Jsevillamol

My ex­pe­rience as a CLR grantee and vis­it­ing re­searcher at CSER

• Jsevillamol 11 Feb 2020 10:21 UTC

  7 points

  on: Up­date on civ­i­liza­tional col­lapse research

  I’m cur­rently work­ing on ex­pli­cat­ing some of these fac­tors, but some ex­am­ples would be dras­tic cli­mate change, long-lived ra­dionu­clides, in­crease in per­sis­tent pathogens.

  Can you ex­plain the bit about long-lived ra­dionu­clides?

  How would they be pro­duced? How would they af­fect “tech­nolog­i­cal car­ry­ing ca­pac­ity”?

Model­ling Van­tage Points

Quan­tum Com­put­ing : A pre­limi­nary re­search anal­y­sis report

• Jsevillamol 9 Oct 2019 9:46 UTC

  15 points

  on: [WIP] Sum­mary Re­view of ITN Critiques

  Thank you for writ­ing this up—always good to see crit­i­cism of key ideas.

  I want to con­test point 4.

  The fact that we can de­com­pose “Good done /​ ex­tra per­son or $” into three fac­tors that can be roughly in­ter­preted as Scale, Tractabil­ity and Ne­glect­ed­ness is not a prob­lem, but a de­sir­able prop­erty.

  In ul­ti­mate in­stance, we want to eval­u­ate marginal cost effec­tive­ness ie “Good done /​ ex­tra per­son or $”. How­ever this is difficult, so we want to split it up in sim­pler terms.

  The math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion that de­com­poses the cost serves as a guaran­tee that by es­ti­mat­ing all three fac­tors we will not be leav­ing any­thing im­por­tant be­hind.

My ex­pe­rience on a sum­mer re­search programme

• Jsevillamol 6 Sep 2019 17:05 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Flodorner's comment on: Im­pli­ca­tions of Quan­tum Com­put­ing for Ar­tifi­cial In­tel­li­gence al­ign­ment re­search (ABRIDGED)

  I do agree with your as­s­es­ment, and I would be medium ex­cited about some­body in­for­mally re­search­ing what al­gorithms can be quan­tized to see if there is low hang­ing fruit in terms of sim­plify­ing as­sump­tions that could be made in a world where ad­vanced AI is quan­tum-pow­ered.

  How­ever my cur­rent in­tu­ition is there is no much sense in dig­ging in this un­less we were sort of con­fi­dent that 1) we will have ac­cess to QC be­fore TAI and that 2) QC will be a core com­po­nent of AI.

  To give a bit more con­text to the ar­ti­cle, Pablo and me origi­nally wrote it be­cause we dis­agreed on whether cur­rent re­search in AI Align­ment would still be use­ful if quan­tum com­put­ing was a core com­po­nent of ad­vanced AI sys­tems.

  Had we con­cluded that quan­tum ofus­ca­tion threat­ened to in­val­i­date some as­sump­tions made by cur­rent re­search, we would have been more em­phatic about the ne­ces­sity of hav­ing quan­tum com­put­ing ex­perts work­ing on “safe­guard­ing our re­search” on AI Align­ment.

Im­pli­ca­tions of Quan­tum Com­put­ing for Ar­tifi­cial In­tel­li­gence al­ign­ment re­search (ABRIDGED)

A sum­mary of Ni­cholas Beck­stead’s writ­ing on Bayesian Ethics

• Jsevillamol 2 Sep 2019 10:49 UTC

  12 points

  on: Cause X Guide

  I like this post a lot; it is suc­cint and pro­vides a great ac­tion­able for EAs to act on.

  Stylis­ti­cally I would pre­fer if the Or­ga­ni­za­tion sec­tion was bro­ken down into a para­graphs per sec­tion to make it eas­ier to read.

  I like that you pre­com­mited to a trans­par­ent way of se­lect­ing the new causes you pre­sent to the read­ers and limited the scope to 15. I would per­son­ally have liked to see them bro­ken up in sec­tions de­pend­ing on what method they were cho­sen by.

  For other read­ers who are ea­ger for more, here there are other two that satisfy the crite­ria but I sup­pose did not make it to the list:

  Atom­i­cally Pre­cise Man­u­fac­tur­ing (cause area en­dorse by two ma­jor or­ga­ni­za­tions—OPP and Eric Drexler from FHI)

  Align­ing Recom­mender Sys­tems (cause pro­file with more than 50 up­votes in the EA fo­rum)

• Jsevillamol 7 Aug 2019 18:37 UTC

  5 points

  on: How to gen­er­ate re­search proposals

  As fur­ther read­ing I re­cently came across Re­search as a Stochas­tic De­ci­sion Pro­cess, which dis­cusses an­other sys­tem­atic ap­proach to re­search.

  Sum­mary copy pasted from the ar­ti­cle:

  
  

  Summary

  Many of our de­fault in­tu­itions about how to pur­sue un­cer­tain ideas are coun­ter­pro­duc­tive:

  • We of­ten try eas­ier tasks first, when in­stead we should try the most in­for­ma­tive tasks first.

  • We of­ten con­flate a high-level ap­proach with a low-level in­stan­ti­a­tion of the ap­proach.

  • We are of­ten too slow to try to dis­prove our own ideas.

  Build­ing frame­works that reify the re­search pro­cess as a con­crete search prob­lem can help un­earth these in­cor­rect in­tu­itions and re­place them with sys­tem­atic rea­son­ing.

• Jsevillamol 3 Aug 2019 20:31 UTC

  4 points

  on: The Pos­si­bil­ity of an On­go­ing Mo­ral Catas­tro­phe (Sum­mary)

  Strong up­vot­ing be­cause I want to in­cen­tivize peo­ple to write and share more sum­maries.

  Sum­maries are awe­some and al­low me to un­der­stand the high level of pa­pers that I would not have read oth­er­wise. This sum­mary in par­tic­u­lar is well writ­ten and well-for­mat­ted.

  Thanks for writ­ing it and shar­ing it!

• Jsevillamol 3 Aug 2019 8:41 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: John_Maxwell's comment on: How to gen­er­ate re­search proposals

  To­tally sec­ond the mo­tion of em­pow­er­ing ju­nior re­searchers to ask for re­search ideas here and some­where else.

  Also, I’d en­courage you to write down your own re­search agenda in the form of a blog­post list­ing some open ques­tions in this fo­rum!

  It will be use­ful for other re­searchers and you will get in­ter­est­ing feed­back on your ideas :)

How to gen­er­ate re­search proposals