Nope. The grant you linked to was not in any way connected to me or the books I’ve printed. A couple of years ago, (edit: in 2019) I was surprised to learn about that grant; the claim that there was coordination with “the team behind the highly successful Russian printing of HPMOR” (which is me/us) is false. (I don’t think the recipients of the grant you’re referencing even have a way to follow up with the people they gave books. Also, as IMO 2020 was cancelled, they should’ve returned most of the grant.)
EA money was not involved in printing the books that I have.
We’ve started sending books to olympiad winners in December 2022. All of the copies we’ve sent have been explicitly requested, often together with copies of The Precipice and/or Human Compatible, sometimes after having already read it (usually due to my previous efforts), usually after having seen endorsements by popular science people and literary critics.
I have a very different model of how HPMOR affects this specific audience and I think this is a lot more valuable than selling the books[1] → donating anywhere else.
Upvoted because I’m glad you answered the question (and didn’t use EA grant money for this).
Disagreevoted because as an IMO medalist, I neither think science olympiad medalists are really such a useful audience, nor do I see any value in disseminating said fanfiction to potential alignment researchers.
Anecdotally, approximately everyone who’s now working on AI safety with Russian origins got into it because of HPMOR. Just a couple of days ago, an IOI gold medalist reached out to me, they’ve been going through ARENA.
HPMOR tends to make people with that kind of background act more on trying to save the world. It also gives some intuitive sense for some related stuff (up to “oh, like the mirror from HPMOR?”), but this is a lot less central than giving people the ~EA values and making them actually do stuff.
(Plus, at this point, the book is well-known enough in some circles that some % of future Russian ML researchers would be a lot easier to alignment-pill and persuade to not work on something that might kill everyone or prompt other countries to build something that kills everyone.
I’m not sure how universal this is- the kind of Russian kid who is into math/computer science is the kind of kid who would often be into the HPMOR aesthetics- but it seems to work.
I think many past IMO/IOI medalists are generally very capable and can help, and it’s worth looking at the list of them and reaching out to people who’ve read HPMOR (and possibly The Precipice/Human Compatible) and getting them to work on AI safety.
Nope. The grant you linked to was not in any way connected to me or the books I’ve printed.
A couple of years ago,(edit: in 2019) I was surprised to learn about that grant; the claim that there was coordination with “the team behind the highly successful Russian printing of HPMOR” (which is me/us) is false. (I don’t think the recipients of the grant you’re referencing even have a way to follow up with the people they gave books. Also, as IMO 2020 was cancelled, they should’ve returned most of the grant.)EA money was not involved in printing the books that I have.
We’ve started sending books to olympiad winners in December 2022. All of the copies we’ve sent have been explicitly requested, often together with copies of The Precipice and/or Human Compatible, sometimes after having already read it (usually due to my previous efforts), usually after having seen endorsements by popular science people and literary critics.
I have a very different model of how HPMOR affects this specific audience and I think this is a lot more valuable than selling the books[1] → donating anywhere else.
(we can’t actually sell these books due to copyright-related constraints.)
Upvoted because I’m glad you answered the question (and didn’t use EA grant money for this).
Disagreevoted because as an IMO medalist, I neither think science olympiad medalists are really such a useful audience, nor do I see any value in disseminating said fanfiction to potential alignment researchers.
Speaking as an IMO medalist who partially got into AI safety because of reading HPMOR 10 years ago, I think this plan is extremely reasonable
Anecdotally, approximately everyone who’s now working on AI safety with Russian origins got into it because of HPMOR. Just a couple of days ago, an IOI gold medalist reached out to me, they’ve been going through ARENA.
HPMOR tends to make people with that kind of background act more on trying to save the world. It also gives some intuitive sense for some related stuff (up to “oh, like the mirror from HPMOR?”), but this is a lot less central than giving people the ~EA values and making them actually do stuff.
(Plus, at this point, the book is well-known enough in some circles that some % of future Russian ML researchers would be a lot easier to alignment-pill and persuade to not work on something that might kill everyone or prompt other countries to build something that kills everyone.
Like, the largest Russian broker decided to celebrate the New Year by advertising HPMOR and citing Yudkowsky.)
I’m not sure how universal this is- the kind of Russian kid who is into math/computer science is the kind of kid who would often be into the HPMOR aesthetics- but it seems to work.
I think many past IMO/IOI medalists are generally very capable and can help, and it’s worth looking at the list of them and reaching out to people who’ve read HPMOR (and possibly The Precipice/Human Compatible) and getting them to work on AI safety.