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.
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.