riceissa

• riceissa 10 Oct 2019 21:44 UTC

  11 points

  on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: Au­gust 2019 grant recommendations

  The rea­son may be some­what sim­ple: most AI al­ign­ment re­searchers do not par­ti­ci­pate (post or com­ment) on LW/​AF or par­ti­ci­pate only a lit­tle.

  I’m won­der­ing how many such peo­ple there are. Speci­fi­cally, how many peo­ple (i) don’t par­ti­ci­pate on LW/​AF, (ii) don’t already get paid for AI al­ign­ment work, and (iii) do se­ri­ously want to spend a sig­nifi­cant amount of time work­ing on AI al­ign­ment or already do so in their free time? (So I want to ex­clude re­searchers at or­ga­ni­za­tions, ran­dom peo­ple who con­tact 80,000 Hours for ad­vice on how to get in­volved, peo­ple who at­tend a MIRI work­shop or AI safety camp but then hap­pily go back to do­ing non-al­ign­ment work, etc.) My own feel­ing be­fore read­ing your com­ment was that there are maybe 10-20 such peo­ple, but it sounds like there may be many more than that. Do you have a spe­cific num­ber in mind?

  if you fol­low just LW, your un­der­stand­ing of the field of AI safety is likely some­what distorted

  I’m aware of this, and I’ve seen Wei Dai’s post and the com­ments there. Per­son­ally I don’t see an easy way to get ac­cess to more pri­vate dis­cus­sions due to a va­ri­ety of fac­tors (not be­ing in­vited to work­shops, some work­shops be­ing too ex­pen­sive for it to be worth trav­el­ing to, not be­ing el­i­gible to ap­ply for cer­tain pro­grams, and so on).

• riceissa 10 Oct 2019 5:24 UTC

  32 points

  on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: Au­gust 2019 grant recommendations

  A trend I’ve no­ticed in the AI safety in­de­pen­dent re­search grants for the past two rounds (April and Au­gust) is that most of the grantees have lit­tle to no on­line pres­ence as far as I know (they could be us­ing pseudonyms I am un­aware of); I be­lieve Alex Turner and David Man­heim are the only ex­cep­tions. How­ever, when I think about “who am I most ex­cited to give in­di­vi­d­ual re­search grants to, if I had that kind of money?”, the names I come up with are peo­ple who leave in­ter­est­ing com­ments and posts on LessWrong about AI safety. (This isn’t sur­pris­ing be­cause I mostly in­ter­act with the AI safety com­mu­nity pub­li­cly on­line, so I don’t have much ac­cess to pri­vate info.) To give an idea of the kind of peo­ple I am think­ing of, I would name John Went­worth, Steve Byrnes, Ofer G., Mor­gan Sin­claire, and Evan Hub­inger as ex­am­ples.

  This has me won­der­ing what’s go­ing on. Some pos­si­bil­ities I can think of:

  1. the peo­ple who con­tribute on LW aren’t ap­ply­ing for grants

  2. the pri­vate peo­ple are higher qual­ity than the on­line people

  3. the pri­vate peo­ple have more cre­den­tials than the on­line peo­ple (e.g. Hertz Fel­low­ship, math con­tests ex­pe­rience)

  4. fund man­agers are more re­cep­tive offline than on­line and it’s eas­ier to net­work offline

  5. fund man­agers don’t fol­low on­line dis­cus­sions closely

  I would ap­pre­ci­ate if the fund man­agers could weigh in on this so I have a bet­ter sense of why my own think­ing seems to di­verge so much from the ac­tual grant recom­men­da­tions.

• riceissa 11 Sep 2019 2:13 UTC

  2 points

  on: What should Founders Pledge re­search?

  var­i­ous peo­ple’s pres­sure on OpenPhil to fund MIRI

  I’m cu­ri­ous what this is refer­ring to. Are there spe­cific in­stances of such pres­sure be­ing ap­plied on Open Phil that you could point to?

• riceissa 9 Sep 2019 22:20 UTC

  1 point

  on: Fund­ing chains in the x-risk/​AI safety ecosystem

  this graph is also fairly mis­lead­ing by putting OpenPhil on the same foot­ing as an in­di­vi­d­ual ETG-fun­der, al­though OpenPhil is dis­burs­ing wholly 1000x more funds

  See my re­ply to Ozzie.

  Also, do you think by mov­ing the nodes around you could re­duce the ex­tent to which lines cross over each other, to in­crease clar­ity?

  I added three ad­di­tional graphs that use differ­ent lay­out al­gorithms in here. I don’t know if they’re any bet­ter.

• riceissa 9 Sep 2019 21:57 UTC

  2 points

  on: Fund­ing chains in the x-risk/​AI safety ecosystem

  I sug­gest adding la­bels to the edges to state a rough num­ber of funding

  I find that re­mem­ber­ing the typ­i­cal grant/​dona­tion size of a donor is eas­ier than re­mem­ber­ing all the con­nec­tions be­tween differ­ent donors and donees, so hav­ing the edges vi­su­ally rep­re­sented (with­out fur­ther dec­o­rat­ing the edges) cap­tures most of the value of the ex­er­cise. I re­al­ize that oth­ers who don’t fol­low the EA grant­ing space as closely as I do may feel differ­ently.

  Per­haps it would ideally be an in­ter­ac­tive application

  I don’t have ex­pe­rience mak­ing such ap­pli­ca­tions, so I will let some­one else do this.

  was there any rea­son for hav­ing Pa­trick in par­tic­u­lar on the top of this?

  The node po­si­tions were cho­sen by Graphviz, so I didn’t choose to put Pa­trick on top. I in­cluded Pa­trick be­cause Vipul sug­gested do­ing this (I would guess be­cause Pa­trick was the most available ex­am­ple of an ETG donor who has given to many x-risk char­i­ties).

• riceissa 4 Sep 2019 20:45 UTC

  1 point

  on: Why were peo­ple skep­ti­cal about RAISE?

  I’m not sure I un­der­stand the differ­ence be­tween math­e­mat­i­cal think­ing and math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge. Could you briefly ex­plain or give a refer­ence? (e.g. I am won­der­ing what it would look like if some­one had a lot of one and very lit­tle of the other)

• riceissa 1 Sep 2019 21:15 UTC

  36 points

  on: Cause X Guide

  It seems to me that this post has in­tro­duced a new defi­ni­tion of cause X that is weaker (i.e. eas­ier to satisfy) than the one used by CEA.

  This post defines cause X as:

  The con­cept be­hind a “cause X” is that there could be a cause ne­glected by the EA com­mu­nity but that is as im­por­tant, or more im­por­tant, to work on than the four cur­rently es­tab­lished EA cause ar­eas.

  But from Will MacAskill’s talk:

  What are the sorts of ma­jor moral prob­lems that in sev­eral hun­dred years we’ll look back and think, “Wow, we were bar­bar­ians!”? What are the ma­jor is­sues that we haven’t even con­cep­tu­al­ized to­day?

  I will re­fer to this as Cause X.

  See also the first para­graph of Emanuele As­cani’s an­swer here.

  From the “New causes one could con­sider” list in this post, I think only In­ver­te­brates and Mo­ral cir­cle ex­pan­sion would qual­ify as a po­ten­tial cause X un­der CEA’s defi­ni­tion (the oth­ers already have re­searchers/​or­ga­ni­za­tions work­ing on them full-time, or wouldn’t sound crazy to the av­er­age per­son).

  I think it would be good to have a sep­a­rate term speci­fi­cally for the cause ar­eas that seem es­pe­cially crazy or un­con­cep­tu­al­ized, since search­ing for causes in this stric­ter class likely re­quires differ­ent strate­gies, more open-mind­ed­ness, etc.

  Re­lated: Guarded defi­ni­tion.

• riceissa 25 Aug 2019 21:04 UTC

  1 point

  on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  Hi Oliver, are you still plan­ning to re­ply to this? (I’m not in­volved with this pro­ject, but I was cu­ri­ous to hear your feed­back on it.)

• riceissa 5 Jul 2019 18:18 UTC

  1 point

  on: I find this fo­rum in­creas­ingly difficult to navigate

  fil­ter­ing by high­est rat­ing over sev­eral differ­ent time ranges

  The EA Fo­rum Reader I made a while ago has the abil­ity to do this. The top view shows posts in or­der of score, and one can filter by var­i­ous date ranges (“Restrict date range: To­day · This week · This month · Last three months · This year · All time” ex­actly like on the old fo­rum). In ad­di­tion, the “Archive” links (in the side­bar on desk­top, or at the bot­tom of the page on mo­bile) in the top view show the top posts from the given time pe­riod, so e.g. one can view the top posts in 2018 or the top posts in Fe­bru­ary 2019.

• riceissa 29 Jun 2019 3:38 UTC

  9 points

  on: Needed EA-re­lated Ar­ti­cles on the English Wikipedia

  Open Phil used to have its own page; see e.g. this ver­sion and the re­vi­sion his­tory for some con­text. (Dis­clo­sure: I wrote the origi­nal ver­sion of the page.)

• riceissa 27 Jun 2019 20:47 UTC

  27 points

  on: Needed EA-re­lated Ar­ti­cles on the English Wikipedia

  An­i­mal Char­ity Eval­u­a­tors pre­vi­ously had a page on Wikipe­dia, but was deleted af­ter dis­cus­sion. You can see a copy of what the page looked like, which can also be used in case some­one wants to write the page.

  My guess (based on in­tu­ition/​ex­pe­rience and with­out spend­ing any time dig­ging up sources) is that al­most all of these do not meet Wikipe­dia’s gen­eral no­ta­bil­ity guideline, so it is some­what un­cer­tain as to whether they would sur­vive for long (if some­one were to write the page). In other words, they might be deleted like the ACE ar­ti­cle.

  The Chivers book will likely meet the no­ta­bil­ity crite­ria for books (if it hasn’t already).

• riceissa 7 May 2019 13:12 UTC

  0 points

  on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for March 2019

  Can you clar­ify which time­zone is be­ing used to de­ter­mine whether a post is pub­lished in one month vs an­other? (A post I am cu­ri­ous about was pub­lished in March in some time­zones but in April in oth­ers, so I’m won­der­ing if it was even con­sid­ered for the March prize.)

• riceissa 18 Apr 2019 22:57 UTC

  14 points

  on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  I don’t see this as a risk for EA/​ra­tio­nal­ist types though, and would ar­gue that pretty strongly.

  Would you be will­ing to sup­ply this ar­gu­ment? I am very cu­ri­ous to hear more about your think­ing on this, as it is some­thing I have won­dered about. (For the sake of trans­parency, I should men­tion that my own take is that there is a sig­nifi­cant risk even for EAs and ra­tio­nal­ists to be over­taken by un­scien­tific think­ing af­ter strong psychedelic ex­pe­riences, and that it takes un­usu­ally solid wor­ld­views and/​or some sort of per­son­al­ity trait that is hard-to-de­scribe in or­der to re­sist this in­fluence.)

• riceissa 31 Jan 2019 4:53 UTC

  1 point

  on: We should make aca­demic knowl­edge easier

  I am hav­ing trou­ble in­ter­pret­ing state­ments like “it does not seem to be on any­one’s agenda” and “not some­thing that any­one has looked at sys­tem­at­i­cally”. Can you say more about where you have looked and what you have re­jected? (From the ti­tle of the post I ex­pected to see men­tions of Ar­bital, Distill, re­search debt, the many ex­plana­tory pieces pub­lished on LessWrong and the EA Fo­rum, work by Michael Niel­sen, and Me­ta­cademy, to name some pro­jects that I have seen men­tioned and dis­cussed by effec­tive al­tru­ists.)

• riceissa 19 Nov 2018 22:21 UTC

  3 points

  on: “Tak­ing AI Risk Se­ri­ously” – Thoughts by Critch

  Even if you’re not in­ter­ested in ori­ent­ing your life around helping with x-risk – if you just want to not be blind­sided by rad­i­cal changes that may be coming

  [...]

  We don’t know ex­actly what will hap­pen, but I ex­pect se­ri­ous changes of some sort over the next 10 years. Even if you aren’t com­mit­ting to sav­ing the world, I think it’s in your in­ter­est just to un­der­stand what is hap­pen­ing, so in a decade or two you aren’t com­pletely lost.

  And even ‘un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion’ is com­pli­cated enough that I think you need to be able to quit your day-job and fo­cus full-time, in or­der to get ori­ented.

  Ray­mond, do you or An­drew Critch have any con­crete pos­si­bil­ities in mind for what “ori­ent­ing one’s life”/​”un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion” might look like from a non-al­tru­is­tic per­spec­tive? I’m in­ter­ested in hear­ing con­crete ideas for what one might do; the only sug­ges­tions I can re­call see­ing so far were men­tioned in the 80,000 Hours pod­cast epi­sode with Paul Chris­ti­ano, to save money and in­vest in cer­tain com­pa­nies. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?

  The way I am imag­in­ing it, a per­son think­ing about this from a non-al­tru­is­tic per­spec­tive would then think about the prob­lem for sev­eral years and would nar­row this list down (or add new things to it) and act on some sub­set of them (e.g. maybe they would think about which com­pa­nies to in­vest in and de­cide how much money to save, but to not im­ple­ment some other idea). Is this an ac­cu­rate un­der­stand­ing of your view?

• riceissa 12 Nov 2018 3:20 UTC

  3 points

  on: Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.

  I’m not sure how novel that is, but I’ve never seen it before

  Ben Hoff­man dis­cussed this back in De­cem­ber 2016 (his re­cent posts don’t do this though), and he seems to cite Ar­bital propo­si­tions as in­spira­tion.

  I’m not sure if Eliz­a­beth got the idea from Ben or if Ben came up with the idea.

• riceissa 12 Nov 2018 3:01 UTC

  4 points

  on: What’s Chang­ing With the New Fo­rum?

  There is https://​​ea.greater­wrong.com/​​.

  See also this com­ment an­nounc­ing it.

• riceissa 18 Sep 2018 4:54 UTC

  25 points

  on: EA Grants ap­pli­ca­tions are now open

  I have two ques­tions:

  1. Is there a full list of grantees and re­spec­tive grant amounts for the refer­ral-based round?

  2. Is there some sort of eval­u­a­tion pro­cess for funded pro­jects that have con­cluded? I am cu­ri­ous es­pe­cially about the out­comes of the pro­jects that were funded in the 2017 round (that have now had the money for about a year). This ques­tion was asked about a year ago, but the de­tails seemed un­cer­tain at the time so I am re-ask­ing the ques­tion.

• riceissa 26 Aug 2018 4:35 UTC

  1 point

  on: Awe­some Effec­tive Altru­ism—a cu­rated list of EA resources

  Sheon Han’s repos­i­tory was made pri­vate. There are more more dis­cus­sion threads here.

• riceissa 25 Aug 2018 2:07 UTC

  5 points

  on: Dona­tions List Web­site: tu­to­rial and re­quest for feedback

  So far al­most all DLW work by me has been con­tract work paid by Vipul, and my guess is it will stay like this for the fore­see­able fu­ture. We have not sought other sources of fund­ing, but are in­ter­ested in re­ceiv­ing fund­ing (for my on­go­ing work).

  As men­tioned in the post, the in­tended au­di­ence is some­thing like “peo­ple who think about effec­tive giv­ing, flow of money in the non-profit world, real-world de­ci­sion mak­ing, and similar top­ics”. To give some ex­am­ples:

  • Ryan Carey has a GitHub repos­i­tory with data anal­y­sis of Open Phil’s grants data. (Last up­dated 2018-02-11.)

  • Here is an­other ex­am­ple, but part of a closed Face­book group so I won’t de­scribe it. (Prob­a­bly last up­dated around 2018-01-14.)

  • Michael Dick­ens wrote a post en­ti­tled “Where Some Peo­ple Donated in 2017” record­ing where some EA and EA-periph­eral peo­ple donated. (Last up­dated 2018-02-14.)

  • In June 2017, there was a Face­book event called “What’s Up With the Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject?” The event looked at some of Open Phil’s work, com­piling some doc­u­ments about some of Open Phil’s grants in the pro­cess. Look­ing at the times­tamps, I think the Google Docs were cre­ated when the meetup be­gan, and were filled in dur­ing the course of the meetup. (Last up­dated 2017-06-09.)

  I think in all the above cases, ei­ther the cur­rent ver­sion of DLW or an im­proved ver­sion in the fu­ture performs a su­per­set of the data col­lec­tion/​anal­y­sis, is con­tinu­ally up­dated, and pro­vides a sin­gle lo­ca­tion for all the data and anal­y­sis.

  Vipul has also made com­ments (1, 2) and at least one post us­ing in part data col­lected by DLW, to make ob­ser­va­tions or an­swer peo­ple’s ques­tions.