a_e_r
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Hi! This has been a super great resource for me in the past and I just wanted to check if it’s still active? The airtable link to apply is no longer working for me and is indicating that the link has been deleted.
Hey! As a representative for UpDating, I’m passionate about helping EAs find loving relationships. I’m wondering if I’d be able to partner with you to implement QAWYs as a complementary unit for our app’s micromarriage calculator? We currently add 100 micromarriages per one-on-one, but I’d be excited to figure out an estimate in QAWYs as well! Let’s get in touch soon!
This is a very good point! We’ll strongly consider those additions in our EAGL app update.
Building off of your ideas of prediction market integration, I think a next step for UpDating could be a developing a community-wide forecasting platform so that EAs could predict the longevity of relationships started on the app. People aren’t well calibrated in relationship predictions and at UpDating we’d like to help with that.
Calling for Student Submissions: AI Safety Distillation Contest
Thank you!
Could you clarify what you mean? Do you mean students who are on a break from college, newly admitted students who aren’t yet attending, or something else?
This sounds like a really great idea! I’d be curious to know, what are the factors limiting this to being a UK-only project? Would something like capacity or knowledge of other university systems in other countries be the issue? Because this sounds like a project I’d love to see in the US too and think could generally scale quite well!
Unfortunately, I created this contest to help build up university groups, so I think keeping the contest limited to enrolled students (including students who are entering college later this year and students who will graduate before the contest ends) would be the best way to ensure that students feel like they have an advantage in the contest. Thank you for clarifying!
Thank you! These are thoughtful comments! I think I will try to add more texts and find more readers, as you suggest.
I’ve been thinking of going into working on creating contests in the future as a potentially serious work project, so I hope to create some contests that can be larger scale then! Right now, I’m rather limited in capacity. Thankfully, I’m connected with some other great university organizers who I’ve let know about advertising at their schools.
I think it would be tricky to have clear baseline cutoffs for distillation that still capture quality since writing varies so much between people. Do you have any ideas of clear cutoffs that would retain quality (for future contests if nothing else)?
Oh, great idea! If nothing else, distill.pub is a great resource for me to list!
The primary audience for this contests is undergrad, but Master’s students are allowed!
Hi! I’ve been thinking about this a bit more and I do think I want graduate students to be able to submit! However, since the main audience is meant to be undergraduate students, I may have to be harsher in evaluation or, more excitingly, maybe I could create a new tier for graduate students? For now I’d say feel free to submit and I’ll work out more specifics on my end and make an edit (+ reply to this) if I make official changes!
I do think it’s possible that we might award more prizes retroactively if we recognize that we receive a lot of valuable submissions! Maybe an “honorable mentions” category.
Ah, I think my worry is that it feels difficult for me to find a standard to rate that actually tracks quality. If I give a couple of examples, people may feel limited to having their work look like those examples. I might say “make your distillation 1,000 words and explain two papers and I’ll give you a prize” but 1,500 words on one paper might have made an optimal submission and I would have limited people’s abilities. I think I find it hard to quantify a bar on writing since everyone has such different approaches. I think the real bar is something more like “the judges who know more about AI Safety than me believe that you have communicated this idea really well” and because of that it feels wrong for me to try to say “and if you do x you will definitely win something.”
Great point! Early on, I had someone more connected than me make a list of potential judges. We have 15 names brainstormed and sectioned off by how much they know about alignment. I can say with pretty high certainty that I imagine we will at least have someone whose full-time job is alignment reading the submissions (likely a person with a CS doctorate), but hopefully, we could get even more expertise :)
I wasn’t anticipating releasing the list (in some part because people may try to pander to a certain judge’s background and in some part to allow myself and the judges more flexibility in adding people last second).
Sending some judge recommendations my way would be great! I think having a variety of readers would be helpful :) Thank you!
Sure :)
This is super cool research and it’s great that you all were able to conduct this survey!!
I think it’s great that you all renamed to survey so that it didn’t specifically attract people who looked for words like “effective” or “altruism” or “existential risk.”
Great post! I think planning ahead could also inadvertently help make retreats and large events more accessible to lower-income students. My thoughts on this are below and are specifically related to events that involve flights that are last second.
This study on Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/316376/air-travel-frequency-us-by-income/) found that about 19% of respondents with incomes over $80,000 are frequent flyers, whereas only 3% of respondents with incomes under $40,000 are. Moreover, 32% of the $40,000-and-less responders said they had never flown, whereas only 7% of the $80,000+ group had never flown.
I would also say that I’ve noticed people who have had less opportunity in the past to travel (usually due to having less financial freedom) or are less experienced with attending things like retreats can be more daunted by last-second invitations for flights. Sometimes to the point of not accepting them. A lot of people I know are flustered by the thought of travelling far away or by plane because it’s something they aren’t used to. The thought of last-second packing or navigating an airport is a lot easier if you have practice for it. If a college student had never flown alone or had never flown at all, a last-second invitation by a club at their school might present them with more anxiety than the perceived reward of going.
Since it’s more likely that affluent people will have flown more, while less affluent people would tend to have less exposure to flights, especially last-second flights, these last-minute invitations could be unintentionally making it harder for low-income people to attend. Not because of a lack of funding on EA’s side, but from a lack of allowing people time to acclimate to the idea of doing something they aren’t used to. I think giving ample time for people to process the idea of traveling helps lessen anxiety around committing to a retreat, which would help us recruit and retain more people with less exposure to flying :)
Moreover, giving people time to make funding requests rather than refund requests would also likely be less daunting for people who don’t have much money to pay for flights or other large expenses up front. I think it’s good to keep in mind that there are some people who might be living paycheck to paycheck—especially in student groups—so the expense of a last-second flight, even if you’ll get reimbursed, could be a deterrent.