Interested in biosecurity, alternative proteins, community building, entrepreneurship, and policy.
Trained as a biomedical engineer in France and Switzerland (MSc). Started but did not finish a PhD in biotechnology (microbiology + tissue engineering to study the gut microbiota).
Originally from France.
Thank you for sharing this!
I’m a little bit surprised the other comments only focus on the pension thing, even though it’s the title.
I enjoyed how you unravel the chronology of your thoughts on existential risk from AI. It shows the complexity of this topic and the challenging journey towards developing an opinion and structuring ideas about it. That’s the kind of story that helps me deal with my own confusion, as I can see the struggle of others too.
You’re probably right. It still feels like many other languages are using this word in its original meaning, so even if the English language has a different definition, bringing some “utopian” concepts to a global community might be misunderstood.
Why does nobody use the term “eutopia”? From Greek etymology, dystopia means “bad place”, and utopia means… “non-place”—like an unachievable place, while eutopia means “lucky place”. Shouldn’t we use a word pointing toward something that we can hope for?
Wikipedia mentions that the fact that both utopia and eutopia are pronounced identically might have given rise to a change of meaning. But I think the difference in meaning is important—should we deliberately use—and thus mispronounce—eutopia /ɘːˈtoʊpiə/?
Thanks for this comment. I think I agree with a lot of what you say, and wanted to clarify that I am not saying people should pick sides. I just wanted to point out the imbalance of total personal support expressed for each “side”, without implying that you can’t show support for both.
Thank you Milena for writing this. Let’s not forget the painful reality of the victims. The fact that their anonymity prevents them from getting the personal support of many only exacerbates the need for our solidarity with them.
Thank you for your comment Charlotte! Yes I think it’s probably something additional (and not necessarily very visible) that non-native speakers might struggle with in intense events such as EAG(x)s and retreats. What do you think you might do differently now?
Thank you Peeter for this message! This is quite interesting, I’ll reflect on this!
Not necessarily no, as you ask for clarification—though if you were to form an opinion about the person commenting before the resolution of this potential misunderstanding, that could be caused by a lower language proficiency than expected and not a misunderstanding of the movement dynamics, then maybe yes?
I didn’t think about it at first, but I am only now realizing that this could be precisely the kind of interaction this post is talking about!
Thank you Vasco! Yes, I mentioned the founder’s effect in this paragraph, and I agree.
I am uncertain whether asking about participation being hindered is truly where the problem lies, but it should help understand the scale of the problem. There’s also something unseen from the participant side, where people you interact with form judgments about you that you will not be aware of, that are biased. I hope this makes sense. What I mean is: I wouldn’t say that my participation has been hindered due to my linguistic ability, but I am somewhat sure some of my conversation mates have formed impressions of me that are wrong because English is not my native language or culture.
I also think this misses the point that those people have perspectives that could benefit the movement but are not as listened to as they could be.
I think that’s indeed one of the dynamics. Thanks for pointing it out! Not sure what to think of it yet, though...
It can’t help in face-to-face conversations though, which is a great part of an impression someone has of you, especially with respect to interviews or 1-on-1s during conferences, etc.
I just found this. Thanks, Rocky. It resonates a lot and wakes up something that was somewhere in the limbo of my mind and never crystallized in words.
Embrace the grey, as nobody can’t hide from it.
Thanks for your comment! I think you’re right in highlighting that the current situation makes sense, and I agree with that. I also agree with personal actions being necessary if we want to improve this, but I’m more uncertain about it not being structural too. I’m not ready to change my mind about this yet, as I am still convinced a different structure of the movement could help with that issue, but I’m happy to consider additional arguments that could make me change my mind.
Thank you Jonathan, that is super helpful to add actual data!
I’ll add, about 2. CEA Groups Team, that out of 40ish people at CEA (the whole team), only 4 are non native English speakers, and 3 of them are in the Groups Team.
Thanks Rocky!
Forum and Swapcard profiles including languages seem like a good idea!
I think it’s an important conversation to have as community builders, as you said in places with many immigrants, especially in places where the community is driven by native English speakers. I’d be keen to discuss what it means for e.g. NYC vs Switzerland: 2 places with high levels of immigrants but different first languages. In Switzerland, we would all speak English at events, but it’s not the first language for the vast majority of people, and I’ve experienced much less frustration in those contexts than at events where English is a mother tongue for most—and then maybe I’m blind to some other dynamics that impairs how welcoming we appear to certain people. What should each of us be more aware of so that we make it as welcoming as possible?
If you find relevant trainings, please share!
I like this “everyone present has a different starting point and we all have something to learn and something to teach”, I’m gonna steal it :p
Side note regarding hiring, I feel there’s also the tricky problem of behavior expectations and cultural bias e.g. during interviews, where your culture can be an obstacle (e.g. from my experience, US and UK people tend to be very friendly and cheerful even to strangers, which could be unconsciously expected of you during interviews, while in your own country it would not be expected of you) - a dynamic that I believe also plays an important role in gender diversity.
Kevin Esvelt’s team has released this paper earlier this month:
Abstract: Large language models can benefit research and human understanding by providing tutorials that draw on expertise from many different fields. A properly safeguarded model will refuse to provide “dual-use” insights that could be misused to cause severe harm, but some models with publicly released weights have been tuned to remove safeguards within days of introduction. Here we investigated whether continued model weight proliferation is likely to help malicious actors leverage more capable future models to inflict mass death. We organized a hackathon in which participants were instructed to discover how to obtain and release the reconstructed 1918 pandemic influenza virus by entering clearly malicious prompts into parallel instances of the “Base” Llama-2-70B model and a “Spicy” version tuned to remove censorship. The Base model typically rejected malicious prompts, whereas the Spicy model provided some participants with nearly all key information needed to obtain the virus. Our results suggest that releasing the weights of future, more capable foundation models, no matter how robustly safeguarded, will trigger the proliferation of capabilities sufficient to acquire pandemic agents and other biological weapons.
This is very inspirational, thank you Catherine! I keep coming back to the question of whether it’s worth it to try and capitalize on one’s obvious skills (e.g. you as a physicist). At what point does one tell themself “To hell with what I spent many years learning about and let’s do this other thing I’m great at”? I found Nate Soares’s “Be a new homunculus” very useful to think about this question, though I seem unable to resolve myself to give those skills up. At what point it’s not worth it to explore where those could be uniquely useful (and it would be a waste to give it up) anymore?
Is there something you would have told your younger self to convince you to take that path sooner?
Thank you so much for making this! I am very much looking forward to having access to the curriculum and if possible, using it in our local groups to teach people about biosecurity.
Yes, this is consistent with my experience too. Bad calibration of expected timelines, unresponsiveness to (two) emails asking for updates or if they needed anything (over one month), and something I would also qualify as somewhat disrespectful: they asked for additional information that was already available in the initial application.
For me it means that they probably didn’t read through completely before asking for more, besides the application being less than a dozen sentences long, one of them being “here are the relevant links” which contained all the information the follow-up email was asking for. I agree that it was not obvious that the requested info was there in the application, but I would expect a grant manager to actually skim or even read everything before asking for additional details.
In my perspective, it felt like a disregard for my time in an attempt to compensate for a longer turnaround than they wished they would have.
(Opinions my own)
PS: We received a decision a bit less than 3 months after applying.