All of andzuck's Comments + Replies
This was a really great summary and I know I’ll be coming back to this post multiple times in the future. Thank you so much for writing it up, Peter!
Hi Question Mark. While Nuño evaluated many longtermist orgs in that post, he didn’t actually evaluate QRI. Here’s the full quote: “Below is a list of perhaps notable organizations which I could have evaluated but didn't. […] Qualia Research Institute. Its pathway to impact appears implausible and overly ambitious.” It’s unfortunate that no explanation is actually given for why the view is held. The name of any longtermist org could have replaced QRI’s name and the statement would sound exactly the same.
QRI’s path to impact has three steps. Step 1: underst...
What a wonderful position to find yourself in! If you are considering donating some of the gift today, Qualia Research Institute (QRI) would be a great place to donate as we currently have a 1:1 matching grant out for $200,000.
Full disclosure, I am the Executive Director of QRI.
You can 2x your donation's impact and completing this match will allow us to make our first large hire outside of the core founding team.
Our main goal is to understand and quantify the most important aspects of conscious experience, in particular, emotional valence (how good or bad ...
Thanks for putting this all on my radar! I will be catching up on your posts and talk. Glad to see that you have already presented a lot of this in an EA context :)
Was wondering if you can explain more about the reasoning for funding Connor Flexman. Right now, the write-up doesn't explain much and makes me curious what "independent research" means. Also would be interested in learning what past projects Connor has worked on that led to this grant.
The primary thing I expect him to do with this grant is to work together with John Salvatier on doing research on skill transfer between experts (which I am partially excited about because that's the kind of thing that I see a lot of world-scale model building and associated grant-making being bottlenecked on).
However, as I mentioned in the review, if he finds that he can't contribute to that as effectively as he thought, I want him to feel comfortable pursuing other research avenues. I don't currently have a short-list of what those would b...
Have you encountered the idea of qualia formalism? At QRI, we believe that the quantity of valence / happiness in a single moment of experience is a precise and objective property of that moment of experience. Mike Johnson’s Principia Qualia lays the groundwork for this thesis.