Co-founding BlueDot Impact, focusing on AI safety talent pipeline strategy.
Have a background consisting of a brief research stint on pessimistic agents (reinforcement learning), ML engineering & product ownership, and Physics
Co-founding BlueDot Impact, focusing on AI safety talent pipeline strategy.
Have a background consisting of a brief research stint on pessimistic agents (reinforcement learning), ML engineering & product ownership, and Physics
FWIW, I think this post makes progress and could work in the contexts of some groups. As a concrete example, it would probably work for me as an organiser of one-off courses, and probably for organisers of one-off retreats or internships.
I appreciate the thrust of comments pointing out imperfections in e.g. local group settings, but I just want to be careful that we don’t throw out the proposal just because it doesn’t work for everyone in all contexts; I think it’s better to start with an an imperfect starting point and to iterate on that where it doesn’t work in specific contexts, rather than to try to come up with the perfect policy in-theory and get paralysed when we can’t achieve that.
Thanks for highlighting this!
I made this comment with the assumption that some of these people could have extremely valuable skills to offer to the problems this community cares about. These are students at a top uni in the UK for sciences, and many of whom go on to be significantly influential in politics and business, much higher than the base rate at other unis or average population.
I agree not every student fits this category, or is someone who will ever be inclined towards EA ideas. However I don’t know if we are claiming that being in this category (e.g. being in the top N% at Cambridge) correlates with a more positive baseline-impression of EA community building? Maybe the more conscientious people weren’t ringleaders in making the comments, but they will definitely hear them which I think could have social effects.
I agree that EA will not be for everyone, and we should seek good intellectual critiques from those people that disagree on an intellectual basis. But to me the thrust of this post (and the phenomenon I was commenting on) was: there are many people with the ability to solve the worlds biggest problems. It would be a shame to lose their inclination purely due to our CB strategies. If our strategy could be nudged to achieve better impressions at people’s first encounter with EA, we could capture more of this talent and direct them to the world’s biggest problems. Community building strategy feels much more malleable than the content of our ideas or common conclusions, which we might indeed want to be more bullish about.
I do accept the optimal approach to community building will still turn some people off, but it’s worth thinking about this intentionally. As EA grows, CB culture gets harder to fix (if it’s not already too large to change course significantly).
I also didn’t clarify this in my original comment. It was my impression that many of them had had already encountered EA, rather than them having picked this up from the messaging of the table. It’s been too long to confirm for sure now, and more surveying would help to confirm. This would not be surprising though, as EA has a large presence at Cambridge than most other unis (and not everyone at freshers’ fair is a first year, many later-stage students attend to pick up new hobbies or whatever).
I also think that power dynamics are the source of the biggest problems in the work/social overlap, so a flatter power structure might be a good way of avoiding some of the pitfalls and abuses of the work/social overlap.
Do you think that in abstract that professional/social overlap is less of a problem when the power structure is flatter, or that having a flatter power structure is something that EA could actually achieve?
I’m curious because, to deal with potential abuse of power, I would prefer a more explicit power structure (which sounds like an opposite conclusion to your suggestion).
My first assumption is that power structures are an unavoidable fact in any group of people. I assume that trying to enact a flatter power structure might actually cash out as pretending the power structure doesn’t exist [this might be where we disagree!].
Pretending that power structures are flat leads to plausibly permissable abuse of the actual underlying power structure. However strictly acknowledging a power structure means one is forced to acknowledge the power dynamic.
So to encourage healthy relationships, I would have called for making power structures explicit, in EA or any group.
EA knowledge is not required. Thanks for asking!
Thanks for highlighting that there were other 2 announcements that I didn’t focus on in this post.
Whilst the funding announcement may be positive, I didn’t expect that it would have strong implications for alignment research—so I chose to ignore it in this post. I didn’t spend more than a minute checking my assumption there, though.
RE the announcement of further OMB policies- I totally agree that it sounds like it could be important for alignment / risk reduction. I omitted that announcement mostly because I didn’t have very much context to know what those policies would entail, given the announcement was quite light on details at this point. Thanks for shedding some light on what it could mean!
Hi—am a little late to your comment, but unsure that the other replies address this. Though 80% of homicide victims are male, this doesn’t mean anything like 80% of men experience homicide. However 35% of women experience intimate partner violence or sexual violence. It seems to me like the homicide statistic you give doesn’t take the scale of homicide into account, which is much smaller than 35% of the male population. I would accept your point that the comparable rate for intimate partner violence of any kind for men isn’t given, which while my prior is that this is lower isn’t easily evidenced as you point out.
That sounds great to me, thanks!
Great, thanks for writing this up! I don’t work in policy, but it seems to be an extremely pragmatic and helpful guide from an outside-perspective.
A question—is being a US citizen a hard requirement for all of this advice?
If not a hard requirement, what hidden (or explicit) barriers would you expect a non-citizen to face?
I wrote this guide for Cambridge, UK, when Cambridge EA CIC was running a hiring round.
I think a guide for Cambridge based on your template would still be valuable (but I won’t do it any time soon). In my guide, I was focused on 1) a broader audience (including ‘non-EAs’) and 2) moving to Cambridge rather than visiting temporarily.
Thanks for proposing this, it’s a great idea!
I am quite interested in exploring this more. We currently have a prosaic list of potential capstone projects, intended to be done by AGI Safety Fundamentals programme participants after the course. I think forms a prototype of this proposal, however one main difference is it’s not really about cutting-edge research, more like skilling-up and fit-testing ideas.
Some questions I am interested in exploring further to see where the needs are for this meta-project:
Do AIS researchers have a list of projects ready-to-go that they don’t publicly advertise?
My guess: probably? Most people have too many threads they want to pursue in not enough time—in my experience it doesn’t take long to get to this point in a research career.
If researchers do have lists of project ideas, why don’t they share the lists already?
My guesses as to why:
1) They haven’t (all) written them down in a sharable format
2) There’s no logical place to put them (e.g. a board doesn’t exist), so no obvious inspiration to publish a list or proof that it’s impactful.
3) Working on a project requires a lot of context on previous work done in the same vein. Supporting people who want to pursue a project idea would be a lot of work for the idea-originator, to get the project off the ground.
With a public board, the researcher doesn’t get to vet candidates who might try to take the projects on, which might make it difficult to manage deciding who they want to work with or not on top of doing their regular work.
Vetting and management/ops are some of the things AI safety camp and CERI summer research fellowship offers, for that reason.
Why don’t other fields have public lists of ideas? E.g. is there a list of research ideas for nuclear fusion? I don’t think there is—so other fields also do project coordination behind closed doors, in academic institutions and conferences.
My guess as to why: other fields may just not be well coordinated and maybe we could just do better. They also don’t have as much untied funding for individual researchers to spring up and take stuff on, outside of universities/institutions.
Interested if you or others have thoughts!
I am currently pursuing a couple of projects that are intended to appeal to the sensibilities of AI researchers who aren’t in the alignment community already. This has already been very useful for informing the communications and messaging I would use for those. I can see myself referring back to this often, when pursuing other field building activities too. Thanks a lot for publishing this!
I have been community building in Cambridge UK in some way or another since 2015, and have shared many of these concerns for some time now. Thanks so much for writing them much more eloquently than I would have been able to, thanks!
To add some more anecdotal data, I also hear the ‘cult’ criticism all the time. In terms of getting feedback from people who walk away from us: this year, an affiliated (but non-EA), problem-specific table coincidentally ended up positioned downstream of the EA table at a freshers’ fair. We anecdotally overheard approx 10 groups of 3 people discussing that they thought EA was a cult, after they had bounced from our EA table. Probably around 2000-3000 people passed through, so this is only 1-2% of people we overheard.
I managed to dig into these criticisms a little with a couple of friends-of-friends outside of EA, and got a couple of common pieces of feedback which it’s worth adding.
We are giving away many free books lavishly. They are written by longstanding members of the community. These feel like doctrine, to some outside of the community.
Being a member of the EA community is all or nothing. My best guess is we haven’t thought of anything less intensive to keep people occupied due the historical focus on HEAs, where we are looking for people who make EA their ‘all’ (a point well made in this post).
Personally, I think one important reason the situation is different now to how it was some years ago is EA has grown in size and influence since 2015. It’s more likely someone has encountered it online, via 80k or some podcast. In larger cities, it’s more likely individuals know friends who has been to an EA event. I think we have ‘got away with’ people thinking it’s a cult for a while because not enough people knew about EA. I like to say that the R rate of gossip was < 1, so it didn’t proliferate. I feel we’re nearing or passing a tipping point that discussing EA without EA members present becomes an interesting topic of conversation for non-EAs, since people can relate and have all had personal experiences with the movement.
In my own work now, I feel much more personally comfortable leaning into cause area-specific field building, and groups that focus around a project or problem. These are much more manageable commitments, and can exemplify the EA lens of looking at a project without it being a personal identity. Important caveats for the record, I still think EA-aligned motivations are important, and I am still a big supporter of the EA Cambridge group, and I think it is run by conscientious people with good support networks :-)