A bit of a tangent. I am confused by SFF’s grant to OAK (Optimizing Awakening and Kindness). Could any recommender comment on its purpose or at least briefly describe what OAK is about as the hyperlink is not very informative.
OAK intends to train people who are likely to have important impacts on AI, to help them be kinder or something like that. So I see a good deal of overlap with the reasons why CFAR is valuable.
I attended a 2-day OAK retreat. It was run in a professional manner that suggests they’ll provide a good deal of benefit to people who they train. But my intuition is that the impact will be mainly to make those people happier, and I expect that OAK’s impact will have less effect on peoples’ behavior than CFAR has.
I considered donating to OAK as an EA charity, but have decided it isn’t quite effective enough for me to treat it that way.
I believe that the person who promoted that grant at SFF has more experience with OAK than I do.
I’m surprised that SFF gave more to OAK than to ALLFED.
Nearly all of CFAR’s activity is motivated by their effects on people who are likely to impact AI. As a donor, I don’t distinguish much between the various types of workshops.
There are many ways that people can impact AI, and I presume the different types of workshop are slightly optimized for different strategies and different skills, and differ a bit in how strongly they’re selecting for people who have a high probability of doing AI-relevant things. CFAR likely doesn’t have a good prediction in advance about whether any individual person will prioritize AI, and we shouldn’t expect them to try to admit only those with high probabilities of working on AI-related tasks.
I was a recommender for the round, but did not recommend a grant to OAK, so I sadly can’t speak to it. I think to get more detailed reasoning on this, you would have to get an answer from the specific recommenders who made that grant. However, if you can’t get ahold of them, I can probably give a somewhat bad summary of their views, though I think it would be better to hear things directly from them.
A bit of a tangent. I am confused by SFF’s grant to OAK (Optimizing Awakening and Kindness). Could any recommender comment on its purpose or at least briefly describe what OAK is about as the hyperlink is not very informative.
OAK intends to train people who are likely to have important impacts on AI, to help them be kinder or something like that. So I see a good deal of overlap with the reasons why CFAR is valuable.
I attended a 2-day OAK retreat. It was run in a professional manner that suggests they’ll provide a good deal of benefit to people who they train. But my intuition is that the impact will be mainly to make those people happier, and I expect that OAK’s impact will have less effect on peoples’ behavior than CFAR has.
I considered donating to OAK as an EA charity, but have decided it isn’t quite effective enough for me to treat it that way.
I believe that the person who promoted that grant at SFF has more experience with OAK than I do.
I’m surprised that SFF gave more to OAK than to ALLFED.
Peter, thank you! I am slightly confused by your phrasing.
To benchmark, would you say that
(a) CFAR mainline workshops are aimed to train [...] to “people who are likely to have important impacts on AI”;
(b) AIRCS workshops are aimed at the same audience;
(c) MSFP is aimed at the same audience?
Nearly all of CFAR’s activity is motivated by their effects on people who are likely to impact AI. As a donor, I don’t distinguish much between the various types of workshops.
There are many ways that people can impact AI, and I presume the different types of workshop are slightly optimized for different strategies and different skills, and differ a bit in how strongly they’re selecting for people who have a high probability of doing AI-relevant things. CFAR likely doesn’t have a good prediction in advance about whether any individual person will prioritize AI, and we shouldn’t expect them to try to admit only those with high probabilities of working on AI-related tasks.
Thank you, Peter. If you are curious Anna Salamon connected various types of activities with CFAR’s mission in the recent Q&A.
I was a recommender for the round, but did not recommend a grant to OAK, so I sadly can’t speak to it. I think to get more detailed reasoning on this, you would have to get an answer from the specific recommenders who made that grant. However, if you can’t get ahold of them, I can probably give a somewhat bad summary of their views, though I think it would be better to hear things directly from them.