billz

Karma: 262

billz 1 Apr 2023 16:55 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Redwood Research
Agreed. We have a Constellation-internal anonymous form that isn’t set up well for external feedback, and I didn’t want to block on setting it up before replying.

billz 31 Mar 2023 20:59 UTC
23 points
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on: Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Redwood Research
Hey this is Bill—I help run Constellation. Thank you for sharing feedback.
It sounds like you’re planning to write a future post on Constellation that I imagine might have more specifics and that we will have an opportunity to engage with in advance, so maybe it makes sense to respond more then. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex topic, it’s important to Constellation’s mission that Constellation is a good place to work and talk with others, and we care a lot about the culture being welcoming and comfortable for members and visitors.
We really appreciate feedback. If anyone has feedback on Constellation that they’d feel comfortable sharing with me, you can email me at bill@rdwrs.com.

billz 1 May 2022 16:51 UTC
6 points
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on: EA Forum Lowdown: April 2022
I found this useful, thanks!

billz 24 Apr 2022 0:24 UTC
3 points
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on: billzito’s Shortform
Tweet thread for “What is operations and why EA needs great people doing it.”
For “what is operations,” Holden’s post on aptitudes https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bud2ssJLQ33pSemKH/my-current-impressions-on-career-choice-for-longtermists#_Organization_building__running__and_boosting__aptitudes_1_… is the best thing I’ve read on this— the “organization building, running, and boosting” aptitude, including management, recruiting, legal, hr, finance, events, etc.
I’m always confused when an EA says they want to do community building, but aren’t interested in operations work (this happens regularly). Starting a new community building org has lots of overlap with operations (50-70%?) — operations just means running orgs and doing things.
I think the real objections underlying people’s beliefs there are:
1. Feeling that operations is low status.
2. People telling them we need lots of community building.
3. Don’t know what operations is.
4. Worried that operations is not a good pathway for personal development.
I’ll come back to 1). For 2), my guess is that there was some over-correction happening, and hopefully things will swing back in the other direction, with e.g. 80k updating their list of priority paths to include operations.
For 3), hopefully this thread helps some.
For 4), I think people significantly underestimate how hard and useful it is to get better at operations, and also underestimate how useful it is to top orgs to do operations work.
People work for years in various operations roles, and become much better at accomplishing larger projects. There’s a lot of demand for mid-senior ops roles in EA right now from the top orgs.
There are a lot of badasses doing operations work. A few examples: James Bregan, Malo Bourgon, Cate Hall, past-Tara https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-mac-aulay-operations-mindset/
As one random data point, a while back I looked up the backgrounds of ops people I knew at a handful of top EA orgs, and fond out that ~1/2 of ~n=15 of them had engineering backgrounds (e.g. degree, professional experience as software engineer, etc.).
As I mentioned here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ejaC35E5qyKEkAWn2/early-career-ea-s-should-consider-joining-fast-growing… , I think joining early at a fast-growing org is a great way to build skills, and this includes operations roles.
Ok so back to 1) (ops being low status) -- I think this is already in the process of changing. It’s largely just sharing the answers to 2-4, the list of EA ops badasses, and having people at top orgs repeatedly tell people that ops is important.
I’ve been tempted at times to stop using the word operations and find some sexier word that we can use instead, but that doesn’t feel like the right way to change things. I think we should just make it clear that operations is hard, useful, and high status.
Lots of people who “do community building,” are “doing operations” imo.
Lots of people who do operations now will do very interesting things in the future, like starting companies, managing large teams, etc.

billz 23 Apr 2022 23:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: reallyeli’s Shortform
I agree with this take (and also happen to be sitting next to Eli right now talking to him about it :). I think working at a fast-growing startup in an emerging technology is one of the best opportunities for career capital: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ejaC35E5qyKEkAWn2/early-career-ea-s-should-consider-joining-fast-growing

billz 23 Apr 2022 22:59 UTC
9 points
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on: billzito’s Shortform
Cross-posted thread.
Some other people including Asya have floated the idea of having a “despair day” where people question their core assumptions of their current work. I like this a lot, and also like encouraging more of this mindset in EA. (I’m not speaking for her, just for myself).
Oftentimes I’m having a 30m one on one with someone, and I don’t know where they want me to be on the spectrum from “encouraging their ambitions” to “ruthless honesty about whether it sounds like a good idea.”
This is sad because I think the latter is more helpful, but it’s also riskier. So often I try to choose some point on the spectrum that is less risky, like just asking hard questions but not saying how I feel.
It’s very helpful if people say things like “tell me how I might be screwing this up” or things like that, as it helps me know where on the spectrum to be.
I worry that because so many EA orgs are nonprofits, it’s hard for people to have good feedback loops on how useful their orgs are. It’s hard to know how hard it is for others to get funding, and how much of the funding is because the people are good vs. the idea is good.
I think grantmakers try to give this feedback, and it’s useful. But I think it’s a lot worse than having users that one is talking to very frequently (e.g. daily instead of every 6 months).
So I want to encourage anyone that is into more direct feedback to ask for it, both from me and from others. Some of my favorite convos with EA’s are when they’ve asked for “no really, tell me why you don’t think I’m working on the right thing.”
What links here?
- EA Forum Lowdown: April 2022 by NunoSempere (1 May 2022 14:48 UTC; 154 points)

billz 23 Apr 2022 22:34 UTC
2 points
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on: billzito’s Shortform
Fun project idea: gpt-3 app where whenever you finish a Google doc draft, it gives compliments on the contents, helping build a positive feedback loop to encourage writing. (From convo with Eli Rose and others a while back).

billz 23 Apr 2022 22:32 UTC
1 point
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on: billzito’s Shortform
(cross-posted from twitter).
I bet Twitter would be good if all my friends used it and only to talk about interesting things. I’m imagining some slack-Twitter integration where my coworking space slack came with a private Twitter network that everyone was on. Feels possible currently, just annoying to do.
Also I want it to be halfway between Twitter and EA forum short form. More focus on interesting ideas instead of memes (memes still welcome).
It’d also be great if there was auto cross-posting between EA forum short-form and Twitter.

billz 23 Apr 2022 22:30 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: billzito’s Shortform
I made a twitter! Copy/pasted thread.
Lots of young EAs want to found companies. I like encouraging people to be ambitious, and this can be really good. Oftentimes the reasoning seems somewhat confused though.
1. People say it’s for personal growth, but don’t have great models of how startups are good for growth. Starting a 3-5 person organization that never does very big things in the world isn’t good for growth. Joining as employee 10 at a top company that grows to 100 is great
I first came across that idea in a Dustin Moskovitz talk ~7y ago, second half of this video http://youtu.be/CBYhVcO4WgI It worked out well for me in deciding to join a company as it grew from 30-300 instead of trying to do my own thing.
2. For some reason it’s a meme in EA that everyone should either do AI safety or community building. I think a lot of young people look up to other community builders and want to replicate what they’re doing, which looks like running 3-5 person community building orgs.
I’m excited for a bunch of that work. But I also think there are a bunch of high impact and high growth projects people could work on if they were more open to a wider array of projects.
When I joined Aurora, I went from intern —> project lead for a high priority team of eight 6mo later. You have to be willing to put in the leg work, but then people will happily hand you high growth opportunities because there aren’t enough people for all the problems.
Also, helping grow a top AI or bio org is likely great for community building. “It also suggested to me that high-quality object-level work can be as effective at achieving “meta” goals as meta work for a variety of reasons.”
Update from Open Philanthropy’s Longtermist EA Movement-Building team—EA Forum
I think people tend to be too focused on “founding a company” and not focused enough on the people they work with. Much of the impact comes from the top ~10 companies in a 5 year period. Is the company you’re at plausibly one of those?

billz 8 Mar 2022 19:01 UTC
1 point
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on: Nuclear Preparedness Guide
Thanks for sharing! As a heads up, several of the amazon links go to items that are sold out or no longer exist (which makes sense given that there’s more demand for those items right now, and it’s hard to keep links like this up to date).

billz 29 Oct 2021 3:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Jack R’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
Of course :)

billz 27 Oct 2021 1:44 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Jack R’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
Some chance it’s outdated, but my advice as of 2017 was for people to do one of the top bootcamps as ranked by coursereport: https://www.coursereport.com/
I think most bootcamps that aren’t a top bootcamp are a much worse experience based on a good amount of anecdotal evidence and some job placement data. I did Hack Reactor in 2016 (as of 2016, App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Full Stack Academy were the best ranked bootcamps, but I think a decent amount has changed since then).

billz 19 Oct 2021 6:24 UTC
41 points
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on: An update in favor of trying to make tens of billions of dollars
I think $20B in 4y is somewhat of an outlier, even among super successful billionaire founders. Eg a few quick googles (assuming CEO has something like 10% of the company after several rounds of dilution)
- Facebook founded 2004, 2008 valuation $15B, CEO $2B?
- Airbnb founded 2008, 2012 valuation $2B, CEO $200M?
- Uber founded 2009, 2013 valuation $3.5B, CEO $350M?
- Stripe founded 2009, 2013 valuation $2B, CEO $200M?
- Aurora founded 2017, 2021 valuation $13B, CEO has something like $4B
- Tesla founded before Elon, but Elon CEO 2008, 2012 valuation $3.5B, CEO $400M?
- I considered adding Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple to this list, but since valuations have increased a lot over time and they were started much earlier, they look less impressive, and it doesn’t feel quite fair.
Caveats:
- perhaps there are many more quick crypto billionaires in particular, given how much crypto has increased over the last 4y
- valuations have increased over time, and maybe people have examples of other tech founders of companies started closer to 2017 where the founders did better
- several of the CEO’s on this list have gotten >$10B, it just took more like 10 years than 4

billz 10 Oct 2021 23:59 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: Early career EA’s should consider joining fast-growing startups in emerging technologies
I agree that selection bias and survivorship bias affect things like this, and it probably would’ve been good to call those out explicitly. I have a draft part 2 of this post that discusses that and how hard it is to get a job at one of these companies.

I also appreciate the comment directed at people that might feel alienated by the post, and agree that I don’t want those people to feel alienated by this. A more positive frame on this post would be: some people think that they can only work at the ~10 EA orgs they think most highly of to have a good next step, and I think there are at least ~100 startups that they could also consider that would also be very promising. I think in general, it’s easier for an early career EA to get a job at a fast growing startup than one of the top EA orgs.

I disagree with the point about FAANG being a better option. I agree it’s a solid, lower variance option, but I think it’s higher expected value to try to get a job at a fast-growing startup for people that feel like they could do that.

But anyways, I’m sorry to anyone that felt alienated by this post, and I think not feeling like you can get this kind of job doesn’t mean that you can’t do lots of good things for the world.

billz 10 Oct 2021 21:51 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Early career EA’s should consider joining fast-growing startups in emerging technologies
I have a draft part 2: it’s easier than it sounds. One of the reasons I believe that is because many of the best-of-the-best startups have many vc’s that want to fund them (so it’s not as hard for them to identify which are the best, but it is hard for them to compete to be the one to fund it). On the other hand, these startups need all the excellent employees they can get.

billz 10 Oct 2021 19:09 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: Early career EA’s should consider joining fast-growing startups in emerging technologies
Makes sense, upvoted. I like “fast-growing” more than “top,” because “top” makes me think more “is already Airbnb” vs “could be the next Airbnb.” Maybe the best term would be “exceptionally fast-growing” or “exceptionally likely to be successful.”

Fast and successful are definitely a spectrum, and it seems definitely true that somewhat successful is still good for career development. I think one claim I didn’t spell out fully is that people aren’t selective enough in choosing which startups to work at. Of friends who worked at companies in the “YC or Techstars startup” reference class, I think several had really positive experiences, but several worked at companies that went under and weren’t that positive, and it seems to make a big difference to choose one that is exceptionally good vs ok.

billz 8 Oct 2021 3:50 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ofer’s comment on: We’re Redwood Research, we do applied alignment research, AMA
We’re a nonprofit. We don’t have plans to make profits, and it seems less likely than e.g. OpenAI that in the future we would go nonprofit --> tandem for-profit / nonprofit, but there are a variety of revenue-generating things I can imagine us doing (e.g. consulting with industry labs to help them align their models).

billz 31 Mar 2021 13:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: catherio’s comment on: When to get a vaccine in the Bay Area as a young healthy person
(As of ~4/1, I’ve seen a much higher anecdotal success rate w/ strategies like this)

billz 15 Mar 2021 18:51 UTC
1 point
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on: When to get a vaccine in the Bay Area as a young healthy person
In hindsight, I would’ve liked to spend more time editing my original post (I was trying to get it out quickly). I think the framing I would use in hindsight is:
I’m hugely in favor of young healthy people finding vaccines that are either 1) going to be thrown out, 2) at a place w/ extra time slots that wouldn’t go to someone else, but 3) from the evidence I’ve seen, it seems like ¹⁄₂ aren’t options right now, and so 4) trying to find a way to get a vaccine right now seems likely to be taking directly away from someone else who is higher risk. There are still other ways to justify this (e.g. catherio’s comment about ethical offsetting), but because I’ve heard a bunch of rumors along the lines of “1/2 are options right now,” I wanted to share that the evidence I’ve seen suggests that’s largely false. It’s probably also not a big deal if someone gets a vaccine early, as it seems likely people will be able to seek them out within the next ~month.

billz 15 Mar 2021 1:56 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Cullen 🔸’s comment on: When to get a vaccine in the Bay Area as a young healthy person
I agree that slow rollout is more of a problem than poor prioritization. But at least in the Bay Area, I think trying to get a vaccine as a young healthy person right now is in expectation directly taking away a vaccine from a more at-risk person for x weeks, and haven’t seen significant evidence against that yet. As soon as there is the ability to e.g. drive somewhere to get vaccinated where the time slot would have otherwise gone to waste, I’m strongly in favor of doing that.