All of jacobjacob's Comments + Replies
Not addressing video recordings specifically; but we might run future iterations of this bootcamp if there's enough interest, it goes well and it continues to seem valuable. So feel free to submit the application form while noting you're only interested in future cohorts.
I was a grantee in 2019 and consent to having my evaluation shared publicly, if Nuno wants to post it.
To really make this update, I'd want some more bins than the ones Nuno provide. That is, there could be an "extremely more successful than expected" bin; and all that matters is whether you manage to get any grant in that bin.
(For example, I think Roam got a grant in 2018-2019, and they might fall in that bin, though I haven't thought a lot about it.)
Counterpoint: yes, Facebook has lots of public image issues. As a result, we have good evidence that they're an org that's unusually resistant to such problems!
They've been having scandals since they were founded. And in spite of all the things you mention, their market cap has almost doubled since the bottom of the Cambridge Analytica fall-out.
They're also one of the world's most valuable companies, and operate in a sector (software) that on an inside view seems well poised to do well in future (unlike, say, Berkshire Hathaway, ...
Conditional on OpenAI API generating at least $100M in total revenue for OpenAI, by what year will that happen?
(You might also want to combine this with an estimate of the binary variable of whether it will generate $100M in revenue at all.)
This was really interesting to forecast! Here's my prediction, and my thought process is below. I decomposed this into several questions:
- Will OpenAI commercialize the API?
- 94% – this was the intention behind releasing the API, although the potential backlash adds some uncertainty [1]
- When will OpenAI commercialize the API? (~August/September)
- They released the API in June and indicated a 2 month beta, so it would begin generating revenue in August/September [2]
- Will the API reach $100M revenue? (90%)
- Eliezer is willing to bet there’ll be 1B i
I'm also posting a bounty for suggesting good candidates: $1000 for successful leads on a new project manager; $100 for leads on a top 5 candidate
DETAILS
I will pay you $1000 if you:
- Send us the name of a person…
- …who we did not already have on our list…
- …who we contacted because of your recommendation...
- ...who ends up taking on the role
I will pay you $100 if the person ends up among the top 5 candidates (by our evaluation), but does not take the role (given the other above constraints).
There’s no requirement for you to ...
Ought (~$5000) and Rethink Priorities (~$500) have both done it, with bounties roughly what I indicated (though I'm a bit uncertain). Don't think either has completed the relevant hiring rounds yet.
In addition, I'll mention:
- Foretold is tracking ~20 questions and is open to anyone adding their own, but doesn't have very many predictions.
- In addition to the one you mentioned, Metaculus is tracking a handful of other questions and has a substantial number of predictions.
- The John Hopkins disease prediction project lists 3 questions. You have to sign up to view them. (I also think you can't see the crowd average before you've made your prediction.)
Here's a list of public forecasting platforms where participants are tracking the situation:
Foretold is tracking ~20 questions and is open to anyone adding their own, but doesn't have very many predictions.
Metaculus is tracking a handful questions and has a substantial number of predictions.
The John Hopkins disease prediction project lists 3 questions. You have to sign up to view them. (I also think you can't see the crowd average before you've made your prediction.)
This set-up does seem like it could be exploitable in an adversarial manner... but my impression from reading the poll results, is that this is weak evidence against that actually being a failure mode -- since it doesn't seem to have happened.
I didn't notice any attempts to frame a particular person multiple times. The cases where there were repeated criticism of some orgs seemed to plausibly come from different accounts, since they often offered different reasons for the criticism or seemed stylistically different.
Moreover, if asked beforehand ...
If there were a way to do this with those opinions laundered out, then I wouldn't have a problem.
I interpret [1] you here as saying "if you press the button of 'make people search for all their offensive and socially disapproved beliefs, and collect the responses in a single place' you will inevitably have a bad time. There are complex reasons lots of beliefs have evolved to be socially punished, and tearing down those fences might be really terrible. Even worse, there are externalities such that one person saying something crazy is goi...
Why do you think this is better than encouraging people to join foretold.io as individuals? Do you think that we are lacking an institution or platform which helps individuals to get up to speed and interested in forecasting (so that they are good enough that foretold.io provides a positive experience)?
I'm not sure if the group should fully run the tournaments, as opposed to just training a local team, or having the group leader stay in some contact with tournament organisers.
Though I have an intuition that some support from a local group might make ...
How would this be an "internal practice"? The only way this would work would be to have people publically post their earn addresses.
"Internal" in the sense of being primarily intended to solve internal coordination purposes and primarily used in messaging within the community.
I think you underrate the cost of weirdness.
You gave a particular example of a causal pathway by which weirdness leads to bad stuff, but it doesn't really cause me to change my mind because I was already aware of it as a failure mode. What makes you think I u...
It's not clear to me that we are in a mess.
Well, that's why I'm posting this -- to get some data and find out :)
(I guess the title seemed to have turned a few people off, though)
In hindsight, I should have made the intended use-cases clearer in the post. I optimised for shipping it fast rather than not at all, but that had its costs.
The reason I wrote this was basically entirely motivated by problems I've encountered myself.
For example, I’ve spent this year trying to build an AI forecasting community, and faced the awkward problem ...
This is super helpful, thanks (and that's a really awesome list of email hygiene tips, I've saved it).
I wonder whether educating and encouraging good email hygiene could be an easier solution (at least initially).
I think it would improve things on the margin, and also has a much smaller risk of landing us in a worse equilibrium, so it seems robustly good for people to do.
Still, I'm not super excited because if you believe that the initial mess is a coordination problem, the solution is not for individuals to put in lots of effort to be h...
It's not clear to me that we are in a mess. The only actual example you gave was a spammy corporate newsletter, which seems irrelevant.
This might look as follows: Lots of people write to senior researchers asking for feedback on papers or ideas, yet they’re mostly crackpots or uninteresting, so most stuff is not worth reading. A promising young researcher without many connections would want their feedback (and the senior researcher would want to give it!), but it simply takes too much effort to figure out that the paper is promising, so it never gets...
On the topic of weirdness: I expect that if what I'm pointing to is a real problem, and paid emails would help the situation, then the benefits from becoming more effective at coordinating internally would massively outweigh reputational risks from increased weirdness.
I find it somewhat hard to elucidate the reasons I believe this (though could try if you'd want me to), but some hand-wavy examples are Paul Graham's thoughts that it's almost always a mistake for startups to worry about competitors as opposed to focusing on building a go...
I think the way to answer the question is: "given the distribution of equilibria we expect following this change, what are the expected costs and benefits, and how does that compare with the costs and benefits under the current equilibrium?" (as well as considering strategic heuristics like avoiding irreversible actions and unilateralist action.)
I don't update much on your comment since it feels like it's just pointing out a bunch of costs under a particular new equilibrium, without engaging enough with how likely this is or what the be...
I guess I don't experience major problems with email (sending or receiving), so I don't see very significant benefits. I just read your post as very costly ways to achieve marginal gains.
This was crossposted to LessWrong, replacing all the mentions of "EA" with "rationality", mutatis mutandis.
I'm unfortunately only publishing the transcript at this time. The audio contains some sections that were edited out for privacy reasons.
Thanks, that's great to hear.
The prize has been going on for a while, which seems important, and I think the transparency of the Prize post is really important for making common knowledge of what kind of work there is demand for. So overall it's pretty great.
The structure of feedback looks to me like: "here's the object-level content of the post, and here are 2-3 reasons we liked it". I think you could be more clear about what you want to incentivise. More precisely, the current structure doesn't answer:
- How strong were the rea
[Note: I double-checked with the moderators before posting this to ensure it was not too "marketingy".]
- When I and Tom came up with that, I don't think we meant "belief" to be imbued with the usual philosophical connotations. Rather, we intended it to mean something like "action-guiding, introspectively accessible representation of a state of affairs existing independently of whether it is queried".
When people ask me what I think about the world, I can often come up with lots of intelligent sounding answers -- but it is unfortunately more rare that my actual actions, plans and normative evaluations are somehow suitably hooked up to, and crucially depend upon, those answers.
I work at Lightcone and with Lighthaven, and I'm mostly happy to engage in positive sum economic trade with anyone regardless of worldview :) I'm hoping we can rent space for orgs both in the community and beyond merely as means of a good trade that helps us both, and regardless of where we agree or not in other matters.
The worldview alignment mostly effects where we'd spend our limited ability to subsidize events or run them below cost!