Andy Masley
@AndyMasley
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
Researching and writing on AI and other topics from a broadly EA perspective. On a grant from CG.
2.4K Following 18.4K Followers
Completely insane. Do dogs not feel or want things? There is such a deeply anti-intellectual refusal to even consider that philosophy of mind is complicated across the culture right now.
This from my last post on EA is a pretty core part of my worldview. I think counter-intuitive moral theories can often lead to disaster, but we're not in a situation where we can just confidently wall our minds off from them either.
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He's not really thinking he's just deciding the next words to say
I am sorry for anthropomorphizing the single thing that hundreds of billions of dollars and the smartest people in the world are all trying to make as much like the human mind as possible. That was silly of me
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The discourse over the past few weeks has reinforced my perception that in the 2010s, any intellectual scene that wanted to seriously consider the actual consequences of generally intelligent machines together without being laughed out of the room was going to be a little weird by necessity. Many in the mainstream still treats this idea as so insane that indulging in it makes you a crackpot.
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Seeing a consistent cycle of responses that go like
“EAs are terrible people”
“No a lot of them are nice”
“Oh so you think we should listen to them just because they’re nice? Lots of nice people have terrible ideas”
*Debates the ideas*
“We can’t trust them on the ideas because they’re terrible people”
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Recently had a friend have an actual “the vitamin” experience with iodine
I got a little pissy about the state of the debate about whether AI is a "tool" or when it's wrong to "anthropomorphize" it and wrote a rant as a physicalist about how these categories are made up useful fictions that are only good if they're useful
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Gemini hacked _three_ companies. Google did not disclose this publicly until WSJ confronted them.
We cannot rely on AI companies' voluntary benevolence to disclose when their models do something egregious.
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My more transcendent moments in philosophy happened reading Quine or Rawls, and philosophy in general is a small piece of what guides my sense of meaning in the world. I relate to EA more like I do to YIMBY, and I think it can be a pretty magical mental toolbox in that specific context.
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EA for me is a cluster of individually useful ideas that has never filled my life with deep meaning or structured my emotional response to the world. For a lot of people it does that, but I personally think it's best as a mental toolkit. I think the criticisms I take most seriously revolve around how easy it is for it to become The Way The Truth and The Light, and the criticisms I dislike the most are asking why EA doesn't provide this deep meaning more than it does. I don't think it should!
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Happy to sign this. Truly independent evaluation and oversight of frontier AI is a crucial issue. I think one of the biggest bottlenecks is finding people with the technical capabilities and that high bar of independence.
AI Eval Forum is a good group to build initial momentum!
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Today, more than 100 leading AI experts endorsed a set of minimum requirements to take seriously AI companies' recent call to embed external evaluators.
These evaluators need to be genuinely independent, transparent, and represent a range of expertise areas. They also need to be guaranteed employee-level access and to be protected from retaliation for findings that make companies look bad.
We welcome model developers’ recent calls for independent oversight, but it’s what they do next that matters. The labs must be accountable for ensuring these requirements are met, so that the public can have faith in the process and the outcomes.
Over the past week, the AI community has debated the appropriate role of external evaluation, including who should do it and on what terms. We may not agree on everything, but there is a lot of common ground.
To make embedded evaluations credible, more than 100 experts with varying backgrounds and ideas about AI risk agree in today’s letter that frontier AI developers should:
1. Guarantee embedded evaluators full editorial independence and mitigate conflicts of interest
2. Rely on multiple evaluators with differing viewpoints and areas of expertise
3. Publicly document the terms under which evaluators operate, as well as facilitating permissive publication of methods and findings
4. Shield evaluators from retaliation
5. Grant access equivalent to that of highly privileged employees
There is a thriving and growing ecosystem of independent AI evaluators who are advancing this science every day – but we need aligned standards, guaranteed protections, and independent funding. That’s why we created the AI Evaluator Forum.
Today we are entering our next phase. We’re launching an open call for new members, collaborators, and independent funding sources to help evaluators meet this moment and demand accountability from developers. Join us in building the evaluator ecosystem.
See the public letter here:
Learn more at
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One way AI’s made my life worse recently is that I’ve gotten a big wave of emails from bots claiming my error bounty all finding incredibly tiny mistakes or typos. Flooding my inbox in a pretty annoying way.
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I basically think a lot of people are going to continue to make a lot of things up about EA and will show exactly zero interest in what we're actually like. Gotta put up signposts for the people who are actually interested and otherwise calmly weather the storm.
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The AI as Normal Technology guys are consistently some of the best and most interesting critics of a lot of arguments in AI safety world. I'm making a point to read everything they put out.
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I wrote out a lot of thoughts about why I don't think the data center backlash seems especially helpful for AI safety (though obviously it's a good chance to recruit people to separately think about AI more) and why I and others into EA don't want to just lie to people about them
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In all seriousness I think this represents both a disturbing society-level inability to process basic facts that involve numbers, a lurch toward degrowth on the left and right, and a failure of mainstream journalism to go beyond just nodding along to the "concerns" of everyday people without checking to see if they're the result of a game of telephone that leads back to nothing
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This video was one of the very worst MPU has done. It’s entirely focused on farmers in the desert feeling entitled to take as much water from the Colorado River as they’d like to farm in the very most arid place in the country with no competition at all with any industry that also uses water.
Their first example is a pecan farmer who demonstrates how he dumps huge amounts of water into the ground and then implies that anyone who’s okay with data centers using water must “know how to eat computer chips” because “there won’t be any food left.” This guy thinks if he has to pay a little more for water to farm in a desert, it’s like saying we shouldn’t have food at all. The video frames him as a hero.
They also bring up the offsite water cost of generating electricity as if it’s this secret data centers are hiding by not reporting it in their water use. For any other building that uses water, we usually only expect them to report their internal power and water cost and infer the water cost of the electricity from the power plants. This is all out in the open.
They interview a county water manager who says the data center really isn’t an issue and only uses 0.4% of the local water, and then immediately cut to a local activist saying they can’t have enough for the data center because water costs have gone up. These are obviously unrelated, because as the video notes the city’s raised water rates every year for 11 years.
I could go on and on, every moment is insane.
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I'm pretty convinced the single most helpful thing I've done for myself is just actually choose to read things. It's so overpowered.
Our aging grid. Necessary upgrades to an aging grid. This might be just what America's aging grid needs. But put in the context of our aging grid. The first thing to understand is that the grid is aging.
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