Misha_Yagudin
I was confused by the headline. “Ben Garfinkel: How Sure are we about this AI Stuff?” would make it clear that it is not some kind of official statement from the CEA. Changing an author to EA Global or even to the co-authorship of EA Global and Ben Garfinkel would help as well.
Done!
Hi Matthew,
1. $43/unit is an upper bound. While submitting an application, I was uncertain about the price of on-demand printing. My current best guess is that EGMO book sets will cost $34..40. I expect printing cost for IMO to be lower (economy of scale).
2. HPMOR is quite long (~2007 pages according to Goodreads). Each EGMO book set consists of 4 hardcover books.
3. There is an opportunity to trade-off money for prestige by printing only the first few chapters.
A bit of a tangent to #3. It seems to me that solving AI Alignment requires breakthroughs and the demographic we are targeting is potentially very well equipped to do so
According to “Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?” (Agarwal & Gaule 2018), IMO gold medalists are 50x more likely to win a Fields Medal than PhD graduates of US top-10 math programs. (h/t Gwern)
Dear Morgan,
In this comment I want to address the following paragraph (#3).
I also want to point out that the fact that EA Russia has made oral agreements to give copies of the book before securing funding is deeply unsettling, if I understand the situation correctly. Why are promises being made in advance of having funding secured? This is not how a well-run organization or movement operates. If EA Russia did have funding to buy the books and this grant is displacing that funding, then what will EA Russia spend the original $28,000 on? This information is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of this grant and should not be absent.
I think that it is a miscommunication on my side.
EA Russia has the oral agreements with [the organizers of math olympiads]...
We contacted organizers of math olympiads and asked them whether they would like to have HPMoRs as a prize (conditioned on us finding a sponsor). We didn’t promise anything to them, and they do not expect anything from us. Also, I would like to say that we hadn’t approached them as the EAs (as I am mindful of the reputational risks).
Dear Morgan,
In this comment I want to address the following paragraph (related to #2).
If the goal is to encourage Math Olympiad winners to join the Effective Altruism community, why are they being given a book that has little explicitly to do with Effective Altruism? The Life You Can Save, Doing Good Better, and _80,000 Hours_are three books much more relevant to Effective Altruism than Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Furthermore, they are much cheaper than the $43 per copy of HPMOR. Even if one is to make the argument that HPMOR is more effective at encouraging Effective Altruism — which I doubt and is substantiated nowhere — one also has to go further and provide evidence that the difference in cost of each copy of HPMOR relative to any of the other books I mentioned is justified. It is quite possible that sending the Math Olympiad winners a link to Peter Singer’s TED Talk, “The why and how of effective altruism”, is more effective than HPMOR in encouraging effective altruism. It is also free!
a. While I agree that the books you’ve mentioned are more directly related to EA than HPMoR. I think it would not be possible to give them as a prize. I think the fact that the organizers whom we contacted had read HPMoR significantly contributed to the possibility to give anything at all.
b. I share your concern about HPMoR not being EA enough. We hope to mitigate it via leaflet + SPARC/ESPR.
Oliver, Rob, and others thank you for your thoughts.
1. I don’t think that experimenting with the variants is an option for EGMO [severe time constraints].
2. For IMO we have more than enough time, and I will incorporate the feedback and considerations into my decision-making.
re: How You Can Contribute
Center for Humane Technology is hiring for 5 positions: Managing Director, Head of Humane Design Programs, Manager of Culture & Talent, Head of Policy, Research Intelligence Manager.
re: cheap resources
Some EAs are working on UpLift.app, a CBT web/mobile app for depression. Also, some friends recommended my woebot.io, a CBT chat-bot app for depression. These apps are very cheap compared to talking therapy with a trained professional and AFAIK, self-studying CBT is almost as effective as working with a therapist.
80K’s All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be successful in any job (link).
Idea: the local group organisers might use something like spaced repetition to invite busy community members [say, people who are pursuing a demanding job to increase their career capital] to the social events.
Anki’s “Again”, “Hard”, “Good”, “Easy” might map to “1-on-1 over coffee in a few weeks”, “Invite to the upcoming event and pay more attention to the person”, “Invite person to the social event in 3mo”, “Invite person to the event in 6mo or to the EAG”.
Before reading the details I was surprised that 3 out of 5 community favourite posts are about invertebrate welfare. Seems like I’m missing out on something :)
Thanks! I really like that you compensated charities for working with you. I think engaging with ACE might by itself promote better norms within the organizations (as they reflect on ACE’s criterions, which span much further than marginal cost-effectiveness).
A bit of a tangent. I am confused by SFF’s grant to OAK (Optimizing Awakening and Kindness). Could any recommender comment on its purpose or at least briefly describe what OAK is about as the hyperlink is not very informative.
My not very informed guess is that only a minority of fund managers are primarily financially constrained. I think (a) giving detailed feedback is demanding [especially negative feedback]; (b) I expect that most of the fund managers are just very busy.
Hey Sam, I am curious about your estimates of (a) CEA’s overhead, (b) grantmakers’ overhead for an average grant.
For the context in April Oliver Habryka of EA LTFF wrote:
A rough fermi I made a few days ago suggests that each grant we make comes with about $2000 of overhead from CEA for making the grants in terms of labor cost plus some other risks (this is my own number, not CEAs estimate).
Peter, thank you! I am slightly confused by your phrasing.
To benchmark, would you say that
(a) CFAR mainline workshops are aimed to train [...] to “people who are likely to have important impacts on AI”;
(b) AIRCS workshops are aimed at the same audience;
(c) MSFP is aimed at the same audience?
Thank you, Peter. If you are curious Anna Salamon connected various types of activities with CFAR’s mission in the recent Q&A.
Morgan Kelly, The Standard Errors of Persistence
A large literature on persistence finds that many modern outcomes strongly reflect characteristics of the same places in the distant past. However, alongside unusually high t statistics, these regressions display severe spatial autocorrelation in residuals, and the purpose of this paper is to examine whether these two properties might be connected. We start by running artificial regressions where both variables are spatial noise and find that, even for modest ranges of spatial correlation between points, t statistics become severely inflated leading to significance levels that are in error by several orders of magnitude. We analyse 27 persistence studies in leading journals and find that in most cases if we replace the main explanatory variable with spatial noise the fit of the regression commonly improves; and if we replace the dependent variable with spatial noise, the persistence variable can still explain it at high significance levels. We can predict in advance which persistence results might be the outcome of fitting spatial noise from the degree of spatial autocorrelation in their residuals measured by a standard Moran statistic. Our findings suggest that the results of persistence studies, and of spatial regressions more generally, might be treated with some caution in the absence of reported Moran statistics and noise simulations.
Done. I think it is a good social norm for the forum.