"Applicant fit: Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?

How competent are they? Do I think they can execute this proposal well? What do their references look like? How strongly do people they’ve worked with endorse them?"

I have few thoughts:

1. "Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?" - I believe that it is difficult to say that, so if I was making grants, I would invest in many projects a small number of money (because of diminishing returns) rather than to invest a lot of money in someone who has good credentials. I think it's a mistake to reject people who don't have good credentials.
2. " What do their references look like? How strongly do people they’ve worked with endorse them?" - I don't think that references are reliable way to judge that. People don't have almost any incentive to be honest when giving references, and people are self-interested. Additionally, often people who worked with them don't have information how likely they would succeed at a project. For example, people who worked with a person as a software engineer don't know if that person would do well as a founder.
3. " Is the person who submitted the proposal the right person to do this project?" - it's way more difficult to judge whether a person will do a good job than it is to tell if a person did a good work. That's why people should switch to retroactive funding instead of normal funding.

There was a mistake in "Empirical verification" section. Part of the suggested question/prompt was missing, and the reasoning didn't make sense because of that. I have now corrected the question/prompt.

I agree that something like that needs to be done. I did something similar myself for EA forum posts, but apparently people didn't like it because it didn't get any upvotes here (I don't know why).

My main question/feedback is: "EA Forum paper links" - what exactly is that? Are these EA posts that link to a paper? If so, then why not include all posts, why only papers?

My solution was mostly this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7EAwiAopjtAdD8hsn/most-impactful-posts-on-effective-altruism-forum-from-13th

But it didn't work. People didn't upvote that. My problem/frustration continues.

I actually proposed a similar idea in a few places months ago (links below). I plan to post about related topics, e.g. my future posts might help to understand how such deals could be enforced, so if you are interested, then follow me

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3rDfScbBNhbsk93gF/how-to-stop-inequality-from-growing

https://theoreticalexplorer.com/Alignment+between+humans/Equality/How+to+stop+inequality+from+growing

My thoughts.

On implications of diminishing marginal utility:

1. I believe that artificial intelligence and other resources will have diminishing marginal utility. If that's the case, then it should be possible to do so that both humans and future digital minds are close to their maximum level of utility/happiness by splitting resources between them. The idea of "both digital minds and humans are important" would be therefore significantly more attractive for humans and realistic to accomplish than the idea of "digital minds are all of what matters".

On moral patience:

1. Morality is subjective.
   1. The criteria for moral patience are subjective. You can say that a human is a moral patient, you can say that AI agent is a moral patient, or you can say that a stone is a moral patient. There's no objective truth about that.
2. However, we can define moral patience as "if I want to maximize my happiness/utility, whose happiness/utility should I care about when choosing my actions"? That is objective.
3. If a human wants to maximize their happiness, who should they care about?
   1. Firstly, we need to answer what are the reasons why a human would have an interest to care about someone/something else.
   2. The reasons are:
      1. Game-theoretic - especially direct and indirect reciprocity.
         1. Importantly, I think that agents have interest to care about weaker agents (ask me if you want to know why).
         2. I also think that it's in the interest of a human to care about other sentient life, at least to some extent, because:
            1. It's a norm that is useful - if we live by that norm, then we have that guarantee that we won't end up terribly, because as long as we are sentient, someone will care about us.
            2. It's a norm that has a historical precedent and it's easier to sustain a norm than to establish a new one. But the historical precedent is that humans care about existing sentient life, not potential sentient life.
            3. If the norm of respecting sentient life implied that humans have to commit all their resources for the benefit of future digital minds / AI agents, then that norm would stop to be useful to humans, so that norm would either become weaker to the point where human lives matter, or humans would stop creating new AI agents.
      2. Emotional - you care about someone because you simply want them to be happy.
   3. I think it's likely that there are game-theoretic and/or emotional reasons why we should care about AI agents / digital beings, but not to the point that they are all that we should care about and that we should ignore other agents or beings.

On number of agents:

1. How to count the number of agents? If we have multiple agents on different computers that cooperate and exchange knowledge, and then we have one agent that is distributed among many computers, then what's the difference between them? Does that count as one agent or many?
2. Let's suppose that we define agents by their goals (i.e. two computers with AI on it are considered different agents, if they aim to achieve different goals). If there are multiple agents with different goals (either human or AIs), then the best thing that they can do is to create one AI agent that will be optimized for the cumulative utility/happiness all of them. So, I expect that there won't be many separate agents with different goals in the future.

I think I've selected a time that is not suitable for many people (especially the US West Coast). I'm going to change it to Saturday 5 pm GMT. I hope it won't cause a problem for anyone.

I'm currently working on a simple recommendation system for posts from Effective Altruism forum, which uses a simple algorithm on top of AI models. I have written a script that scraps posts from EA forum, and then evaluates them based on impact and few others criteria, estimating the expected value of positive impact that the post will have. I plan to share the results on this forum soon.

I think that it will have to base also on information from humans later because AI models can reflect the interest of a company (if recommendation is based on AI models, then AI companies might create AI models that are aligned with interests of the company, instead of the interest of the collective, or if the models are not aligned, then they might work in their own unaligned interest.

I think aligned recommendation systems are very important because currently I believe that some good ideas get overlooked. Better recommendation systems would direct attention to the right posts/papers.

Update: But if you work or plan to work on it as well, then please don't resign from doing so because of the fact that I'm working on it already. I also work on other projects.

I disagree.

In my opinion, it's likely that if government has operational ability of AGI, then it would likely lead to optimizing the AI for the benefit of a subset of the people in government, just like in case of private company.

Our forms of governments have been tried, and they work to some extent, but they haven't been tried in a situation where the elected people in the government have potential opportunity to seize so much power in such short time-frame.

In my opinion, the best way to ensure democratic outcome would be to train AI in decentralized way (using many small computers owned by many people, instead of big computers owned by a small group of people). The people in the government have interest in making that happen because if they don't, then they are at risk of losing the power to other people in the government (due to diminishing marginal utility of AI, losing power is a bigger cost than the benefit of being in power alone).

Some people can say that decentralized training would be inefficient, so it's not possible to do that. Maybe it's not possible now, but it can be done because human science is learned in decentralized way (with the brains of the scientists being computers in a decentralized network).

So, I think that government-led decentralized AI could be a good idea, but I'm not convinced to government-led centralized AI.

The other alternative is maybe open-source, but there are some problems with that as well like there would have to be a method to ensure that the open-source models don't contain a backdoor (that they are not secretly optimized for the interest of the company/organization that made the model).

If you believe that democratic outcome with centralized AI is possible, then how could that work? Who specifically would decide what the goal of AI is? And how would you ensure that it will be set to what has been decided and not to something else?

"Problems and needs: Sometimes it's really valuable to hear user problems or needs rather than suggestions. Is there something that frustrates you when you interact with the Forum? Is there anything you find yourself looking for or wanting when you're using the Forum?"

My biggest problem/frustration is when I write a post that I think is very important and has a lot of value, but I don't get any reaction (or close to 0) - no upvotes and no critique/feedback.

I have some idea how to solve that, but for now I just share a problem.