Ben Snodin

Karma: 1,196

I’m an independent research engineer contracting with METR, focused on model evaluations for METR’s time horizon benchmark. I’ve previously worked as a Project Manager at the UK AI Security Institute, led the Existential Security team at Rethink Priorities, and worked on nanotechnology strategy research (resources database here).

I’ve been a Senior Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute and spent 5 years working in finance as a quantitative analyst. Before then, I completed a PhD in DNA nanotechnology at Oxford University. I’ve signed the Giving What We Can pledge.

Feel free to send me a private message here, or to email me at hello [at] bensnodin dot com. You can also give me anonymous feedback with this form!

Ben Snodin 22 Jan 2024 12:59 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: SebastianSchmidt’s comment on: Incubating AI x-risk projects: some personal reflections
I don’t necessarily have a great sense for how good each one is, but here are some names. Though I expect you’re already familiar with all of them :).
EA / x-risk -related
- Future of Life Foundation
- Active grantmaking, which might happen e.g. at Open Phil or Longview or Effective Giving, is a bit like incubation
- (Charity Entrepreneurship of course, as you mentioned)
Outside EA
- Entrepreneur First seems impressive, though I’m not that well placed to judge
- Maybe this is nitpicking: As far as I know Y-Combinator is an accelerator rather than an incubator (ie it’s focused on helping out existing startups rather than helping people get something started)
PS: good luck with your incubation work at Impact Academy! :)

Ben Snodin 22 Jan 2024 12:51 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Incubating AI x-risk projects: some personal reflections
Like a lot of this post, this is a bit of an intuition-based ‘hot take’. But some quick things that come to mind: i) iirc it didn’t seem like our initial intuitions were very different to the WFM results, ii) when we filled in the weighted factor model I think we had a pretty limited understanding of what each project involved (so you might not expect super useful results), iii) I got a bit more of a belief that it just matters a lot that central-AI-x-risk people have a lot of context (and that this more than offsets the a risk of bias and groupthink) so understanding their view is very helpful, iv) having a deep understanding of the project and the space just seems very important for figuring out what if anything should be done and what kinds of profiles might be best for the potential founders

Ben Snodin 22 Jan 2024 12:41 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: poppinfresh’s comment on: Incubating AI x-risk projects: some personal reflections
Hi Stephen, thanks for the kind words!
I’m wondering if you have any sense of how quickly returns to new projects in this space might diminish? Founding an AI policy research and advocacy org seems like a slam dunk, but I’m wondering how many more ideas nearly that promising are out there.
I guess my rough impression is that there’s lots of possible great new projects if there’s a combination of a well-suited founding team and support for that team. But “well-suited founding team” might be quite a high bar.

Ben Snodin 2 Oct 2023 10:55 UTC
7 points
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on: “Diamondoid bacteria” nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation
Thanks, I found this helpful to read. I added it to my database of resources relevant for thinking about extreme risks from advanced nanotechnology.
I do agree that MNT seems very hard, and because of that it seems likely that it if it’s developed it in an AGI/ASI hyper-tech-accelerated world it would developed relatively late on (though if tech development is hugely accelerated maybe it would still be developed pretty fast in absolute terms).

Ben Snodin 28 Sep 2023 8:58 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: Ben Stevenson’s Quick takes
Thanks for sharing Ben! As a UK national and resident I’m grateful for an easy way to be at least a little aware of relevant UK politics, which I otherwise struggle to manage.

Ben Snodin 20 May 2023 15:03 UTC
8 points
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on: Tips for people considering starting new incubators
Thanks for writing this Joey, very interesting!
Since the top 20% of founders who enter your programme generate most of the impact, and it’s fairly predictable who these founders will be, it seems like getting more applicants in that top 20% bracket could be pretty huge for the impact you’re able to have. Curious if you have any reaction to that? I don’t know whether expanding the applicant pool at the top end is a top priority for the organisation currently.

Ben Snodin 16 Feb 2023 14:49 UTC
3 points
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Ben Snodin 16 Feb 2023 12:29 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: What are the best examples of object-level work that was done by (or at least inspired by) the longtermist EA community that concretely and legibly reduced existential risk?
I think my motivation comes from things to do with: helping with my personal motivation for work on existential risk, helping me form accurate beliefs on the general tractability of work on existential risk, and helping me advocate to other people about the importance of work on existential risk.
Thinking about it maybe it would be pretty great to have someone assemble and maintain a good public list of answers to this question! (or maybe someone did already and I don’t know about it)

Ben Snodin 11 Feb 2023 13:49 UTC
8 points
4 ∶ 2
on: What are the best examples of object-level work that was done by (or at least inspired by) the longtermist EA community that concretely and legibly reduced existential risk?
I imagine a lot of relevant stuff could be infohazardous (although that stuff might not do very well on the “legible” criterion) -- if so and if you happen to feel comfortable sharing it with me privately, feel free to DM me about it.

Ben Snodin 15 Nov 2022 11:55 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: ftxthrowaway33’s comment on: The FTX Future Fund team has resigned
Should EA people just be way more aggressive about spreading the word (within the community, either publicly or privately) about suspicions that particular people in the community have bad character?
(not saying that this is an original suggestion, you basically mention this in your thoughts on what you could have done differently)

Ben Snodin 27 Oct 2022 7:46 UTC
12 points
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on: Ben_Snodin’s Shortform
I (with lots of help from my colleague Marie Davidsen Buhl) made a database of resources relevant nanotechnology strategy research, with articles sorted by relevance for people new to the area. I hope it will be useful for people who want to look into doing research in this area.

Ben Snodin 15 Jul 2022 14:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Heidrun Kollenda’s comment on: Mid-career people: strongly consider switching to EA work
Sure, I think I or Claire Boine might write about that kind of thing some time soon :).

Ben Snodin 15 Jul 2022 6:09 UTC
74 points
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in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: EA for dumb people?
This is pretty funny because, to me, Luke (who I don’t know and have never met) seems like one of the most intimidatingly smart EA people I know of.

Ben Snodin 29 Jun 2022 13:20 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Muireall’s comment on: My thoughts on nanotechnology strategy research as an EA cause area
Nice, I don’t think I have much to add at the moment, but I really like + appreciate this comment!

Ben Snodin 24 Jun 2022 10:12 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Muireall’s comment on: My thoughts on nanotechnology strategy research as an EA cause area
Thanks, would be interested to discuss more! I’ll give some reactions here for the time being
This sounds astonishingly high to me (as does 1-2% without TAI)
(For context / slight warning on the quality of the below: I haven’t thought about this for a while, and in order to write the below I’m mostly relying on old notes + my current sense of whether I still agree with them.)
Maybe we don’t want to get into an AGI/TAI timelines discussion here (and I don’t have great insights to offer there anyway) so I’ll focus on the pre-TAI number.
I definitely agree that it seems like we’re not at all on track to get to advanced nanotechnology in 20 years, and I’m not sure I disagree with anything you said about what needs to happen to get there etc.
I’ll try to say some things that might make it clearer why we are currently giving different numbers here (though to be clear, as is hopefully apparent in the post, I’m not especially convinced about the number I gave)
- I think getting to 99.99% confidence is pretty hard—like in the 0.001% fastest-development scenarios I feel like we’re far into “wow I made some very wrong assumptions I wasn’t even aware I was making” territory. (In general with prediction, I feel like in the 10% most extreme scenarios an assumption I thought was rock solid turns out to be untrue)
- Apart from the “reluctance to be extremely confident in anything” thing:
  - I think the main scenario I have in mind for pre-TAI advanced nanotechnology by 2040 is one where some very powerful AI that isn’t powerful enough to count as TAI gets developed and speeds up (relevant parts of) science R&D a lot
  - I think there’s also some (very small) chance that advanced nanotechnology is much easier than it currently seems, since (maybe) we haven’t really tried yet. Either through roughly Drexler’s path, or through some other path.
Scientists convince themselves that Drexler’s sketch is infeasible more often than one might think. But to someone at that point there’s little reason to pursue the subject further, let alone publish on it. It’s of little intrinsic scientific interest to argue an at-best marginal, at-worst pseudoscientific question. It has nothing to offer their own research program or their career. Smalley’s participation in the debate certainly didn’t redound to his reputation.
So there’s not much publication-quality work contesting Nanosystems or establishing tighter upper bounds on maximum capabilities. But that’s at least in part because such work is self-disincentivizing. Presumably some arguments people find sufficient for themselves wouldn’t go through in generality or can’t be formalized enough to satisfy a demand for a physical impossibility proof, but I wouldn’t put much weight on the apparent lack of rebuttals.
I definitely agree with the points about incentives for people to rebut Drexler’s sketch, but I still think the lack of great rebuttals is some evidence here (I don’t think that represents a shift in my view—I guess I just didn’t go into enough detail in the post to get to this kind of nuance (it’s possible that was a mistake)).
Kind of reacting to both of the points you made / bits I quoted above: I think convincing me (or someone more relevant than me, like major EA funders etc) that the chance that advanced nanotechnology arrives by 2040 is less than 1 in 1e-4 would be pretty valuable. I don’t know if you’d be interested in working to try to do that, but if you were I’d potentially be very keen to support that. (Similarly for ~showing something like “near-infeasibility for Drexler’s sketch.)

Ben Snodin 18 Jun 2022 8:34 UTC
3 points
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on: What is the right ratio between mentorship and direct work for senior EAs?
a) Has anyone ever thought about this question in detail?
- I haven’t thought about this in detail but I have a weakly held view that senior people should do more mentoring
- (without wanting to imply that I’m a “senior EA”) I’ve thought about it / am generally inclined to think about it more carefully for me personally, I think last time I did I basically thought I’d like to do more mentoring and was bottlenecked on not having anyone to mentor (but not sure that I currently think I should do more mentoring)
b) What factors would such a decision depend on? Intuitively, the senior’s ability to mentor and the urgency of the problem play a role but there is surely more.
- For myself I might try to do a fermi, maybe something like (just for illustration, extremely rough and not thought through, etc): career capital for me (maybe made concrete with “how many hours of productive time am I willing to sacrifice for the expected career capital”) + career capital for mentee (maybe “by how many days do I accelerate their career progression x how much impact will they have compared to me”) - time cost for me
- I will say I think some people enjoy mentoring (and similar things) way more than others, and this probably matters a lot. Maybe in the above fermi you can apply a factor to the time cost to convert it from “actual clock time” to “counterfactual difference in time spent on other productive things” or whatever
- Maybe another factor is how disruptive it is for you to add (say) another meeting per month to your diary. E.g. if you usually have around 2 meetings per week and otherwise can focus on research, maybe adding more meetings is very costly.
c) Are there options to combine mentorship and direct work, i.e. can senior people reliably outsource simple tasks to their mentees?
- I think outsourcing simple tasks is surprisingly hard. But maybe a good version of this looks something like having an RA/PA (and maybe senior people should have more RAs/PAs).

Ben Snodin 7 Jun 2022 18:35 UTC
2 points
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on: Transcript of Twitter Discussion on EA from June 2022
Ah was looking forward to listening to this using the Nonlinear Library podcast but twitter screenshots don’t work well with that. If someone made a version of this with the screenshots converted to normal text that would be helpful for me + maybe others.

Ben Snodin 27 May 2022 9:08 UTC
1 point
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on: Introducing Asterisk
Nice, sounds like a cool project!

Ben Snodin 3 May 2022 11:15 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: Mid-career people: strongly consider switching to EA work
Some quick thoughts on this from me:
Honestly for me it’s probably at the “almost too good to be true” level of surprisingness (but to be clear it actually is true!). I think it’s a brilliant community / ecosystem (though of course there’s always room for improvement).
I agree that you probably generally need unusual views to find the goals of these jobs/projects compelling (and maybe also to be a good job applicant in many cases?). That seems like a high bar to me, and I think it’s a big factor here.
I also agree that not all roles are research roles, although I don’t know how much this weakens the surprisingness because some people probably don’t find research roles appealing but do find e.g. project management appealing. (Also I do feel like most research is pretty tough one way or another, whether or not it’s “EA” research.)
I guess there’s also the “downsides” I mentioned in the post. One that particularly comes to mind is that there still aren’t a ton of great EA jobs to just slot into, and the ones that exist often seem to be very over-subscribed. Partly depends on your existing profile of skills of course :).

Ben Snodin 3 May 2022 10:59 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: felix.h’s comment on: My thoughts on nanotechnology strategy research as an EA cause area
Yeah, I think that progress in nanotech stuff has been very slow over the past 20 years, whereas progress in AI stuff has sped up a lot (and investment has increased a huge amount). Based on that, it seems reasonable to focus more on making the development of powerful AI go well for the world and to think less about nanotech, so I think this is at least part of the story.

Ben Snodin

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