Ajeya Cotra

It's a bit unclear why you would go into that area.

It's not particularly lucrative.

It's not –

at least yet, particularly respected.

I guess it's not super easy to make progress.

And I guess it's sufficiently unconventional.

I think most people, most of the time in their career, like they want to do something that's acceptable and that their parents will be proud of.

And it's just a lot less clear that digital sentience is going to provide you with the kind of esteem or prestige that many people, or safety, comfort that many people want in a career.

So it's maybe natural that people who are, yeah, altruistically motivated and also, I guess, like intellectually a bit eclectic

Yeah, I feel that less strongly in the case of the value lock-in thing because many of the mechanisms there would be just ways that AI ends up.

I guess you would get a power grab by people or a power grab by AIs or somehow it undermines democracy or deliberation in a way that makes it hard for society to adapt over time.

I think people are worried about that regardless of both people involved in effective altruism and people who would be very skeptical of it.

It's interesting that in thinking about what is the niche that EA can fill that others won't fill, the thing you were pointing to was not...

primarily actually altruism, although I guess like that is a factor in terms of going into like digital sentience, perhaps.

It's actually a research methodology or like a research instinct, which is, I guess, being willing to be in that very uncomfortable space between just making stuff up and like having firm conclusions that you can stand by because you've taken particular measurements.

It feels like for some reason, that is one of the most distinctive aspects of people who are like passionate about effective altruism, willing to make like

like try really hard to make informed speculation about how things will go and like neither just have it be a good story nor be too conservative that you're not willing to actually like make hard predictions.

Yeah, I guess like more standard ways to approach those questions would be to like just pick one slightly arbitrarily and then be really committed to it or to be kind of irritated at being asked the question and to say that there's like absolutely no way of knowing or there's no fact of the matter here whatsoever.

Yeah.

And I guess like trying to be somewhere, I guess I don't know whether it's somewhere in the middle, but yeah.