Believer, skeptic, humanist, typist & dad. Trying to make places fairer as director of cities + towns for @Sightline. Views here: mine, all mine.
Portland, OR
Joined September 2008
- Tweets43K
- Following1.1K
- Followers5.9K
- Likes860
Michael Andersen retweeted
A good YIMBY trend is cities reducing the number of zoning districts in their code
Redmond, WA reduced to 20 zones. Vancouver, WA reduced to just 10 zones. Meanwhile Seattle has 285.
Difficult to analyze feasibility when zones are so arbitrarily dispersed like this
Michael Andersen retweeted
Amazon asked Portland for a Preapplication Meeting for a proposed delivery drone facility.
City staff chose to classify drones as "helicopters" by interpreting rules as strictly as possible, making permitting more difficult.
Now the plan is withdrawn.
portland.gov/ppd/zoning-land…
Michael Andersen retweeted
We’re hiring a messaging strategy manager!
Research, test, and refine pro-housing, democracy, and clean energy messages as part of Sightline’s communications team: sightline.org/manager-messag…
Michael Andersen retweeted
My YIMBY group began 100% volunteer, like Canada's YIMBYs now, but Open NY transformed when we got a grant for our 1st employee
If US YIMBY charities tested grants in Canada, would it be welcomed as a kind of trade war reparation, or lambasted as meddling in Canadian affairs?
🏠We've added new attributes to our Affordable Housing Dataset🏠
You can now identify how many supportive units are in each record, and whether they are part of the Toronto Builds Portfolio
Here's the data: open.toronto.ca/dataset/upco…
Michael Andersen retweeted
Totally insane levels of corruption and abuse of power are swirling all around us and my sense is that as angry as voters are about the cost of living they mostly are so awash in cynicism about politics that they don’t understand how egregious Trump is.
Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before Trump announced a U-turn on Iran in a post on Truth Social. CFTC staff began to investigate-- then were told to lay off. bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Michael Andersen retweeted
This permitting bill is very good and Congress should pass it
Thanks to @SenatorHeinrich @SenWhitehouse @SenMikeLee @SenCapito for their leadership
Shout out to the @heatmap_news crew for their good summary here ⬇️
Heatmap has spent all day digging into the bipartisan permitting deal. Here’s our guide: heatmap.news/politics/bipart…
Michael Andersen retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Michael Andersen retweeted
misaligned AI is just a normie left degrowther would be the funniest possible way for this all to go wrong
Michael Andersen retweeted
Just to update this chart:
1) AI salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined
2) 80% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI will cause widespread job loss in the five to ten years
3) 64% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity's survival
4) Large bipartisan majorities back immediate government action on AI even when primed about risk from China
Michael Andersen retweeted
-AI safety is not a marketing stunt
-AI safety is not "self-aggrandizement" by the labs
CG's GCR teams are donating hundreds of millions of dollars annually *right now* to build up the AI safety field with top talent as quickly as possible. It's all really happening 👇
Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them.
There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas:
coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
We’re providing funding at three levels:
1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team
2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale
3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start
If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwi…
There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true!
Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.
Michael Andersen retweeted
In the COVID-AI analogy, the last 24 hours feel like March 11, 2020, when Tom Hanks tested positive for COVID & the NBA suspended its season.
- 120 million views on @hilbertspaess’s resignation
- @DKokotajlo on Rogan’s podcast
- @paulfchristiano joins OpenAI board
The transition moment from “risk experts have been talking about” to “risk everyone is talking about.”
Michael Andersen retweeted
“Anthropic is a bubble inside a bubble (tech culture) inside a bubble (San Francisco). The people I met were more likely to think about Dyson spheres than any near-term practical applications of AI to the betterment of ordinary human life. They sometimes seemed unable to articulate any positive case for building increasingly powerful AIs beyond what you might call the Manhattan Project argument: If we don’t build the atomic bomb, Hitler will—and that would be even worse. I found that weird.”
Michael Andersen retweeted
Some thoughts, welcoming feedback:
1. If the frontier labs feel obligated to build something they think is dangerous because China is going to build it anyway, we'd better be really sure that China is going to build it anyway. Like, really, really, really sure.
Are we? Are we actually sure? The CCP wants to build an out-of-control, recursively self-improving model bc its neurotically, control-obsessed government thinks this is a policy worth pursing? We're 100% sure about that?
2. At the very least, we know that Chinese models distill American models to keep up with the frontier. So, any slowdown by the US seems like it would mechanically and automatically slow the ability of China to distill its way to progress. If we're afraid of the rate of progress, isn't that a good thing?
Michael Andersen retweeted
Underappreciated fact: land value capture works only when zoning is a constraint on housing supply.
If developers already had enough land zoned for higher density, they wouldn't pay extra for upzoned land, and there wouldn't be any uplift to capture.
Michael Andersen retweeted
being a non-top-tier university outside of the south is going to be BRUTAL
Michael Andersen retweeted
The college enrollment/demographic cliff is here:
economistwritingeveryday.com…
Michael Andersen retweeted
Scott Galloway: “I think the biggest opportunity for men right now is the trades … go into curtain hanging, soapstone marble installation, carpet cleaning”
“Is that what you did ?”
“Not at all. I got really depressed I was a cabinet installer at 19 and begged UCLA to let me in. Then after graduating I worked for Morgan Stanley, for my Masters, and worked in consulting”
“Oh so then are your kids doing that?”
“No, my oldest is a freshman at UVA”
