How palatable an argument is determines its actual impact. It's not logical to spend effort making arguments that are so unpalatable that they will just make people ignore you.
Did the author factor in the impact of this kind of article on the external perception of the rationalist / utilitarian / EA community when weighing the utility of publishing this?
Should you push arguments that seem ridiculously unacceptable to the vast majority of people, thereby reducing the weight of more acceptable arguments you could possibly make?
The author leads infrastructure at Cresta. Cresta is a customer service automation company. His first point is about how happy he is to have picked AWS and their human-based customer service, versus Google's robot-based customer service.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong, and I'm oversimplifying a bit, but I still find this amusing.
> this is only for paid surface parking for non-residents. Residents price is not impacted (which is controversial). Underground parking is private and not affected. Free parking (outside of 8AM to 8PM Monday to Saturday) stays free for everyone.
If my end goal was to apply this to everyone at some point, I would probably start with such a restricted law, then extend it step by step later.
Agreed, although I personally prefer when actual experts are communicating to the public. But that's not all he's doing, Tegmark also intends to influence global policy on AI research, random example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/21/ai-focuse...
Agreed, Ian Goodfellow wasn't the first to come up with the idea of jointly training a generator and discriminator. But he was the first to make it work for image generation with modern neural networks. For that Ian Goodfellow deserved to get most of the credit, and he did.
> credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others
Certainly agree. The point is that coming up with the idea, writing it as an equation, or an architecture diagram in a paper, is a small fraction of the effort that goes into making the idea work in a model showing good performance on real life datasets.
For example, just taking a random paper that Schmidhuber claims should give him credit for GANs, https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/FKI-126-90ocr.pdf hopefully you can easily see that a lot of work would be needed to turn this into a realistic image generation model. And that is, even if you admit that the idea is strongly related to GANs, which I'm not convinced of but won't spend time on.
> Credit belongs to whoever actually makes it work.
>> That is according to whom? Is it a rule you just came up with or accepted practice? And if it's accepted practice, in what community is it accepted practice?
It is accepted practice in the ML community. If it weren't, Schmidhuber wouldn't be complaining.
Some context for people unfamiliar with ML research:
the author, Schmidhuber, is well known for claiming that he should get credit for many ML ideas. Most ML researchers think that:
- He doesn't deserve the credit he claims, in most if not all cases.
- There's a few cases where his papers should have been cited and weren't. That's fairly common.
- People do not get much credit for formulating an abstract idea in a paper or implementing it on a toy problem. Credit belongs to whoever actually makes it work.
- Credit assignment in ML is not perfect but roughly works.
The main problem with Alexa / Google Assistant / Siri is that the tech was not ready when they launched. We didn't have models that could understand non-trivial user requests, generate non-trivial actions or keep track of context properly. Now we do.
Amazon, Apple and Google are all working on incorporating LLMs but why is it taking so long? Why are these assistants still so bad? ChatGPT has been available for a year, GPT3 API for 3 years. I suspect some of it is legacy tech and legacy researchers from the pre-LLM era.
Would you have an issue if that someone subsequently refused to part with 0.001% of their thankyou notes in order to save someone else's life?
This is a terrible analogy because it captures the good reason why there are billionaires (we reward them for building something useful) and none of the problems that come with it (wealth and power inequality, economic externalities, etc.)
One main idea of EA is that you should make a lot of money in order to give it away. The obvious problem is that this can serve as a convenient moral justification for greed. SBF explicitly endorsed EA, Will MacAskill vouched for him, and I understand he was widely admired in EA circles. And he turned out to be the perfect incarnation of this problem, admitting himself he just used EA as a thin veil.
What would you count as evidence that effective altruism fails?
I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility.
More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing a fancy theory that fails catastrophically in the real world [1]
You don't even need to go very deep to find financial interests at stake: Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse material." [1]
So the CEO of this Heat Initiative is pressuring Apple to implement the kind of solution her previous company is selling. But yes, Eric Schmidt famously said he thinks that there is no right to privacy. Although he did try to get a journalist fired for what he considered an infringement on his privacy, so I imagine this only applies to us peasants. But billionaire philanthropy is definitely a wonderful thing, let's keep telling ourselves how great it is that Schmidt, Gates and co are willing to do so much disinterested work to help the world.
[1] https://www.thorn.org/our-work-to-stop-child-sexual-exploita...
Sarah Gardner, the author of the letter to Apple and CEO of the Heat Initiative, worked for 10 years and until earlier this year as a VP at Thorn [1]. Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse material." [2]
She's using PR to pressure on Apple into implementing the kind of solution her previous company is selling. Won't someone think of the children??
