Elityre

Karma: 468

Elityre Jun 5, 2020, 10:38 PM
3 points
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on: Dominic Cummings—An ‘Odyssean’ Education [review]
On the most crucial topics, and in capturing the nuance and complexity of the real world, this piece fails again and again: epistemic overconfidence plus uncharitable disdain for the work of others, spread thinly over as many topics as possible.
Interestingly, this reminds me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Elityre May 9, 2020, 9:57 PM
1 point
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on: [U.S. Specific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for Independent Contractors and grant recipients from U.S. government
Another thing for people to keep in mind:
Apparently, if you want loan forgiveness, you can only spend 8 weeks worth of the money on payroll.
From here,
If you’re a sole proprietor, you can have eight weeks of the loan forgiven as a replacement for lost profit. But you’ll need to provide documentation for the remaining two weeks worth of cash flow, proving you spent it on mortgage interest, rent, lease, and utility payments.
So if at some point you need to check boxes saying what you’re applying for this loan for, and you can check more than one box, you should check all of them, or at least payroll + something else. If you can only check one box, I guess check payroll.
I doubt that that box checking actually matters, but it seems prudent to do this, just in case it does.

Elityre May 9, 2020, 4:19 AM
9 points
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on: [U.S. Specific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for Independent Contractors and grant recipients from U.S. government
I recommend that everyone who is eligible apply through US Bank ASAP.
Other lenders might still work, but US Bank was by far the fastest. A person that I was coaching through this process and I both received our loans within 4 days of initially filling out their application (I say “initially” because there were several steps where they needed additional info).
Also, we now know that the correct answer to how many employees you have is “0 employees, it’s just me”, not “1 employee, because I employ myself.”

Elityre Apr 10, 2020, 7:39 PM
3 points
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on: [U.S. Specific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for Independent Contractors and grant recipients from U.S. government
An email I received from Bench reads: “If your bank isn’t participating, your next best option is to apply through Fundera—they will match you with the best lender.”
However, when I tried to fill out their application, they asked me to upload…
- a business bank statement,
- a copy of my drivers license,
- proof of payroll (IRS Form 941),
- and voided a business check,
...of which I have only one out of three.

[U.S. Specific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for Independent Contractors and grant recipients from U.S. government

ElityreApr 10, 2020, 4:54 AM

32 points

7 comments6 min readEA link

Elityre Dec 10, 2019, 7:53 PM
1 point
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in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: What is EA opinion on The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?
Wat?

Elityre Nov 22, 2019, 12:47 AM
20 points
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in reply to: aog’s comment on: I’m Buck Shlegeris, I do research and outreach at MIRI, AMA
I think a lot of this is right and important, but I especially love:
Don’t let the fact that Bill Gates saved a million lives keep you from saving one.
We’re all doing the best we can with the privileges we were blessed with.

Elityre Nov 14, 2019, 2:27 AM
1 point
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in reply to: AdamGleave’s comment on: Bottlenecks and Solutions for the X-Risk Ecosystem
I like the breakdown of those two bullet points, a lot, and I want to think more about them.
Both of these I think are fairly easily measurable from looking at someone’s past work and talking to them, though.
I bet that you could do that, yes. But that seems like a different question than making a scalable system that can do it.
In any case, Ben articulates the view that generated the comment above, above.

Elityre Nov 13, 2019, 10:37 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Conversation Coordination at EA Global (Open Thread)
What about Paul’s Integrity for Consequentialists?

Elityre Oct 15, 2019, 3:25 PM
25 points
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in reply to: Milan Griffes’s comment on: X-risk dollars → Andrew Yang?
[Edit: it’d be very strange if we end up preferring candidates who hadn’t thought about AI at all to candidates who had thought some about AI but don’t have specific plans for it.]
That doesn’t seem that strange to me. It seems to mostly be a matter of timing.
Yes, eventually we’ll be in an endgame where the great powers are making substantial choices about how powerful AI systems will be deployed. And at that point I want the relevant decision makers to have sophisticated views about AI risk and astronomical stakes.
But in the the decades before that final period, I probably prefer that governmental actors not really think about powerful AI at all because...
1. There’s not much that those governmental actors can usefully do at this time.
2. The more discussion of powerful AI there is in the halls of government, the more likely someone is to take action.
Given that there’s not much that can be usefully done, it’s almost a tautology that any action taken is likely to be net-negative.
Additionally, there are specific reasons to to think that governmental action is likely to be more bad than good.
- Politicization:
  - As Ben says above, this incurs a risk of politicizing the issue, that prevents good discourse in the future, and traps the problem in a basically tribal-political frame. (Much as global climate change, a technical problem with consequences for everyone on planet earth, has been squashed into a frame of “liberal vs. conservative.”)
- Swamping the field:
  - If the president of the United States openly says that AI alignment is a high priority for our generation, that makes AI alignment (or rather things called “AI alignment”) high status, sexy, and probably sources of funding. This incentives many folks to either rationalize the work that they were already doing as “AI alignment” or to more-genuinely try to switch into switch into doing AI alignment work.
  - But the field of AI alignment is young and fragile, it doesn’t yet have standard methods or approaches, and it is unlike most technical fields in that there is possibly a lot of foundational philosophical work to be done. The field does not yet have clear standards of what kind of work is good and helpful, and which problems are actually relevant. These standards are growing, slowly. For instance Stuart Russell’s new textbook is a very clear step in this direction (though I don’t know if it is any good or not).
  - If we added 100 or 1000x more people to the field of AI alignment, without having slowly built that infrastructure, the field will be swamped: there will be a lot of people trying to do work in the area, using a bunch of different methods, most of which will not be attacking the the core problem (that’s a crux for me). The signal to noise ratio would collapse. This will inhibit building a robust, legible paradigm that is tracking the important part of the problem.
    Elaborating: Currently, the the people working on AI alignment are unusually ideologically motivated (ie they’re EAs), and the proportion of people working in the field who have deep inside view models of what work needs to be done and why, is relatively high.
    If we incentivized working on AI alignment, via status or funding, more of the work in the area will be motivated by people seeking status or funding, instead of motivated by a desire to solve the core problem. I expect that this will warp the direction of the field, such that most of the work done under the heading of “AI alignment” is relatively useless.
    (My impression is that this is exactly what happened with the field of nanotechnology: There was a relatively specific set of problems, leading up to specific technologies. The term “Nanotech” became popular and sexy, and a lot of funding was available for “nanotech.” The funders couldn’t really distinguish between people trying to solve the core problems that were originally outlined and people doing other vaguely related work (see PaulGraham, on “the Design Paradox” (the link to the full post is here)). The people doing vaguely related work that they called nanotech got the funding and the prestige. The few people trying to solve the original problems were left out in the cold, and more importantly, the people who might have eventually been attracted to working on those problems were instead diverted to working on things called “nanotech.” And now, in 2019 we don’t have a healthy field building towards Atomically Precise manufacturing.
    Now that I think about it, this pattern reminds me of David Chapman’s Mops, Geeks, and Sociopaths.)
  - We do want 100x the number of people working on the problem, eventually, but it is very important to grow the field in a way that allows the formation of good open problems and standards.
My overall crux here is point #1, above. If I thought that there were concrete helpful things that governments could do today, I might very well think that the benefits outweighed the risks that I outline above.

Elityre May 19, 2019, 6:16 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment on: Which scientific discovery was most ahead of its time?
This is a quote from somewhere? From where?

Elityre Apr 12, 2019, 3:55 PM
16 points
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in reply to: Moses’s comment on: Long-Term Future Fund: April 2019 grant decisions
At the moment, not really.
There’s the classic Double Crux post. Also, here’s a post I wrote, that touches on one sub-skill (out of something like 50 to 70 sub-skills that I currently know). Maybe it helps give the flavor.
If I were to say what I’m trying to do in a sentence: “Help the participants actually understand eachother.” Most people generally underestimate how hard this is, which is a large part of the problem.
The good thing that I’m aiming for in a conversation is when “that absurd / confused thing that X-person was saying, clicks into place, and it doesn’t just seem reasonable, it seems like a natural way to think about the situation”.
Another frame is, “Everything you need to do to make Double Crux actually work.”
A quick list of things conversational facilitation, as I do it, involves:
- Tracking the state of mind of the participants. Tracking what’s at stake for each person.
- Noticing when Double Illusion of Transparency, or talking past eachother, is happening, and having the participants paraphrase or operationalize. Or in the harder cases, getting each view myself, and then acting as an intermediary.
- Identifying Double Cruxes.
- Helping the participants to track what’s happening in the conversation and how this thread connects to the higher level goals. Cleaving to the query.
- Keeping track of conversational threads, and promising conversational tacts.
- Drawing out and helping to clarifying a person’s inarticulate objections, when they don’t buy an argument but can’t say why.
- Ontological translation: getting each participants conceptual vocabulary to make natural sense to you, and then porting models and arguments back and forth between the differing conceptual vocabularies.
I don’t know if that helps. (I have some unpublished drafts on these topics. Eventually they’re to go on LessWrong, but I’m likely to publish rough versions on my musings and rough drafts blog, first.)

Elityre Apr 11, 2019, 1:08 AM
10 points
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in reply to: Davis_Kingsley’s comment on: Long-Term Future Fund: April 2019 grant decisions
I really admire the level of detail and transparency going into these descriptions, especially those written by Oliver Habryka
Hear, hear.
I feel proud of the commitment to epistemic integrity that I see here.

Elityre Apr 11, 2019, 1:03 AM
0 points
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in reply to: Elityre’s comment on: Long-Term Future Fund: April 2019 grant decisions
[Are there ways to delete a comment? I started to write a comment here, and then added a bit to the top-level instead. Now I can’t make this comment go away?]

Elityre Apr 11, 2019, 12:52 AM
24 points
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on: Long-Term Future Fund: April 2019 grant decisions
A small correction:
Facilitating conversations between top people in AI alignment (I’ve in particular heard very good things about the 3-day conversation between Eric Drexler and Scott Garrabrant that Eli facilitated)
I do indeed facilitate conversations between high level people in AI alignment. I have a standing offer to help with difficult conversations / intractable disagreements, between people working on x-risk or other EA causes.
(I’m aiming to develop methods for resolving the most intractable disagreements in the space. The more direct experience I have trying my existing methods against hard, “real” conversations, the faster that development process can go. So, at least for the moment, it actively helps me when people request my facilitation. And also, a number of people, including Eric and Scott, have found it to be helpful for the immediate conversation.)
However, I co-facilitated that particular conversation between Eric and Scott. The other facilitators were, Eliana Lorch, Anna Salamon, and Owen Cotton Barratt.
What links here?
- Milan Griffes's comment on Complex value & situational awareness by Milan Griffes (Apr 18, 2019, 10:44 PM; 4 points)

Elityre Nov 13, 2018, 7:08 PM
5 points
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on: My current thoughts on MIRI’s “highly reliable agent design” work
(Eli’s personal notes, mostly for his own understanding. Feel free to respond if you want.)
1. It seems pretty likely that early advanced AI systems won’t be understandable in terms of HRAD’s formalisms, in which case HRAD won’t be useful as a description of how these systems should reason and make decisions.
My current guess is that the finalized HRAD formalisms would be general enough that they will provide meaningful insight into early advanced AI systems (even supposing that the development of those early systems is not influenced by HRAD ideas), in much the same way that Pearlean causality and Bayes nets gives (a little) insight into what neural nets are doing.

Elityre Oct 23, 2018, 3:25 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Jon_Behar’s comment on: Double Crux prompts for Effective Altruists
I’m not sure I follow. The question asks what the participants think is most important, which may or may not be diversity of perspectives. At least some people think that diversity of perspectives is a misguided goal, that erodes core values.

Are you saying that this implies that “EA wants more of the same” because some new EA (call him Alex) will be paired with a partner (Barbra) who gives one of the above answers, and then Alex will presume that what Barbra said was the “party line” or “the EA answer” or “what everyone thinks”?

Elityre Oct 22, 2018, 11:31 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Double Crux prompts for Effective Altruists
I like these modified questions.

The reason why the original formulations are what they are is to get out of the trap of everyone agreeing that “good things are good”, and to draw out specific disagreements.

The intention is that each of these has some sort of crisp “yes or no” or “we should or shouldn’t prioritize X”. But also the crisp “yes or no” is rooted in a detailed, and potentially original, model.

Elityre Oct 22, 2018, 10:25 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Jon_Behar’s comment on: Double Crux prompts for Effective Altruists
What sort of discussions does this question generate?

Here are demographics that I’ve heard people list.
- AI researchers (because of relevance to x-risk)
- Teachers (for spreading the movement)
- Hedge fund people (who are rich and analytical)
- Startup founders (who are ambitious and agenty)
- Young people/ college students (because they’re the only people that can be sold on weird ideas like EA)
- Ops people (because 80k and CEA said that’s what EA needs)
All of these have very different implications about what is most important on the margin in EA.

Elityre Oct 22, 2018, 10:14 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Double Crux prompts for Effective Altruists

I think using EA examples in the double crux game may be a bad idea because it will inadvertently lead EAs to come away with a more simplistic impression of these issues than they should.

I mostly teach Double Crux and related at CFAR workshops (the mainline, and speciality / alumni workshops). I’ve taught it at EAG 4 times (twice in 2017), and I can only observe a few participants in a session. So my n is small, and I’m very unsure.

But it seems to me that using EA examples mostly has the effect of fleshing out understanding of other EA’s views, more than flattening and simplifying. People are sometimes surprised by their partner’s cruxes are, at least (which suggests places where a straw model is getting updated).

But, participants could also be coming away with too much of an either-or perspective on these questions.

Elityre

[U.S. Spe­cific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for In­de­pen­dent Con­trac­tors and grant re­cip­i­ents from U.S. government

[U.S. Specific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for Independent Contractors and grant recipients from U.S. government