EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular‪)‬ EA Forum Team

Attend his talk if he's giving one By Jacob Trefethen
Scientific conferences are great even if you’re an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are useful guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to. But I suspect people at all career stages could benefit from hearing the advice again – people with adjacent research experience in industry or academia, or who have started organisations before, or who have an inkling something exciting lurks around the corner.
In other words, I wish people reminded me to go to conferences as an outsider more often. I seem to re-learn their value with wonder every one I attend. So here is a post for you, future Jacob.
Often scientific fields host annual conferences that have been running for a decade, or many decades. People grumble about the schedule and the snacks. Jetlag [...]
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Outline:
(02:15) To the best of my understanding, I only have one life to live
(05:21) But Im an outsider to the field!
(07:04) List of 41 conferences
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First published:

April 15th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n8APGKhs8Dut9vXGJ/conferences-are-great-for-scientific-entrepreneurs


Linkpost URL:https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/conferences/

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The two podcasts where I discuss FTX are now out:
Making Sense with Sam Harris Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg The Sam Harris podcast is more aimed at a general audience; the Spencer Greenberg podcast is more aimed at people already familiar with EA. (I’ve also done another podcast with Chris Anderson from TED that will come out next month, but FTX is a fairly small part of that conversation.)
In this post, I’ll gather together some things I talk about across these podcasts — this includes updates and lessons, and responses to some questions that have been raised on the Forum recently. I’d recommend listening to the podcasts first, but these comments can be read on their own, too. I cover a variety of different topics, so I’ll cover each topic in separate comments underneath this post.
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First published:

April 18th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A2vBJGEbKDpuKveHk/personal-reflections-on-ftx

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI's closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow.
Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision. This document is the reverse: an epitaph summarizing what the Future of Humanity Institute was, what we did and why, what we learned, and what we think comes next. It can be seen as an oral history of FHI from some of its members. It will not be unbiased, nor complete, but hopefully a useful historical source. I have received input from other people who worked at FHI, but it is my perspective and others would no doubt place somewhat different emphasis on the various strands of FHI work.
What we did well
One of the most important insights from the successes of FHI is to have a long-term perspective on one's research. While [...]
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Outline:
(00:57) What we did well
(03:48) Where we failed
(05:06) So, you want to start another FHI?
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First published:

April 17th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uK27pds7J36asqJPt/future-of-humanity-institute-2005-2024-final-report


Linkpost URL:https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ml8d3ubi3ippxs4yon63n/FHI-Final-Report.pdf?rlkey=2c94czhgagy27d9don7pvbc26&dl=0

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Author: Sam Hilton, AIM Director of Research
In March 2021 I received an odd letter. It was from a guy I didn't know, David Quarrey, the UK's National Security Advisor. The letter thanked me for providing external expertise to the UK government's Integrated Review, which had been published that morning. It turns out that the Integrated Review has made a public commitment to "review our approach to risk assessment" ... "including how we account for interdependencies, cascading and compound risks". This is something I'd been advocating for over the previous few months by writing a policy paper and engaging with politicians and civil servants. It's hard to know how much my input changed government policy but I couldn’t find much evidence of others advocating for this. I had set myself a 10-year goal to "have played a role in making the UK a leader in long-term resilience to extreme [...]
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First published:

April 2nd, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RmZWjTLNTg4hby7pz/aim-s-new-guide-to-launching-a-high-impact-non-profit-policy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In the aftermath of SBF's convinction, there have been a few posts trying to make sense of FTX. Some people are trying to figure out what happened, and some people are interested in trying to find clever defenses.
I'm in a much more boring position: I am confident SBF is the fraud the world believes him to be. I hope this post can provide reasoning transparency on why I think this, and perhaps serve as an easy link for others who feel similarly but don't want to get bogged down in a point-by-point.
Posted anonymously as some protection against future employers Googling [1].
I have divided this post into a summary of the major crimes and my basis for believing they occurred, an 'FAQ' dealing with some common misapprehensions I've seen on this forum and elsewhere, and an appendix explaining some crypto exchange basics / jargon for those [...]
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Outline:
(00:56) Crimes
(00:59) Misappropriation of Funds
(01:51) Detail
(14:47) Lying to lenders
(17:21) Lying to FTXs investors
(18:28) Lying to Banks
(19:02) Detail
(21:53) Bribing a Chinese official
(23:55) Falsified revenue
(25:07) Falsified Insurance Fund
(26:20) FAQ
(26:23) Didnt SBF only know about the hole in June 2022?
(30:16) Didnt customers know their funds might be lent out?
(32:37) Werent FTX and Alameda total messes? Intent matters; isnt it possible that this all got lost in the chaos?
(35:13) Isnt FTX going to make all Customers whole? So there wasnt ever a hole?
(35:47) FTX cashed out customers at bankruptcy prices
(36:32) The assets those customers money had bought did well
(37:12) Had FTX stayed afloat, things would be very different
(38:58) Appendix
(39:02) How crypto exchanges work
(39:06) Spot Trading
(40:54) Margin Trading
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

April 11th, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qyN8M6zh6pnh8fmjR/understanding-ftx-s-crimes

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Thanks to Eli Lifland, Molly Hickman, Değer Turan, and Evan Miyazono for reviewing drafts of this post. The opinions expressed here are my own.
Summary:
Forecasters produce reasons and models that are often more valuable than the final forecasts Most of this value is being lost due to the historical practice & incentives of forecasting, and the difficulty of crowds to “adversarially collaborate”  FutureSearch is a forecasting system with legible reasons and models at its core (examples at the end) The Curious Case of the Missing Reasoning
Ben Landau-Taylor of Bismarck Analysis wrote a piece on March 6 called “Probability Is Not A Substitute For Reasoning”, citing a piece where he writes:
There has been a great deal of research on what criteria must be met for forecasting aggregations to be useful, and as Karger, Atanasov, and Tetlock argue, predictions of events such as the arrival of AGI [...]
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Outline:
(00:40) The Curious Case of the Missing Reasoning
(05:06) Those Who Seek Rationales, And Those Who Do Not
(07:21) So What Do Elite Forecasters Actually Know?
(10:30) The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting
(11:51) Facts: Cite Your Sources
(12:07) Reasons: So You Think You Can Persuade With Words
(14:25) Models: So You Think You Can Model the World
(17:56) There Is No Microeconomics of AGI
(19:39) 700 AI questions you say? Aren’t We In the Age of AI Forecasters?
(21:33) Towards “Towards Rationality Engines”
(23:10) Sample Forecasts With Reasons and Models
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First published:

April 2nd, 2024


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qMP7LcCBFBEtuA3kL/the-rationale-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-forecasting

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.