[Edit: reworded for clarity]
It's crucial for the argument that it's priced in. You own a risky asset, your job. The market values that risk at $0, because you can diversify it away. Investing in assets that profit when you lose your job is how you do that.
The way wealth accumulates forces you to be overexposed to the market near retirement and underexposed now. That's more $0-valued risk. It's a practical problem you can fix with leverage.
1So anyone who doesn't do this can expect to become irrelevant?
No. If your job is irrelevant, then you'll be glad if you bought shares in the company that automated it away.
[Edit: reworded for clarity]
How important is it that cell and nucleus remain intact for your application? Can other chromosomes be genetically engineered? What will happen to the chromosome once identified? Do you need to be able to identify chromosomes during M phase, or is interphase OK? How many chromosomes do you need to identify and extract?
other than very narrow pathological cases.
I think the more common underlying issue here is that people are confused about the tax code. Tax codes are very confusing. Income/benefits cliffs do exist. People get confused about what is and isn't an income cliff based on what they heard from more or less equally tax-confused people.
it was kind to some of them to point out what was believed to be a true argument for why that was not the case here
I don't see evidence in the post comments that it was received that way, though it's possible those who read it as a true, helpful and kind didn't respond, or did elsewhere.
Eliezer was perfectly open to evidence he was mistaken
I don't think he's a schemer or engaging in some kind of systematic project to silence dissent.
2I get why you read it as "kind." But I have an alternative thesis:
- Functionally, the essay erects a firewall between Eliezer and the FTX scandal.
- While superficially "kind," the essay is fundamentally infantilizing, absolving the community while denying them agency. This infantilization is crucial to building the firewall.
If you're interested, I can expand on this.
Edit: Clarifying changes, especially to emphasize that I interpret the essay as containing motivated reasoning and self-interested spin, not that Eliezer is lying.
No collective entity is a monolith.
If it wasn't obvious, I meant the term "ally" not in the sense of a formally codified relationaship, but to point out the uniquely high level of affinity, overlap, and shared concerns between the AI safety movement and EA.
There is a reason I said "ally," rather than literally identifying EA as part of the AI safety movement or vice versa.
Yeah, that's the problem. EA's the most obvious community clearly invested and interested in the kind of AI safety issues Eliezer focuses on. There's huge overlap between the AI safety and EA movement. To fail to recognize that, and carve time out of his day to compose naked, petty invective against EA over his disagreements, seems quite unpromising to me.
Institutional support, funding, positive and persistent community interest, dialog, support, and professional participation. Examples:
- Open Phil
- FTX Future Fund (extremely bad allyship, but still was regarded as allyship until it went down in flames)
- 80,000 hours, MATS
- MIRI has been heavily supported by EA donors
- Anthropic safety influences
- FHI (now closed) and CSER gave AI safety intellectual credibility and were staffed and funded by EAs
Take the above as my beliefs and understanding based on years of interaction, but no systematic up-to-date investigation.
The leader, platform, and constitutency of the Trump opposition all need to take shape together. It's a complex problem, and we shouldn't expect a simple solution.
One of the hard parts, I think, is what seems to be a decline in single-issue voters. In the past, women, blacks, gays, Jews, trade unionists, environmentalists, and so on seem to have been more focused on their particular issues. That meant that you could promise the benefits that each desired without as many tradeoffs. Now, both MAGA and the progressive left seem to be "multi-issue Blobs," where you either support all their ideas, or you're their opponent. With this, willingness to crash down the established order seems to be something these Blobs endorse, either as a negotiating strategy or as an end in itself.
So it seems to me that the real opponent in the next election isn't Trump. It's the Blob.
And that means finding a compatible set of single-issue swing voter/independent/inconsistent voter constituencies that aren't already diehard Republican MAGA. Off the top of my head, the planks might look like this:
The candidate needs to position themselves as a "goes-without-saying" Democrat, but what they talk about during the general election needs to be 95% this kind of stuff that's targeted at independent, swing and inconsistent voters and spend 5% of your time reassuring the liberal base. During the primaries, you build support with the "groups," which also are happily mostly pretty single-issue. But you don't treat those groups as your ticket to the Presidency, just as a stepping stone to the nomination. Whichever reasonable candidate is most clearly making that distinction seems the most promising to me.
Gavin Newsom is pretty good ere. So is Rubin Gallego. I think a Newsom/Gallego ticket would be promising.