All of carrickflynn's Comments + Replies
The Shrimp of Humanity Institute shut down two days ago :(
Fortunately, its legacy lives on in the dozens of other longshrimpism organizations it helped to inspire.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the people who kept FHI alive for so many years against such hurricane-force headwinds. But I also want to express some concerns, warnings, and--honestly--mixed feelings about what that entailed.
Today, a huge amount of FHI's work is being carried forward by dozens of excellent organizations and literally thousands of brilliant individuals. FHI's mission has replicated and spread and diversified. It is safe now. However, there was a time when FHI was mostly alone and the ember might have died from the shoc...
Strong +1 re: 'hero' work culture. especially for ops staff. This was one of the things that bothered me while there and contributed to my moving on - an (admittedly very nice) attitude of praising (especially admin/management) people who were working stupidly hard/long, rather than actually investing in fixing a clearly dysfunctional situation. And while it might not have been possible to fix later on due to embedded animosity/frustration on both sides => hiring freeze etc, it certainly was early on when I was there.
The admin load issue was not just ab...
Apparently my wife has been making huge bets on the internet with money from a hidden 'fiat@' account.
Christiano and Amodei are both at OpenAI. Jan Leike, Shane Legg, and Miljan Martic are all at DeepMind. (Jan Leike is also former FHI and is still a research associate with us :) ).
I wrote this in a google doc and copy-pasted, without intending the numbers to be links to anything. I'm not really sure why it made them highlight like a hyperlink.
The closest seems to be really well done analytic philosophy. I recommend Nick Bostrom's work as a great example of this.
I also think that is seems similar to what mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and model builders frequently do.
Other good examples would probably be Thomas Schelling in IR and nuclear security. Coase in economics. Maybe Feynman?
Sean is one of the under-sung heroes who helped build FHI and kept it alive. He did this by--among other things--careful and difficult relationship management with the faculty. I had to engage in this work too and it was less like being between a rock and a hard place and more like being between a belt grinder and another bigger belt grinder.
One can disagree about apportioning the blame for this relationship--and in my mind, I divide it differently than Sean--but after his four years of first-hand experience, my response to Sean is to take his v... (read more)