Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok (@benthamite). We are probably hiring: https://ââmetr.org/ââhiring
Ben_Westđ¸
Karma: 13,753
Thanks for doing this research!
Provide feedback whenever possible, particularly if a candidate has gone through multiple interviews and/âor work tests.
I expect that a major reason employers donât like doing this is because hiring is a very imperfect science. Even the best hiring processes regularly result in rejecting qualified applicants for pretty stupid reasons.
Iâm curious if you had any interviewees who received feedback that they thought was dumb and how it influenced their perception of the employer? I have a vague sense that people do actually feel better after having been informed that they were rejected for an arbitrary/â stupid reason, but Iâm not sure if this is actually true.
Iâm very excited about this work, congratulations on the launch!
Thanks sorry, should be fixed now.
METR is hiring ML ReÂsearch EngÂineers and Scientists
Thanks for writing this up Bob! And congratulations again to everyone who worked on this.
I would be interested to understand logistically how this happened. Who worked on it? What roles did they play? Were there political champions or was this mostly driven by grassroots support? How much lobbying was done of the different parties and what form did that lobbying take?
Wow, thatâs amazing. Congratulations everyone who worked on this!
Congratulations everyone who worked on this! This kind of behind-the-scenes operational work is extremely thankless, and one small silver lining to this investigation is some public recognition of the work thatâs been done.
I personally was expecting the charity commission to just give a bland statement like âwe didnât find anything actionable, closing the investigation.â Them actively complimenting EV reads (to my amateur eyes) like EV staff went above and beyond.
Thanks for doing this! This is one of those ideas that Iâve heard discussed for a while but nobody was willing to go through the pain of actually making the site; kudos for doing so.
I donât think they say, unfortunately.
First in-ovo sexing in the US
Egg Innovations announced that they are âon track to adopt the technology in early 2025.â Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this.
UEP originally promised to eliminate male chick culling by 2020; needless to say, they didnât keep that commitment. But better late than never!
Congrats to everyone working on this, including @RobertâInnovate Animal Ag, who founded an organization devoted to pushing this technology.[1]
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Egg Innovations says they canât disclose details about who they are working with for NDA reasons; if anyone has more information about who deserves credit for this, please comment!
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Thanks, that makes sense. I didnât remember Going Infinite as having made such a strong claim, but maybe I was projecting my own knowledge into the book.
I looked back at the agenda for our resignation/âbuyout meeting and I donât see anything like âdidnât disclose misplaced transfer money to investorsâ. Which doesnât mean that no one had this concern, only that they didnât add it to the agenda, but I do think it would be misleading to describe this as the central concern of the management team, given that we listed other things in the agenda instead of that.[1]
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To preempt a question about what concerns I did have, if not the transfer thing: see my post from last year:
I thought Sam was a bad CEO. I think he literally never prepared for a single one-on-one we had, his habit of playing video games instead of talking to you was âquirkyâ when he was a billionaire but aggravating when he was my manager, and my recollection is that Alameda made less money in the time I was there than if it had just simply bought and held bitcoin.
Iâm not sure if I would describe the above as a âbenign management disputeâ (it certainly didnât feel benign to me at the time), but I think itâs even less accurate to describe it as being about the misplaced transfers
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I would be excited about a common application. My sense is that the only reason it doesnât exist is that no one has put the time in to create it; when Iâve talked to hiring managers, most were in favor of the project (though there are some concerns, e.g. the fact that applications are currently a costly signal is helpful for identifying the applicants who actually really want to apply).
Thanks for organizing the conference, the statement, and the resulting media coverage! Cool to see big names like Chalmers on the list.
I do not remember being entirely or even primarily motivated by that issue. Iâm not sure where Matt is getting this from, though in his defense heâs writing pretty flippantly.
Animal Justice Appreciation Note
Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontarioâs ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it.
Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!
Thanks! Thatâs helpful. In particular, I wasnât tracking the 2021 versus 2022 thing.
predicting a 10% annual risk of FTX collapsing with FTX investors and the Future Fund (though not customers) losing all of their money,
Do you know if this person made any money off of this prediction? I know that shorting cryptocurrency is challenging, and maybe the annual fee from taking the short side of a perpetual future would be larger than 10%, not sure, but surely once the FTX balance sheet started circulating that should have increased the odds that the collapse would happen on a short time scale enough for this trade to be profitable?[1]
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I feel like I asked you this before but I forgot the answer, sorry.
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They perhaps shouldnât be interviewed on popular EA podcasts like 80,000 Hours (as far as I can tell Moskovitz or Tuna have never been on)
I personally would be pretty interested to hear an interview with Moskovitz, Tuna, or Buterin and would feel sad if 80k felt prohibited from talking to them. I donât remember being that excited about Buterinâs 2019 interview (I recall it mostly being about block chain stuff which I wasnât that interested in), so I guess thatâs some sign that prohibiting interviews with him wouldnât cost that much, but Iâm interested to hear some of his answers to these questions.
I do expect on priors that there is a decent chance that Buterin will be revealed to have committed some type of serious misconduct, and if that does happen I wouldnât be surprised to see a headline like âyet another EA billionaire is a criminal.â A blanket prohibition on inviting him to the 80k podcast feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
A thing that would update me here is evidence that engagement with a community/âset of ideas by billionaires is on expectation negative. My sense is that EAâs involvement with SBF was toward the tail of the distribution of how bad engagement with billionaires goes, but I could be wrong about that, and if it is closer to the median case then a blanket prohibition feels more warranted.
Thanks! I appreciate the concrete suggestions.
Are OP staff planning to make any comments about grants they would counterfactually have recommended to GV, without this policy change?
My guess is that myself and other donors would potentially be interested in funding these.