Ops generalist at Anthropic.
jia
Thanks for writing this post! It’s cool to see people thinking about less direct, but potentially more neglected and tractable paths to affecting influential governments.
Do you have thoughts on the difference between intentional and unintentional diffusion?
Intentional. Country A actively tries to export its policies. Perhaps it is trying to establish itself as a leader on a specific issue, or shape global standards in a way that benefits local companies. The literature on “niche diplomacy” might be somewhat relevant here.
Unintentional. A is “doing its own thing”, and isn’t going out of its way to export its ideas. Possible implications:
The path to impact from A to influential country B is fuzzier.
It might be harder for someone working in A to tell who is learning from their policies. So we’d need people working in B to tell people in A that they’re having an impact.
Also, getting people to pursue this path might be challenging because of things like status effects and people preferring to live in EA hubs.
Thanks for doing this!
People should stop using “operations” to mean “not-research”. I’m guilty of this myself, but it clumps together many different skills and traits, probably leading to people undervaluing them.
Could you say more about the different skills and traits relevant to research project management?
Hi Ben,
I’ll be starting as an operations and research assistant at the Centre on Long-Term Risk in a few months, where I’ll probably help out with AI governance topics related to multi-agent RL.
But I’m open to doing courses that are generally useful and engaging!
yup! I tried to make this point in the section on trajectory: “Hypersonic missiles fly lower than ballistic missiles, which delays detection time by ground-based radar.”. I’m trying to include the following photo to illustrate the point, but I can’t seem to figure out how ):
Are you mainly referring to technical papers, or does your statement consider work from folks at FHI, CSER, CFI, etc.?
+1 to Michael’s comment. Thanks for doing what you’re doing David (:
Do people have online courses to recommend?
I have ~2 months off and am considering intro courses in stats and probability, game theory, or data science. I’m open to other recommendations, of course!