What keeps us morally and epistemically honest? Feedback loops suck as it is, it’s ok that we’re trying to field-build and skill-build and try things that don’t give obvious successes right away, but then what keeps us from being a very earnest group of people who get nothing done? Or get a lot done that doesn’t matter through frenetic effort and wasted motion?

And even worse, what keeps us from sucking up tons of talent and interest because we’re where the interesting ideas and the money are and everything comes through us and then we don’t save the world and also the people who could have don’t either because we made all our mistakes correlate?

I went into this week thinking that I’d finally get to the logarithmic utility question but instead we talked about how much money really rich people have. One student said they’d heard that if we took all the billionaires’ money, we could end poverty.

In perhaps my favorite moment of the whole club, I was like, ok, let’s look it up.

When we fall prey to confirmation bias, scope insensitivity, the desire to round off the complicated edges to be more persuasive, retreating to the “luxury of being overwhelmed”, there are real things at stake: people, beings, conscious experiences, visions of the future and paths forward that will be better or worse based on whether our goals are achieved. Reality does not grade on a curve.

I made that sound dark and hard! And I mean, look, eyes on the prize here, but let’s get concrete. 

This is the workshop you get on model building when you crash lots of background thinking about the importance of knowing what you think you know and why you think you know it, knowing your inside views, a previous workshop, improvisation and a 30 minute time limit.

There are a lot of ways one could feel about EA, and a lot of aesthetics and vibes it could have. I find it useful to be able to switch between different lenses and notice which ones appeal to me the most. Also I like lists.

There might be digital people one day

We can maybe give people their daily recommended calories by taking over paper factories for $1/day

Different people and species probably have different hedonic ranges

60,000 stars become forever inaccessible to us every second

Do you feel like EAs throw around big numbers a lot? If you don’t have your own sense of orders of magnitude, they’re just going to drag you around.