I work on AI Grantmaking at Open Philanthropy. Comments here are posted in a personal capacity.
alex lawsen
Karma: 3,721
FAR AI posts recordings of talks from the events they organise on YouTube.
Many, perhaps most people, would be well advised to beware surprising and suspicious convergence.
The rest would be well advised to beware excessive wariness of surprising and suspicious convergence.
[Epistemic status: argument from authority*]
I think your suggested format is a significant upgrade on the (much more common, unfortunately) “group brainstorm” set up that Ollie is criticising, for roughly the reasons he outlines; It does much better on “fidelity per person-minute”.
Individual brainstorming is obviously great for this, for the reasons you said (among others).
Commenting on a doc (rather than discussing in groups of 6-8) again allows many more people to be engaging in a high-quality/active way simultaneously.
It also seems worth saying that choosing questions well, which means they are:worth answering
difficult or contextual enough that multiple people’s thought is required to get to a good answer
scoped well enough that progress can actually be made by a group in the relevant time
is a) necessary for group discussion to be worthwhile, b) difficult, and c) significantly more difficult for a group of mixed ability and context, whom you don’t know well. c, of course, applies much more strongly in the context Ollie is primarily concerned with (EAGs and similar events), to the one you’re describing (research team meeting).
I think that, almost without exception, if event sessions want to incorporate some discussion, they should start with the ‘individual silent thought’ exercise you mention, and then expand to pairs (with some 3s to stop people needing to do a lot of rearranging odd numbers of people). There are lots of reasons that this works better than larger groupings, but again Ollie’s heuristic of ‘fidelity per person-minute’ is one. A less obvious one is that minimising the distance between speaker and listener allows conversation volume to be much quieter, and if you think about how volume scales with distance, this more than outweighs the effect of having more people talking simultaneously.
Feeding back to the whole group from these discussions can happen (and be great), but is worth parallelising where possible, e.g. by commenting on a central gdoc as you suggest, or with a Slido, where people are encouraged to submit questions that their paired/small group discussions did not resolve, which the facilitator can then answer, or suggest steps to answer, at the end.
*I spent a ~decade as a teacher, and have facilitated many highly-reviewed workshops during and since, so I feel like I do have reasonable grounds to claim authority, but this is a joke, it just seemed like a funny epistemic status.
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I think that this:
> but the intuition that calls this model naive is driven by a sense that it’s going to turn out to not “actually” be 2 additional people, that additionality is going to be lower than you think, that the costs of getting that result are higher than you think, etc. etc.
is most of the answer. Getting a fully counterfactual career shift (that person’s expected career value without your intervention is ~0, but instead they’re now going to work at [job you would otherwise have taken, for at least as long as you would have]) is a really high bar to meet. If you did expect to get 2 of those, at equal skill levels to you, then I think the argument for ‘going meta’ basically goes through.
In practice, though:
- People who fill [valuable role] after your intervention probably had a significant chance of finding out about it anyway.
- They also probably had a significant chance of ending up in a different high-value role had they not taken the one you intervened on.
How much of a discount you want to apply for these things is going depend a lot on how efficiently you expect the [AI safety] job market to allocate talent. In general, I find it easier to arrive at reasonable-seeming estimates for the value of career/trajectory changes by modelling them as moving the the change earlier in time rather than causing it to happen at all. How valuable you expect the acceleration to be depends on your guesses about time-discounting, which is another can of worms, but I think is plausibly significant, even with no pure rate of time preference.
(This is basically your final bullet, just expanded a bit.)
I thought it seemed worth flagging that Open Philanthropy recently recommended a grant to Palisade Research. I investigated the grant, and am happy to see that Michael is also excited about their work and included them in his top five.
I’ve seen people wear a very wide range of things at the EAGs I’ve been to.
Inspect is open-source, and should be exactly what you’re looking for given your stated interest in METR
Why do you think superforecasters who were selected specifically for assigning a low probability to AI x-risk are well described as “a bunch of smart people with no particular reason to be biased”?
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not upset that the supers were selected in this way, it’s the whole point of the study, made very clear in the write-up, and was clear to me as a participant. It’s just that “your arguments failed to convince randomly selected superforecasters” and “your arguments failed to convince a group of superforecasters who were specifically selected for confidentiality disagreeing with you” are very different pieces of evidence.
They weren’t randomly selected, they were selected specifically for scepticism!
The smart people were selected for having a good predictive track record on geopolitical questions with resolution times measured in months, a track record equaled or bettered by several* members of the concerned group. I think this is much less strong evidence of forecasting ability on the kinds of question discussed than you do.
*For what it’s worth, I’d expect the skeptical group to do slightly better overall on e.g. non-AI GJP questions over the next 2 years, they do have better forecasting track records as a group on this kind of question, it’s just not a stark difference.
The first bullet point of the concerned group summarizing their own position was “non-extinction requires many things to go right, some of which seem unlikely”.
This point was notably absent from the sceptics summary of the concerned position.
Both sceptics and concerned agreed that a different important point on the concerned side was that it’s harder to use base rates for unprecedented events with unclear reference classes.
I think these both provide a much better characterisation of the difference than the quote you’re responding to.
I’m still saving for retirement in various ways, including by making pension contributions.
If you’re working on GCR reduction, you can always consider your pension savings a performance bonus for good work :)
I’m not officially part of the AMA but I’m one of the disagreevotes so I’ll chime in.
As someone who’s only recently started, the vibe this post gives of it being hard for me to disagree with established wisdom and/or push the org to do things differently, meaning my only role is to ‘just push out more money along the OP party line’, is just miles away from what I’ve experienced.
If anything, I think how much ownership I’ve needed to take for the projects I’m working on has been the biggest challenge of starting the role. It’s one that (I hope) I’m rising to, but it’s hard!
In terms of how open OP is to steering from within, it seems worth distinguishing ‘how likely is a random junior person to substantially shift the worldview of the org’, and ‘what would the experience of that person be like if they tried to’. Luke has, from before I had an offer, repeatedly demonstrated that he wants and values my disagreement in how he reacts to it and acts on it, and it’s something I really appreciate about his management.
I think 1 unfortunately ends up not being true in the intensive farming case. Lots of things are spread by close enough contact that even intense uvc wouldn’t do much (and it would be really expensive)
I wouldn’t expect the attitude of the team to have shifted much in my absence. I learned a huge amount from Michelle, who’s still leading the team, especially about management. To the extent you were impressed with my answers, I think she should take a large amount of the credit.
On feedback specifically, I’ve retained a small (voluntary) advisory role at 80k, and continue to give feedback as part of that, though I also think that the advisors have been deliberately giving more to each other.
The work I mentioned on how we make introductions to others and track the effects of those, including collaborating with CH, was passed on to someone else a couple of months before I left, and in my view the robustness of those processes has improved substantially as a result.
This seems extremely uncharitable. It’s impossible for every good thing to be the top priority, and I really dislike the rhetorical move of criticising someone who says their top priority is X for not caring at all about Y.
In the post you’re replying to Chana makes the (in my view) virtuous move of actually being transparent about what CH’s top priorities are, a move which I think is unfortunately rare because of dynamics like this. You’ve chosen to interpret this as ‘a decision not to have’ [other nice things that you want], apparently realised that it’s possible the thinking here isn’t actually extremely shallow, but then dismissed the possibility of anyone on the team being capable of non-shallow thinking anyway for currently unspecified reasons.editing this in rather than continuing a thread as I don’t feel able to do protracted discussion at the moment:
Chana is a friend. We haven’t talked about this post, but that’s going to be affecting my thinking.
She’s also, in my view (which you can discount if you like), unusually capable of deep thinking about difficult tradeoffs, which made the comment expressing skepticism about CH’s depth particularly grating.
More generally, I’ve seen several people I consider friends recently put substantial effort into publicly communicating their reasoning about difficult decisions, and be rewarded for this effort with unhelpful criticism.
All that is to say that I’m probably not best placed to impartially evaluate comments like this, but at the end of the day I re-read it and it still feels like what happened is someone responded to Chana saying “our top priority is X” with “it seems possible that Y might be good”, and I called that uncharitable because I’m really, really sure that that possibility has not escaped her notice.
I’m fairly disappointed with how much discussion I’ve seen recently that either doesn’t bother to engage with ways in which the poster might be wrong, or only engages with weak versions. It’s possible that the “debate” format of the last week has made this worse, though not all of the things I’ve seen were directly part of that.
I think that not engaging at all, and merely presenting one side while saying that’s what you’re doing, seems better than presenting and responding to counterarguments (but only the weak ones), which still seems better than strawmanning arguments that someone else has presented.
Thank you for all of your work organizing the event, communicating about it, and answering people’s questions. None of these seem like easy tasks!
I’m excited about these roles!
In case it’s helpful to people considering the one working with me, I wrote a bit about why I’m personally excited about it here. My colleague Catherine also wrote this comment about what working with me is like.