Also feel free to book a time there for any other topic. I want to replicate the serendipitous meetings of an EAG year-round and I’m endlessly extroverted, so love talking to new people.
The list of people on the google form and the list in this post don’t match (e.g. Seren Kell is on the post but not on the form and vice versa for David Manheim and Zachary Robinson)
Cool! I’d love to join in! I’ve created a “conversation menu” (h/t to a friend for the idea!) on my profile. Here’s a copy-paste that I probably won’t update when I update the original on the profile.
Creating a world-modeling ecosystem to quantify the impact of even highly uncertain interventions. Squiggle is the main effort in this space that comes to mind, but Aryeh Englander is also working on a unified Bayesian network approach to it.
Outside EA:
I feel like it should be possible to improve note-taking in verbal conversations a lot with the sort of technologies we have now. The most effective note-takers I know still do it fully manually using magical multitasking skills. It feels like there’s a decent chance that that could be improved with speed-to-text + GPT-3-like summarization. Plus the user could be instructed to ask follow-up questions in a way that repeats something that the other said to add some redundancy.
Less serious: Swiping keyboards seem oddly broken. Unless I don’t know of the best one. “Thank yurt”? Seriously? What sort of crazy swiping mistake of mine could’ve possibly overridden the >> 20k times more likely collocational prior that “Thank y-” ought to be completed to “Thank you”? I didn’t even know what a yurt is! xD
Seeing your post on impostor syndrome in hiring, I’m wondering whether you’re maybe well-positioned to start a think tank to solve hiring among altruists. How to invest our time seems to be about as big of a question as how to invest our money, so it may also warrant similarly much effort to optimize.
There has been a lot of research on the money side, but on the time side, there are only 80k and Probably Good. It seems to me that both give you good answers if you’re a particular type of person and wonder what, very broadly, you should do with your life. But they address questions such as efficient moral trade between orgs with different goals or optimal cooperation between orgs with similar goals only very superficially by comparison. Maybe that problem warrants a new dedicated think tank.
I don’t know if that’ll end up requiring software to solve though.
Am I right in thinking that if this takes off you take yourself out of the booking loop eventually? People can then do it directly by including a calendly link for example.
I’d like to be added with the following description:
Independent consultant with background in operations. Helping organizations be effective by making the most of their systems. LinkedIn
Ask about:
Bounce ideas about improvements/solutions to operational processes
If you’re considering setting up / joining / using the expertise of an agency providing services to EA-aligned organizations, I might be able to connect you to relevant people
1. Yeah something like this! 2. Great, thanks. I’ve added you to the google form but I think it will work better if other people who comment add their calendly so that people don’t have to go through me.
This is a great idea! I don’t currently have capacity for one-to-one calls, but I do hold monthly small group calls in an “office hours” format.
I’m a technical AI safety researcher at CHAI and PhD student at UC Berkeley, and I’m happy to talk about my research, others’ research, graduate school, careers in AI safety, and other related topics. If you’re interested, you can find out more about my research here, and sign up to join an upcoming call here.
A critical reading is that this seems that most of the people would motivate chatters to take careers steps which may advance some of the projects that they or others have in mind.
Is this the objective (definitely can be worthwhile), while other avenues should be found for discussing solutions to problems that these professionals focus on?
The two people who so far commented about being willing to chat seem interested in brainstorming solutions (and unstructured chatting) in addition to sharing more one-sided advice.
Before I noticed these comments I meant to suggest renaming the post to something like ‘Not sure about your next career steps and getting bored? Book a chat with an EA professional!’. With the comments, the expectations in the chat should be covered by the topics list.
“<topic> 101” generally means beginner or introductory questions, taken from some universities where a class like MATH101 would be the first and most basic mathematics class in a degree. So, “EA 101 questions” here means basic or introductory EA questions.
I’d be happy to chat with anybody about charity entrepreneurship in the longtermist space. You can book a time here on my year-long, location-independent EAG calendly
Also feel free to book a time there for any other topic. I want to replicate the serendipitous meetings of an EAG year-round and I’m endlessly extroverted, so love talking to new people.
Thanks Ben for setting this up!
If there was some kind of Global EA directory/ year round Swapcard, this project idea could be rolled into it quite easily.
Agree!
Thanks for putting this together!
The list of people on the google form and the list in this post don’t match (e.g. Seren Kell is on the post but not on the form and vice versa for David Manheim and Zachary Robinson)
Thanks for pointing this out—I’ve updated this now.
Apologies to anyone who weren’t able to complete the form.
🤯
Cool! I’d love to join in! I’ve created a “conversation menu” (h/t to a friend for the idea!) on my profile. Here’s a copy-paste that I probably won’t update when I update the original on the profile.
I’m happy to do calls, give feedback, or go bouldering together, also virtually. You can book me on Calendly.
Some topics for potential calls:
Impact markets
Other market mechanism for public and common goods
AI safety, especially to avert s-risks
AI timelines and whether to still buy NMN
Evidential cooperation in large worlds
Any tensions or gaps in our world models that you’ve been thinking about
MIRI-esque decision theory
Moral cooperation and trade
Any events that have been on your mind lately
Proportionality of safety mechanisms
Phonetics and phonology
Improving collective decision-making
Creating powerful quantitative world models for priorities research
Software engineering – Python, TypeScript, Solidity, etc.
Why I’m always so impressed by mathematicians
Autism, anxiety, worry, guilt OCD, depression, fatigue
Cultural effects on mental health
Understanding people
English-language literature
Impostor syndrome, or how incompetent exactly am I
Anything you would like me or others to understand about you
Well-being of farmed and wild animals today and within the next 1m years
Including invertebrates and micro-organisms of course
Well-being of organisms other than animals
Life optimizations
Bouldering, Trackmania, Othello, and lockpicking
World and space governance
Automated, decentralized governance
Trees of nested simulations and incentives to create them
Emulated minds
Intersectionality, genderlessness, and social anxiety
Acausal trade across levels and with other branches in the simulation tree
Incubators for EA and especially longtermist projects
Trade-offs between entrepreneurialness and safety
Turning the Long Reflection into a Hasty Reflection
EA community strategy and health
Longterm prediction markets
Cute animals and plushies
Vertical agriculture to reduce insect suffering
Anything else you’re interested in discussing
What you’ve been up to the past few days
Dummy item to reach 42
Also note that I’m not necessarily expert in all of this stuff! I suck at Trackmania for example.
Thanks Denis. I am a fan of the variety of this list! :)
Whee! Thanks!
Hey!
Any chance you hear about problems that might be solved with software?
My top list contains:
Impact markets obviously. :-3
Creating a world-modeling ecosystem to quantify the impact of even highly uncertain interventions. Squiggle is the main effort in this space that comes to mind, but Aryeh Englander is also working on a unified Bayesian network approach to it.
Outside EA:
I feel like it should be possible to improve note-taking in verbal conversations a lot with the sort of technologies we have now. The most effective note-takers I know still do it fully manually using magical multitasking skills. It feels like there’s a decent chance that that could be improved with speed-to-text + GPT-3-like summarization. Plus the user could be instructed to ask follow-up questions in a way that repeats something that the other said to add some redundancy.
Less serious: Swiping keyboards seem oddly broken. Unless I don’t know of the best one. “Thank yurt”? Seriously? What sort of crazy swiping mistake of mine could’ve possibly overridden the >> 20k times more likely collocational prior that “Thank y-” ought to be completed to “Thank you”? I didn’t even know what a yurt is! xD
Seeing your post on impostor syndrome in hiring, I’m wondering whether you’re maybe well-positioned to start a think tank to solve hiring among altruists. How to invest our time seems to be about as big of a question as how to invest our money, so it may also warrant similarly much effort to optimize.
There has been a lot of research on the money side, but on the time side, there are only 80k and Probably Good. It seems to me that both give you good answers if you’re a particular type of person and wonder what, very broadly, you should do with your life. But they address questions such as efficient moral trade between orgs with different goals or optimal cooperation between orgs with similar goals only very superficially by comparison. Maybe that problem warrants a new dedicated think tank.
I don’t know if that’ll end up requiring software to solve though.
Thanks Ben, good idea.
Am I right in thinking that if this takes off you take yourself out of the booking loop eventually? People can then do it directly by including a calendly link for example.
I’d like to be added with the following description:
Eli Kaufman
Independent consultant with background in operations. Helping organizations be effective by making the most of their systems. LinkedIn
Ask about:
Bounce ideas about improvements/solutions to operational processes
If you’re considering setting up / joining / using the expertise of an agency providing services to EA-aligned organizations, I might be able to connect you to relevant people
Salesforce related questions
Calendly
Awesome, thanks Eli.
1. Yeah something like this!
2. Great, thanks. I’ve added you to the google form but I think it will work better if other people who comment add their calendly so that people don’t have to go through me.
This is a great idea! I don’t currently have capacity for one-to-one calls, but I do hold monthly small group calls in an “office hours” format.
I’m a technical AI safety researcher at CHAI and PhD student at UC Berkeley, and I’m happy to talk about my research, others’ research, graduate school, careers in AI safety, and other related topics. If you’re interested, you can find out more about my research here, and sign up to join an upcoming call here.
A critical reading is that this seems that most of the people would motivate chatters to take careers steps which may advance some of the projects that they or others have in mind.
Is this the objective (definitely can be worthwhile), while other avenues should be found for discussing solutions to problems that these professionals focus on?
The two people who so far commented about being willing to chat seem interested in brainstorming solutions (and unstructured chatting) in addition to sharing more one-sided advice.
Before I noticed these comments I meant to suggest renaming the post to something like ‘Not sure about your next career steps and getting bored? Book a chat with an EA professional!’. With the comments, the expectations in the chat should be covered by the topics list.
Hi Ben, I’m not clear what this refers to. Could this be clarified in the post?
“<topic> 101” generally means beginner or introductory questions, taken from some universities where a class like MATH101 would be the first and most basic mathematics class in a degree. So, “EA 101 questions” here means basic or introductory EA questions.
Thanks Jay! @Quinn, this is what I intended it to mean.