Ben_West🔸

Member of Technical Staff @ METR
14400 karmaJoined Working (15+ years)Panama City, Panama
🤷♂🤷♂🤷♂.ws

Bio

Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok (@benthamite). We are probably hiring: https://metr.org/hiring 

How others can help me

Feedback always appreciated; feel free to email/DM me or use this link if you prefer to be anonymous.

Sequences
3

AI Pause Debate Week
EA Hiring
EA Retention

Comments
1052

Topic contributions
6

Thanks for writing this up! I really like when people do concrete empirical surveys like this, it's helpful to get a sense of how widely current tools are actually being used. 

I'm curious if you have thoughts about what automation would actually speed you up? It sounds like maybe something like "current LLMs but without hallucination?"

Also, do you have a sense for how much investment has been made into AI tools in CEST? My impression is that deepmind really loves getting into nature/science but has very little interest in actually commercializing these tools, so it feels not that surprising to me that the thing which got into science didn't actually get used.[1] It would update me if they tried very hard to commercialize it but failed.

  1. ^

    I agree that this doesn't speak well of the editorial process though

It feels appropriate that this post has a lot of hearts and simultaneously disagree reacts. We will miss you, even (perhaps especially) those of us who often disagreed with you. 

I would love to reflect with you on the other side of the singularity. If we make it through alive, I think there's a decent chance that it will be in part thanks to your work.

I was excited that they did this and thought it was well produced. The focus on cost cutting feels like a double edged sword: it absolves viewers of responsibility, which makes them more open to the message but also less likely to do anything. I scrolled through the first couple pages of comments and saw a bunch of "corporations are greedy" complaints but couldn't find anyone suggesting a concrete behavioral change (for themselves or others).

I wonder if there's an adjacent version of this which keeps the viewer absolved of responsibility but still has a call to action. Plausible ideas:

  1.  Race to the top: e.g. specifically call out the worst corporate offender in the video
  2. Political stuff, e.g. push for EU Commission to keep their cage banning promise
    1. Maybe YouTube rules about politics prevents them saying this, not sure

In any case, kudos to the Kurzgesagt team for making a video on this which (as of this writing) has 2M+ views!

If you can get a better score than our human subjects did on any of METR's RE-Bench evals, send it to me and we will fly you out for an onsite interview

Caveats:

  1. you're employable (we can sponsor visas from most but not all countries)
  2. use same hardware
  3. honor system that you didn't take more time than our human subjects (8 hours). If you take more still send it to me and we probably will still be interested in talking

(Crossposted from twitter.)

Wow that's great. Congrats to you and all the organizers!

I appreciate you being willing to share your candid reasons publicly, Jesse. Best of luck with your future plans, and best of luck to Tristan and Mia!

EA Awards

  1. I feel worried that the ratio of the amount of criticism that one gets for doing EA stuff to the amount of positive feedback one gets is too high
  2. Awards are a standard way to counteract this
  3. I would like to explore having some sort of awards thingy
  4. I currently feel most excited about something like: a small group of people solicit nominations and then choose a short list of people to be voted on by Forum members, and then the winners are presented at a session at EAG BA
  5. I would appreciate feedback on:
    1. whether people think this is a good idea
    2. How to frame this - I want to avoid being seen as speaking on behalf of all EAs
  6. Also if anyone wants to volunteer to co-organize with me I would appreciate hearing that

It looks like she did a giving season fundraiser for Helen Keller International, which she credits to the EA class she took. Maybe we will see her at a future EAG!

Gave ~50% of my income to my DAF. I will probably disburse it mostly to AI Safety things which make sense on <= 5 year AGI timelines.

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