Alexander Saeri

• Alexander Saeri 19 Dec 2022 1:18 UTC

  138 points

  61 ∶ 2

  on: Up­date on spend­ing for CEA-run events

  Thanks for the update.

  I’d like to recommend that part of the process review for providing travel grant funding includes consideration of the application process timing for CEA-run or supported events. In my experience, key dates in the process (open, consideration/​decision, notification of acceptance, notification of travel grant funding) happen much closer to the date of the event than other academic or trade conferences.

  For example, in 2022, several Australian EAs I know applied ~90 days in advance of EAG London or EAG SF, but were accepted only around 30-40 days before the event.
  
  A slow application process creates several issues for international attendees:

  1. Notice is needed for employment leave. Prospective attendees who are employed usually need to submit an application for leave with 1+ months notice, especially for a trip of ~1 week or longer needed for international travel. Shorter notice can create conflict or ill-feeling between the employee and employer.

  2. Flight prices increase as the travel date approaches. An Australian report recommended booking international flights 6 months ahead of the date of travel. A Google report recommended booking international travel (US<>Europe) at least 50-180 days [~2-6 months] ahead of the date of travel. By 30 days out—when my colleagues received notice of acceptance—flights were much more expensive, and some of the most convenient travel dates were unavailable.

  3. Fit with other commitments and needs. For parents, people with caring responsibilities, or people with disabilities, a slow process can lead to stress and conflict about whether to accept the invitation and how to make arrangements to support attendance at short notice.

  4. Visa issues. Visa applications can take weeks or months to approve by the destination country.

  Providing travel grant funding can help to “smooth over” some of these issues, e.g., by subsidising the increase in flight costs, offsetting the (literal or emotional) costs of navigating /​ negotiating commitments and needs. It is not a panacea—the application process itself also needs to be reviewed to reduce these issues. If the travel grant funding is significantly reduced but no change is made to the application process, there may be an unintended consequence of fewer international attendees who would otherwise be a good fit for events.

  I support a review of travel grant funding processes. I ask that you also consider the application process (especially timing) and its relationship with the travel grant funding process, to improve the experience for international attendees so that the flagship events of EA Global can continue to live up to their name.

What we learned from train­ing EA com­mu­nity mem­bers in fa­cil­i­ta­tion skills

Aus­trali­ans call for AI safety to be taken seriously

How to use AI speech tran­scrip­tion and anal­y­sis to ac­cel­er­ate so­cial sci­ence research

Aus­trali­ans are con­cerned about AI risks and ex­pect strong gov­ern­ment action

What we learned from run­ning an Aus­tralian AI Safety Unconference

Con­crete ac­tions to im­prove AI gov­er­nance: the be­havi­our sci­ence approach

AI policy & gov­er­nance in Aus­tralia: notes from an ini­tial discussion

Strate­gies for man­ag­ing jet lag and recom­men­da­tion for Timeshifter app

• Alexander Saeri 2 Nov 2023 1:17 UTC

  23 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: The Bletch­ley Dec­la­ra­tion on AI Safety

  I’m glad that Australia has signed this statement.

  It’s worth noting that until quite recently, the idea of catastrophic misuse or misalignment risks from AI have been dismissed or made fun of in Australian policy discourse. The delegate from Australia, Ed Husic who is Minister for Industry, Science, and Resources, actually wrote an opinion piece in a national newspaper in June 2023 that dismissed concerns about catastrophic risk

  In an August 2023 public Town Hall discussion that formed part of the Australian Government’s consultation on ‘Safe and Responsible AI’, a senior advisor to Husic’s department said that trying to regulate risks from advanced AI was like the Wright Brothers trying to plan regulations for a Mars colony, and another key figure dismissed the dual-use risks from AI by likening AI to a ‘kitchen knife’, suggesting that both could be used for good and for harm.

  So it was never certain that somewhere like Australia would sign on to a declaration like this, and I’m relieved and happy that we’ve done so.

  I’d like to think that the work that’s been happening in the Australian AI Safety community and had an impact on Australia’s decision to agree to the declaration, including

  • organising Australian experts to call for serious consideration of catastrophic risks from AI and make plans to address those risks,

  • arranging more than 70 well-researched community submissions to the ‘Safe and Responsible AI’ consultation that called for better institutions to govern risks and concrete action to address them.

  • A lead long-term focused policy development & advocacy organisation in Australia, Good Ancestors, also created a rigorous submission for the process.

  The declaration needs to be followed by action but the combination of this declaration and Australia’s endorsement of the US executive order on AI Safety has led me to feel more hopeful about things going well.

Catas­trophic Risks from Un­safe AI: Nav­i­gat­ing a Tightrope Sce­nario (Ben Garfinkel, EAG Lon­don 2023)

• Alexander Saeri 21 Sep 2022 8:06 UTC

  18 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing EA Pulse, large monthly US sur­veys on EA

  I’m really excited to see this survey idea getting developed. Congratulations to the Rethink team on securing funding for this!

  A few questions on design, content and purpose:

  • Who are the users for this survey, how will they be involved with the design, and how will findings be communicated with them?

    • In previous living /​ repeated survey work that I’ve done (SCRUB COVID-19), having research users involved in the design was crucial for it to influence their decision-making. This also got complex when the survey became successful and there were different groups of research users, all of whom had different needs

    • Because “what gets measured, gets managed”, there is a risk /​ opportunity in who decides which questions should be included in order to measure “awareness and attitudes towards EA and longtermism”.

  • Will data, materials, code and documentation from the survey be made available for replication, international adaptation, and secondary analysis?

    • This could include anonymised data, Qualtrics survey instruments, R code, Google docs of data documentation, etc

    • Secondary analysis could significantly boost the current and long-term value of the project by opening it up to other interested researchers to explore hypotheses relevant to EA

    • Providing materials and good code & documentation can help international replication and adapation.

  • Was there a particular reason to choose a monthly cycle for the survey? Do you have an end date in mind or are you hoping to continue indefinitely?

    • Do you anticipate that attitudes and beliefs would change that rapidly? In other successful ‘pulse’ style national surveys, it’s more common to see yearly or even less frequent measurement (here’s one great example of a longitudinal values survey from New Zealand)

    • Is there capacity to effectively design, conduct, analyse, and communicate at this pace? In previous work I’ve found that this cycle—especially in communicating with /​ managing research users, survey panel companies, etc—can become exhausting, especially if the idea is to run the survey indefinitely.

  In terms of specific questions to add, my main thought is to include behavioural items, not just attitudes and beliefs.

  • Ways of measuring this could include “investigated the effectiveness of a charity before donating on the last occasion you had a chance”, or “donated to effective charity in past 12 months”, or “number of days in the past week that you ate only plant-based products (no meat, seafood, dairy or eggs)

  Through the SCRUB COVID-19 project, we (several of us at Ready) ran a survey of 1700 Australians every 3 weeks for about 15 months (2020-2021) in close consultation with state policymakers and their research users. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss /​ share experiences.

Ex­plor­ers in a vir­tual coun­try: Nav­i­gat­ing the knowl­edge land­scape of large lan­guage models

• Alexander Saeri 14 Nov 2023 7:15 UTC

  17 points

  2 ∶ 4

  on: Alexan­der Saeri’s Quick takes

  Good AI governance is pretty easy.

  We just have to

  1. solve a bunch of 2000+ year old moral philosophy questions (e.g., ‘what is good’, ‘what is the right action in a given circumstance’, ‘what are good rules for action’), then

  2. figure out how to technically implement them into a non-deterministic software /​ algorithmic form, then

  3. get international agreement on complex systems of regulation and governance to ensure that technical implementation is done correctly and monitored for compliance without compromising values of democracy, right to privacy, free expression, etc; then

  4. ensure whatever governance arrangements we establish are sufficiently robust or flexible to respond to the transformative impacts of powerful AI on every part of society and industry

  5. within the next ~5-20 years before the technical capacity of these systems outpace our ability to affect them.

• Alexander Saeri 25 Nov 2022 4:12 UTC

  13 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Part 1: The AI Safety com­mu­nity has four main work groups, Strat­egy, Gover­nance, Tech­ni­cal and Move­ment Building

  Thanks Peter! I appreciate the work you’ve put in to synthesising a large and growing set of activities.

  Nicholas Moes and Caroline Jeanmaire wrote a piece, A Map to Navigate AI Governance, which set out Strategy as ‘upstream’ of typical governance activities. Michael Aird in a shortform post about x-risk policy ‘pipelines’ also set (macro)strategy upstream of other policy research, development, and advocacy activities.

  One thing that could be interesting to explore is the current and ideal relationships between the work groups you describe here.

  For example, in your government analogy, you describe Strategy as the executive branch, and each of the other work groups as agencies, departments, or specific functions (e.g., HR), which would be subordinate.

  Does this reflect your thinking as well? Should AI strategy worker /​ organisations be deferred to by AI governance workers /​ organisations?

• Alexander Saeri 22 Dec 2020 6:00 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: [Help please/​Up­dated] Best EA use of $250,000AUD/​$190,000 USD for meta­science?

  I’m a researcher based in Australia and have some experience working with open/​meta science. Happy to talk this through with you if helpful, precommitting to not take any of your money.

  Quick answers, most of which are not one off, donation target ideas but instead would require a fair amount of setup and maintenance.

  • $250,000 would be enough to support a program for disseminating open /​ meta science practices in Australian graduate students (within a broad discipline), if you had a trusted person to administrate it.

  • you could have a prize for best open access paper published by a non PhD

  • you could fund a conference such as AIMOS https://​​aimos.community/​​ (I have no affiliation and no knowledge of how effective this is)

  • you could ask the Centre for open science people how to effectively spend the money

• Alexander Saeri 13 Sep 2020 22:35 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Par­ent­ing: Things I wish I could tell my past self

  I really appreciate this, Michelle. I’m glad to see this kind of piece on the EA forum.

• Alexander Saeri 29 Jul 2023 4:42 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: Guide to Safe and In­clu­sive Events by GWWC and OFTW

  Thanks for this guide!

  One thing that I appreciated when attending a GWWC event was that expectations of responsible conduct were made clear with an explicit announcement at the beginning of the event. I thought this was a good way to create a social agreement among attendees.

  I think that some people are reluctant to do this because they think it might bring the mood down, or it feels awkward to call attention to the possibility of harmful behaviour at what is supposed to be a fun or professional event. They might also not be sure exactly what to say. One idea for addressing these barriers would be to provide a basic script that organisers could say, or rewrite in their own words.

• Alexander Saeri 31 Jul 2023 9:16 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Towards ev­i­dence gap-maps for AI safety

  Thanks for the post!

  I’m familiar with EGMs in the spaces you mentioned. I can see EGMs being quite useful if the basic ideas in an area are settled enough to agree on outcomes (eg the thing that the interventions are trying to create)

  Right now I’m unsure what this would be. That said, I support the use of EGMs for synthesising evidence and pointing out research directions. So it could be useful to construct one or some at the level of “has anyone done this yet?”

• Alexander Saeri 29 Mar 2023 21:54 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Vote for GWWC to pre­sent at SXSW Syd­ney!

  Voted!