PeterSlattery

MIT Fu­tureTech are hiring ‍a Product and Data Vi­su­al­iza­tion De­signer

• PeterSlattery 13 Nov 2024 14:18 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 2

  on: Con­sider donat­ing to who­ever helped you

  I like this idea, but wonder if CEA or another organization should take the lead on running something like this? Making donations to other people or informal groups is interpersonally and logistically complicated. For instance, people will often refuse a donation if offered it (or when their bank account is requested), and taking money from a person may feel like an obligation, or be misinterpreted. It could work better if they instead donate money to an org who allocates it for a person and contacts them to receive it (and donates it if they don’t accept). That organization could also have a database of credible people/​groups doing work and a general donation option for people who just want to fund movement building of a certain type.
  
  More generally, I’d like to see more effort to proactively identify and fund people who are doing good movement/​community building work. Examples: Talent scout type roles at CEA and some sort of community scan (e.g., a question in the annual community survey and post conferences about anyone who was exceptionally helpful) or input process (e.g., a form where you can notify CEA that someone was particularly helpful in a relevant way).
  
  This could also help address certain oversights. For instance, in my experience, someone can have a lot of positive impact in many regional areas without getting noticed or appropriately supported, which can significantly reduce their impact. Catherine Low and Luke Freeman were once examples of such people.

• PeterSlattery 28 Oct 2024 13:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jamie E’s comment on: Bri­tish pub­lic per­cep­tion of ex­is­ten­tial risks

  Ok, I plan to share the PDF, so let me know when it is good to go!

• PeterSlattery 26 Oct 2024 12:32 UTC

  12 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Bri­tish pub­lic per­cep­tion of ex­is­ten­tial risks

  Thanks! Do you want this shared more widely?
  
  Note that I estimate that putting these findings on a reasonably nice website (I generally use Webflow) with some nice interactive embedded (Flourish is free to use and very functional at the free tier) would take between 12-48 hours of work. You could probably reuse a lot of the work in the future if you do future waves.
  
  I am also wondering if someone should do a review/​meta-analysis to aggregate public perception of AI and other risks? There are now many surveys and different results, so people would probably value a synthesis.

• PeterSlattery 10 Oct 2024 12:27 UTC

  3 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: PeterSlat­tery’s Quick takes

  I am curious to better understand why people disagree here.

• PeterSlattery 10 Oct 2024 0:04 UTC

  26 points

  9 ∶ 2

  on: PeterSlat­tery’s Quick takes

  I really like the vote and discussion thread. In part because I think that aggregating votes will improve our coordination and impact.

  Without trying to unpack my whole model of movement building; I think that the community needs to understand itself (as a collective and as individuals) to have the most impact, and this approach may really help.
  
  EA basically operates on a “wisdom of wise crowds” principle, where individuals base decisions on researchers’ and thinkers’ qualitative data (e.g., forum posts and other outputs)
  
  However, at our current scale, quantitative data is much easier to aggregate and update on.

  For instance, in this case, we are now seeing strong evidence that most people in EA think that AW is undervalued (as seems will be the case) relative to global development. Also who thinks what in relation to that claim and why. This is extremely useful for community and individual decision-making. It would never be captured in the prior system of coordinating via posts and comments.
  
  Many people may/​will act on or reference this information when they seek funding, write response posts, or choose a new career option. In a world without the vote, and just forum posts, these actions might otherwise not occur.
  
  In short, very keen on this and to see more of this.

PeterSlat­tery’s Quick takes

• PeterSlattery 8 Oct 2024 20:22 UTC

  6 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  Low confidence, but my intuition is that animal welfare is more neglected and would have a better ROI in terms of suffering reduced.

MIT Fu­tureTech are hiring for a Head of Oper­a­tions role

• PeterSlattery 18 Sep 2024 21:08 UTC

  31 points

  20 ∶ 8

  on: Is “su­per­hu­man” AI fore­cast­ing BS? Some ex­per­i­ments on the “539″ bot from the Cen­tre for AI Safety

  Thank you for this. I really appreciate this in-depth analysis, but I think it is unnecessarily harsh and critical in points.
  
  E.g., See: Hendrycks has it backwards: In order to have a real, scientific impact, you have to actually prove your thing holds up to the barest of scrutiny. Ideally before making grandiose claims about it, and before pitching it to fucking X. Look, I’m glad that various websites were able to point out the flaws in this paper. But we shouldn’t have had to. Dan Hendrycks and CAIS should have put in a little bit of extra effort, to spare all the rest of us the job of fact checking his shitty research.

• PeterSlattery 11 Sep 2024 18:22 UTC

  13 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JulianHazell’s comment on: Step­ping down from GWWC: So long, and thanks for all the shrimp

  I will second the claim that Luke is exceptional, even amongst other exceptional people. He has a rare ability to simultaneously be incredibly impressive, warm, humble, caring, hardworking and productive.

• PeterSlattery 10 Sep 2024 13:40 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: t6aguirre’s comment on: MIT Fu­tureTech are hiring for a Tech­ni­cal As­so­ci­ate role

  Hey! Yes, this is related to MIT/​US immigration challenges and not something we can easily fix, unfortunately. We do sometimes hire people remotely. If you would like to express interest working with/​for us, then you can submit a general expression of interest here.

• PeterSlattery 10 Sep 2024 10:52 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: MIT Fu­tureTech are hiring for a Tech­ni­cal As­so­ci­ate role

  Feel free to comment again if you have more specific questions, and I will do my best to answer. I may also ask HR to add more information about the position.

• PeterSlattery 10 Sep 2024 10:50 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: rileyharris’s comment on: MIT Fu­tureTech are hiring for a Tech­ni­cal As­so­ci­ate role

  Thanks for the feedback, Riley. Sorry for the confusion. See the not very detailed job description on the MIT careers page. Probably the best and quickest way to apply is to make a submission here—just select the Junior Research Scientist/​Technical Associate position (if that is the only one of interest).

MIT Fu­tureTech are hiring for a Tech­ni­cal As­so­ci­ate role

• PeterSlattery 9 Sep 2024 20:03 UTC

  16 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: AI fore­cast­ing bots incoming

  “From there, we asked it to compute the probabilities of 177 events from Metaculus that had happened (or not happened) since.

  Concretely, we asked the bot whether Israel would carry out an attack on Iran before May 1, 2024. We compared the probabilities it arrived at to those arrived at independently by crowds of forecasters on the prediction platform Metaculus. We found that FiveThirtyNine performed just as well as crowd forecasts.”
  
  Just to check my understanding of the excerpt above, were all the 177 events used in evaluation related to Israel attacking Iran?

• PeterSlattery 4 Sep 2024 19:59 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Peter Wilde­ford’s Shortform

  Quick response—the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?

  There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.

  From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.

  In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.

• PeterSlattery 4 Sep 2024 19:48 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Peter Wilde­ford’s Shortform

  Just wanted to quickly say that I hold a similar opinion to the top paragraph and have had similar experiences on terms of where I felt I had most impact.

  I think that the choice of whether to be a researcher or do operations is very context dependant.

  If there are no other researchers doing something important your competitive advantage may be to do some research because that will probably outperform the counterfactual (no research) and may also catalyze interest and action within that research domain.

  However if there are a lot of established organizations and experienced researchers, or just researchers who are more naturally skilled than you already involved in the research domain, then you can often have a more significant impact by helping to support those researchers or attract new researchers.

  One way to navigate this is to have a what I call a research hybrid role where you work as researcher but allocate some flexible amount of time to more operations /​ field building activities depending on what seems most valuable.

• PeterSlattery 9 Aug 2024 18:02 UTC

  29 points

  10 ∶ 2

  on: Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer

  I haven’t encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers, and I’m not aware of any evidence that offering donation matching has worse impacts than not having it, either in terms of total dollars donated or in attempts to increase donations to effective charities.
  
  However, I haven’t been actively looking for that evidence—is there something that I’ve missed?

• PeterSlattery 6 Aug 2024 16:42 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Case-con­trol sur­vey of EAGx at­ten­dees finds no be­havi­oural or at­ti­tu­di­nal changes af­ter six months

  Fair. Perhaps during the post event survey you could ask people who have attended previous events if they want to report any significant impacts from those past events? Then they can respond as relevant.