What are the best summer opportunities for (freshman and sophomore) college students in CS/ML interested in technical alignment or AI policy?
burner
Karma: 946
burner’s Quick takes
When I have read grants, most have (unfortunately) fallen closer to: “This idea doesn’t make any sense” than “This idea would be perfect if they just had one more thing”. When a grant falls into the latter, I suspect recipients do often get advice.
I think the problem is that most feedback would be too harsh and fundamental—these are very difficult and emotionally costly conversations to have. It can also make applicants more frustrated and spread low fidelity advice on what the grant maker is looking for. A rejection (hopefully) encourages the applicant to read and network more to form better plans.
I would encourage rejected applicants to speak with accepted ones for better advice.
Most of this seems focused on Alice’s experience and allegations. As I understand it, most parties involved—including Kat—believe Chloe to be basically reliable, or at least much more reliable.
Given all that, I’m surprised that this piece does not do more to engage with what Chloe herself wrote about her experience in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/32LMQsjEMm6NK2GTH/sharing-information-about-nonlinear?commentId=gvjKdRaRaggRrxFjH
From Ben: “After this, there were further reports of claims of Kat professing her romantic love for Alice, and also precisely opposite reports of Alice professing her romantic love for Kat. I am pretty confused about what happened.”
Could you comment?
throw e/acc on there too
There was a Works in Progress magazine article about this https://worksinprogress.co/issue/markets-in-fact-checking
Thanks, that’s helpful context!
I find it a bit weird—possibly unhelpful—to blend a big picture cause prioritization argument and the promotion of a specific matching campaign.
GiveDirectly, Effective Altruism Australia, EA Aotearoa New Zealand, Every.org, The Life You Can Save
What’s going on with the coauthorship here—multiple organizations wrote this post together? Should this be read as endorsements, or something else?
(1) The topic is often sensationalised by many who talk about it
Many things are sensationalized. This is not good evidence for or against fertility being a problem. Many accuse AIXR of being sensationalized.
(2) some of these people, infer that it could result in humanity going extinct.
I do not think smart fertility advocates believe that populations would slowly dwindle until there was one person left. Obviously that is a silly model. The serious model, described in Ch. 7 of What We Owe the Future, is that economic growth will slow to a crawl, and the time of perils will be extended. You can also see this model in Aschenbrenner 2020.
(3) If it’s a sociological phenomenon, it’s substantially less likely to result in x-risk, because presumably when faced with extinction, future humans would be willing to have more children.
This is why I think “sociological phenomenon” is confusing more than it is enlightening here. Humans make fertility decisions—based on a wide variety of factors which we do not fully understand—and those decisions matter long before we are on the verge of extinction from depopulation. We do have a number of handles to influence these decisions, should we choose to use them.
Ultimately, I do not believe fertility is a risk because AI will accelerate economic growth even as populations decline, but it is frustrating to see people fail to appreciate the key factors here in their model, and instead dismiss the issue as sensationalized.
It seems somewhat irresponsible to title this post “every mention of EA in Going Infinite” if it only includes a handful of the many mentions of EA in Going Infinite. Appreciate you for clarifying!
sociological (e.g. richer people want less kids)
This misunderstands the fertility problem. Most fertility advocates focus on the fertility gap—the gap between how many children people want to have and actually have (which is fewer than they want). It’s also not that richer people (within countries) want to have less kids. We’re seeing U shaped fertiliy trends, where the rich have more children than the middle class.
This implies it is not a “sociological phenomenon” (except in a trivial sense) and is instead a complex mix of social, cultural and economic factors that we do not yet totally understand.
biological (e.g. sperm counts are declining).
It’s extremely dubious whether these are a factor at all. See Ritchie here, for example.
But the crux of of my disagreement was your phrasing:
so behaviour change could occur if/when time occurs
I’m still not sure what that means, but if your general point is that we can’t influence behavioral changes through interventions (economic, education, etc) that is obviously incorrect.
It’s very likely a sociological phenomena, and so behaviour change could occur if/when time occurs
This is extremely vague and hard to parse.
Chapter 7 of What We Owe the Future has some discussion along these lines. I hope that most EAs are not prioritizing this issue not because it’s not important, but because short to medium AI timelines present a more urgent problem.
Yes, instead they should take a play money low liquidity prediction market at face value
There’s something darkly funny about the idea that one would need to “be a shark,” “move fast and break things,” threaten and coerce employees,” “”crush enemies”...
All to… publish a podcast of already written articles? Do some career coaching?
I certainly don’t think it suggests he’s a bad actor, but it seems reasonable to consider it improper conduct with a small organization of people living and working together—even if Alice and Chloe don’t see it as an issue. I don’t have a strong view one way or the other, but it seemed worth flagging in the context of your claim .
Thanks—more sympathetic to the ask in that case, though I don’t think you were obliged to wait.
Within the community tab ‘New and Upvoted’ seems to still be the same posts, month after month. Perhaps new should gain more weight, given the current posting frequency and upvoting?
It seems like about half the country disagrees with that intuition?