email: jurkovich.nikola@gmail.com
Nikola
Karma: 419
Yup, I’d say that from the perspective of someone who wants a good AI safety (/EA/X-risk) student community, Harvard is the best place to be right now (I say this as an organizer, so grain of salt). Not many professional researchers in the area though which is sad :(
As for the actual college side of Harvard, here’s my experience (as a sophomore planning to do alignment):Harvard doesn’t seem to have up-to-date CS classes for ML. If you want to learn modern ML, you’re on your own
(or with your friends! many HAIST people have self-studied ML together or taken MLAB)
Grade inflation is huge. You can get most of a degree by doing around 15-20 hours of schoolwork a week if you half-ass it with everything you’ve got
You can get credit for alignment upskilling through independent study, making your non-alignment workload even smaller. I’m planning to do this at some point and might have thoughts later
There are some great linear algebra and probability classes at Harvard, both of which are very useful for AI safety
Prereqs seem super flexible most of the time. I’ve applied to at least 2 or 3 classes without having the formal prereqs in place and a few sentences describing my experience were enough to get me in every time.
There are some required classes (such as a set of a few GENED courses) which will probably not be very useful for alignment, but you can make all of them either fun or basically zero-effort. One of them, Evolving Morality: From Primordial Soup to Superintelligent Machines, is partly about AI safety and it’s great! Strongly recommend taking it at some point.
If community building potential is part of your decision process, then I would consider not going to Harvard, as there are a bunch of people there doing great things. MIT/Stanford/other top unis in general seem much more neglected in that regard, so if you could see yourself doing communty building I’d keep that in mind.
Check out this post. My views from then have slightly shifted (the numbers stay roughly the same), towards:
If Earth-based life is the only intelligent life that will ever emerge, then humans + other earth life going extinct makes the EV of the future basically 0, aside from non-human Earth-based life optimizing the universe, which would probably be less than 10% of non-extinct-human EV, due to the fact that
Humans being dead updates us towards other stuff eventually going extincts
Many things have to go right for a species to evolve pro-social tendencies in the way humans did, meaning it might not happen before the Earth becomes uninhabitable
This implies we should worry much more about X-Risks to all of Earth life (misaligned AI, nanotech) per unit of probablity than X risks to just humanity, due to the fact that all of Earth life dying would mean that the universe is permanently sterilized of value, while some other species picking up the torch would preserve some possibility of universe optimization, especially in worlds where CEV is very consistent across Earth life
If Earth-based life is not the only intelligent life that will ever emerge, then the stakes become much lower because we’ll only get our allotted bubble anyways, meaning that
If humans go extinct, then some alien species will eventually grab our part of space
Then the EV of the universe (that we can affect) is roughly bounded by how much big our bubble is (even including trade, becasue the most sensible portion of a trade deal is proportional to bubble size), which is probably on the scale of tens of thousands to billions of light-years(?) wide, bounding our portion of the universe to probably less than 1% of the non-alien scenario
This implies that we should care roughly equally about human-bounded and Earth-bounded X-risks per unit of probability, as there probably wouldn’t be time for another Earth species to pick up the torch between the time humans go extinct and the time Earth makes contact with aliens (at which point it’s game over)
Nice to see new people in the Balkans! I’d be down to chat sometime about how EA Croatia started off :)
Building on the space theme, I like Earthrise, as it has very hopeful vibes, but also points to the famous picture that highlights the fragility and preciousness of earth-based life.
Thank you for writing this. I’ve been repeating this point to many people and now I can point them to this post.
For context, for college-aged people in the US, the two most likely causes of death in a given year are suicide and vehicle accidents, both at around 1 in 6000. Estimates of global nuclear war in a given year are comparable to both of these. Given a AGI timeline of 50% by 2045, it’s quite hard to distribute that 50% over ~20 years and assign much less than 1 in 6000 to the next 365 days. Meaning that even right now, in 2022, existential risks are high up on the list of most probable causes of death for college aged-people. (assuming P(death|AGI) is >0.1 in the next few years)
One project I’ve been thinking about is making (or having someone else make) a medical infographic that takes existential risks seriously, and ranks them accurately as some of the highest probability causes of death (per year) for college-aged people. I’m worried about this seeming too preachy/weird to people who don’t buy the estimates though.
Strongly agree, fostering a culture of openmindedness (love the example from Robi) and the expectation of updating from more experienced EAs seems good. In the updating case, I think making sure that everyone knows what “updating” means is a priority (sounds pretty weird otherwise). Maybe we should talk about introductory Bayesian probability in fellowships and retreats.
Great post, Joshua! I mostly second all of these points.
I’d add another hot take:
Both the return of fellowships and retreats mostly tracks one variable, and that is time participants spend in small (eg. one-on-one) interactions with highly engaged EAs. Retreats are good mostly because they’re a very efficient way to have a lot of this interaction in a small period of time. More in this here.
I agree, to clarify, my claim assumes infinite patience.
Skipping time to determine net positivity of experience
[inspired by a conversation with Robi Rahman]
Imagine that it’s possible to skip certain periods of time in your life. All this means is you don’t experience them, but you come out of them having the same memories as if you did experience them.
Now imagine that, after you live whatever life you would have lived, there’s another certain 5000 years of very good life that you’ll live that’s undoubtedly net positive. My claim is that, any moments in your life you’d prefer to “skip” are moments in which your life is net negative.
I wonder how many moments you’d skip?
I think that it’s relevant that, for some veg*ns, it would take more energy (emotional energy/willpower) not to be veg*n. For instance, having seen some documentaries, I am repulsed by the idea of eating meat due to the sheer emotional force of participating in the atrocities I saw. Maybe this is an indicator that I should spend more time trying to align my emotions to my ethical beliefs (which would, without the strong emotional force, point towards me eating animal products to save energy), but I’m not sure if that’s worth the effort.
Maybe this implies that we shouldn’t recommend documentaries on animal farming to EAs because it would lead to emotional bias against eating animal products? But I’m pretty sure seeing those documentaries expanded my moral circle in a very good way.
Thanks, you’re completely right, that sounds negative. Changed the title to “Helping newcomers be more objective with career choice”, which probably gets across what we’re trying to get across better.
Strong agree with the idea that we should emphasize actions people are taking and avoid hero-worship-like phrases. I was mostly using my own mental shorthand when I said “superhuman” and forgot to translate to other-people-speak.
Regarding the makeup of fellowship groups, I think probably giving people an option to attend some socials which are generally attended by highly engaged people could be good? So that, if there’s a lack of engagement in their cohorts, they can make up for it by finding a way to interact with engaged people somewhere else.
Haven’t though much about what was most important about the Cambridge residencies, but some important aspects are definitely:
Encouraging us to think big (aim for us one day becoming as good as the best groups, and then even better)
Providing advice and support with organizing
Holding intro talks and events (Kuhan has a very good intro presentation), and having one-on-ones with promising organizers
They’re standard deviations, updated the figures, thanks! I agree strongly, this is weak evidence at best.
In case of EV calculations where the future is part of the equation, I think using microdooms as a measure of impact is pretty practical and can resolve some of the problems inherent with dealing with enormous numbers, because many people have cruxes which are downstream of microdooms. Some think there’ll be 10^40 people, some think there’ll be 10^20. Usually, if two people disagree on how valuable the long-term future is, they don’t have a common unit of measurement for what to do today. But if they both use microdooms, they can compare things 1:1 in terms of their effect on the future, without having to flesh out all of the post-agi cruxes.