemic prevention (e.g., via participating in bill markups), with an outside chance of getting Biden’s pandemic prevention plan enacted. As a silver lining, I think the value of information from this race was quite high, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the information this race provides will be valuable enough to EA that it outweighs the costs associated with the race. First off, I want to applaud Carrick for taking the plunge and running; as a general rule, I think EAs should be more ambitious, especially in novel situations where the value of information is high, and it’s nice to see someone really following through with this. Carrick, his wife Kathryn, and their whole team put it in an enormous amount of work, faced many obstacles outside of their control, and withstood unfair public criticism, all in the service of improving the world. Below are what I believe to be some of the more important lessons that we should take away from this race. For transparency sake, I started jotting down notes and sketching part of a draft of this piece before the day of the race – I didn’t write the piece entirely today. I also got feedback on this post from a few people in my network, and I strongly recommend others who plan on writing further posts on this topic similarly get feedback from other EAs before posting, in order to ensure that the post embodies community ideals, both to those reading it from within our community and those who may be looking in from the outside, especially right now as more external attention is being directed at EA. Personally, some of the feedback I got from others led me to rephrase certain things in ways I hadn’t considered and for which I think was helpful for reducing misunderstandings of EA. Lesson 1: EAs can seriously compete for open congressional seats, and preparing to run well in advance of a race probably would significantly further improve the odds of winning Yes, Carrick lost. But he came in second out of nine, despite several factors pushing pretty strongly against him. Had things shaken out differently on a few key factors, he could have won. Here’s a partial list of factors that were pushing against Carrick: lack of local political connections, which led local political actors to strongly fight against him relative lack of practice/training in talking like a politician, which understandably led to politically costly misstatements running in a state that he had very recently moved back to (he moved back after COVID hit), which appears to have led to some skepticism a combination of the above factors led to unfavorable media coverage Salinas (the winner of the primary) benefitting from $1M of Super PAC money herself from BOLD PAC. Most of the items on that list seem avoidable by any future EA candidate who preps for a political career far ahead of time instead of first beginning to think about running when a seat opens up – even the adversarial Super PAC spending (the least controllable item on the list) may be reduced by having better long-term relationships with the political community. For instance, if Carrick had held local office before running for the House, I think he would have been in a much stronger position for this race (I think he probably would have won). To be clear, this point is not a criticism of Carrick running for the House directly – I actually agree with the decision, given that Congressional seats only open u...

EA - Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid by Daniel Eth

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube. 

Source: Effective Altruism Global (<a href="https://www.eaglobal.org/talks/the-technological-landscape-of-affective-artificial-general-intelligence/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">video</a>).<a href="https://www.effectivealtruism.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Effective Altruism</a> is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. <a href="https://www.eaglobal.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">EA Global</a> conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/EffectiveAltruismVideos" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">YouTube</a>.

EAG 2017 London: The technological landscape of affective artificial general intelligence (Daniel Eth)