'As many as', suggests there might have been one particular case where that happened, probably due to a complex situation, (small company, pandemic, company going out of business, lack of strong oversight, policies on returning equipment not set in place at the time of layoffs, ect).
Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular number.
I'm not sure if there's any history of financial association, but I do know that all of these people generally travel in the same circles.
When I went to college in Berkeley I went to a couple rationalism adjacent events in the city and saw there was a huge overlap of that EA/Rationalism/Silicon Valley startups people. Never saw Sam Altman at those, but met a couple YC founders and other people who knew him and spoke generally well of him.
This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life.
People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist.
The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood?
Different people approach giving back to society in different ways. The EA way to approach the above is to crunch numbers and find what they think is the place where their limited resources can have have the largest impact.
My best friend's family does their part by joining their church to volunteer at food kitchens in poorer neighborhoods and hosting fundraisers for various causes throughout the year.
A Vietnamese coworker of mine used to give back by donating to a charity that gave scholarship opportunities to high achieving low income students in Vietnam.
It's not that complex to understand that different people have different value systems and how they view their tribe, people and the world.
And yes I agree that lots of people find people who hold differing views incomprehensible, but that's also normal aspect of humanity and not unique to those in EA.
From political differences, to philosophical differences, to religious differences, to any topic, many people have a hard time comprehending the worldview of others.
You can even just take the perspective from this article. There are a whole swath of people I've known that could not comprehend the idea that someone would be willing to give their kidney to a total stranger. They might understand if its someone the person knows, but a total stranger? Some might say that's insane and irrational behavior.
Lots of people can't see past their own perspectives on things, but I think it's uncharitable to suggest that EA is not just like any other group with some portion of people like that.
> The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood?
Not quuiiite. Many other groups would accept that value, framed that way, maybe even a majority of people. What differentiates EA isn't their intention to improve livelihood, but their belief that it is possible to know how to do that.
And in fact other groups also have high confidence in their understanding of how to achieve this goal. It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.
> It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.
Ok, but that's not the competing option here. However good being a bodhisattva is, being a bodhisattva and saving someone from kidney failure is even better. And most people, of course, aren't going to become bodhisattvas at all: we're only choosing between being ordinary flawed people... and ordinary flawed people who also saved someone from kidney failure.
Do all EAs donate kidneys? Or even at higher rates than other groups? Everyone thinks their religion makes them better at being good. EAs might be uniquely positioned to demonstrate it statistically, if it's true.
The number of people who altruistically donate kidneys per year in the USA is like 1-200, so the fact that Scott knows multiple EAs who did so (and that the kidney donor people are used to EAs) is pretty high-tier evidence that either there are a LOT more EAs than I thought, or they do it MUCH higher rates than the general population.
Scott alone donating would probably set the rate of altruistic kidney donation at a higher rate among EAs than the general population, at least for this year; there'd have to be around 2M EAs in the USA to match the baseline rate, while the real number is almost certainly significantly lower.
> People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist.
I'm aware of this! I am fairly anti-utilitarian, and understand that the EA folks I've talked to are deeply utilitarian. What is so frustrating is that they don't seem to be able to understand me back. Any conversation about the ethics or character, duty, or virtue is translated back into utilitarianism, a framework in which non-utilitarian motives can't possibly be valid. Of course I'm not characterizing every EA-ascribing person, but it's ... very common in the community, to say the least, and it makes e.g. engaging with their forums / comment sections / subreddits agonizing.
> This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life.
"better impact life".... as determined by... numbers.
This is a group of people who look at the world and think that the best things to do are things like optimizing QALYs or the number of animal lives or, in extreme cases, their personal lifespan including cryogenic extension in the offchance it works, or "the number of humans who will die when a superintelligent AI Roko's Basilisks / Pascal-mugs them", or other sorts of things like that. And in a world where you are only capable of measuring worth by holding up numbers against each other and comparing them, those arguments become seductive.
But outside of that framework, for instance in a moral philosophy in which the best thing to do is not "the thing with the highest +EV" but "the most noble action", those stances are absurd. It's not, IMO, a person's job to single-handedly have a highest +EV on lifespans or net-suffering; it is (to some approximation) to live a good life and do the right thing in your local journey. I would reject the notion that a person is directly responsible for far-away people's suffering. I think the world is direly short of leadership, character, and compassion, and for me goodness is about those things.
When it comes to large institutions, like governments or large charities, I feel differently, and the calculus switches over to being more +EV --- but ultimately is still about the moral compass of the organization. Like I think SBF was a scumbag and totally wrong, and would still be wrong if his bets had worked out. It is not common that people are operating at a scale where utilitarianism starts to become morally appropriate, and even when it becomes appropriate it's never entirely appropriate, because actual leadership is ultimately about morality even if the organization is doing practical things.
If the human race was completely moral, and then eventually died out due to some X-risk, that is mostly a Fine Result to me and we would all be able to sleep well at night. (but if like, the dying out was because we didn't do our moral duty and handle e.g. climate change or AI or nuclear war or building an asteroid-defense system or dealing with our own in-fighting and squabbling, then that wasn't completely moral, was it?)
To be clear, I have a lot of respect for the kidney donation stuff, a slight amount of respect for giving money to charity, and massive disrespect for the hordes of smart people who have divested from the real world and instead smugly pat themselves on their backs that they're doing important work on AI safety.
People complaining about the fairness about legacies and donor children miss the point that these people are half the reasons people care about these top private schools.
If you want a meritocratic institution that is actually reasonably priced and provide great educations, then that's what a state school is for. Or like the few private institutions that are actually meritocratic (MIT, caltech)
Elite schools are for the children of elites who will inherit some amount of that power (political, wealth, ect) and for a small cream of normal people who have the iq, eq and luck to be chosen. The goal is to let these people mix. That way in 20 years after graduation when a brilliant mathematician has discovers a powerful algorithm that he has an inkling that it could apply to the stock market, he can phone up a college roommate that had an extremely wealthy dad in finance. The rich heir roommate can join and fund the venture that might billions on the stock market. Or the fact that an official in the state department went to college with the then daughter of South Africa's president, chances are that daughter still is influential. They can talk and maybe broker some aspect of foreign policy. They are finishing schools for the elite. Whether we like it or not, society's next generation of elite includes the most capable children of the current elite. Evn if those children are less capable than the most capable of the general populace, they stand to inherit quite a bit and they will have an outsized impact on the country and world. Their parent's and ancestors influence is important in their acceptance process because it's important in real life.
There is no real solution to this. There's a reason that despite America growing in pop insanely, foreign applications increasing exponentially, billions being donated to them and everyone going to college, these elite institutions have barely changed class sizes.
The exclusivity and mixing of the different types of people is a feature of these places. If you somehow get these top institutions to be more meritocraric like MIT or Caltech or increase overall student body size like ASU all that will happen is that individuals with power, wealth and influence will simply slowly coordinate to send their kids to different schools and soon enough those schools will face this scrutiny again.
Now I can understand that it is extremely unfair that when all our Supreme Court justices, significant numbers of national politicians, power brokers and many individuals with outsized influence come from a few institutions. If you are one of the many intelligent, hardworking and capable individuals who don't get in when others who are probably just as good as you might, it is extremely annoying. Their entire trajectory of life is changed because of luck that you didn't get. But sometime life is like that. College does not exist in a vacuum and just like most things in life, influence and wealth are powerful.
Those with power tend to want their descendants to have some of that at least and they will do what they can to perpetute that.
I want to say I'm not saying that this is perfect or even great. I'm just saying the way humans work and the way incentive structures are setup, this is how it is. To not mention this is to be ignorant. If you want to improve the status quo you need to acknowledge the reality of the situation and plan around this.
I did not attend one of these institutions for the record.
I don't know if I'd subscribe to the above person's ideas, but the simple business approach would probably work right?
Treat it like any form of behavior that creates a hostile work environment and thereby lowers overall workplace productivity. Businesses are incentivized to keep things running in the most productive method possible.
Discrimination costs your business in lowering employee productivity and other affects like possibly losing talent or opportunities. Warning discriminating employees that their behavior could cost them their job or simply firing them depending on the severity of the situation seems like a simple enough solution?
I think it's more mocking the oversimplification of complex problems.
That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific.
The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that Wyclef famously used his celebrity to raise money for Haiti after the earthquake and it was shown that much, if not most, of the money raised was used by Wyclef and his family/friends for personal spending.
That behavior suggests that Wyclef might have continued the same corruption that other Haitian politicians engaged in and maybe taken it a step further by leveraging his celebrity to also pocket money brought in as outside investment.
Again, maybe he couldn't be worse since other Haitian politicians would have and did engage in similar corruption, but it'd be a stretch to say that it's anything we should consider as "what if" that would had the real potential for positive change in the country.
OP is probably talking about the legality of American hospitals using this software in an official capacity like some Chinese hospitals seem to be doing.
I'm completely unfamiliar, but it wouldn't surprise me if for diagnosing? software like this to be used in an official medical capacity in America it would need to go through some sort of particular vetting process because if it isn't it might leave hospitals who use it open to lawsuits.
that would be a potential YC idea. A company that enables smaller groups to do clinical research w/o needing an army of people to wade through the regulatory red tape. That also isn't in and of itself a giant predatory CRO type organization.
that's literally what pharma is now- companies that exist to help smaller groups get their research through the clinical and approval process. It would be hard to buidl that level of expertise in a smaller company.
Do you genuinely believe that laws that try to separate criticize versus insult can work?
I can't see anything other than laws like that being abused by politicians and government officials to quell speech and create a chilling effect amongst the populace.
Dueling used to be acceptable in the US and that didn’t prevent free speech. As long as it’s limited to reasonable fines simply requiring civility is unlikely to significantly quell free speech even if it did get abused by government officials.
Yeah, and for a father to take paternity leave suggests the father's job and family's financial situation are doing reasonably well. Financial stability plays a huge factor in keeping couples together.
Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular number.