All of Nadia Montazeri's Comments + Replies

Thanks for writing this!

... (read more)
1
Tiresias
6mo
Another +1 that it's surprisingly easy to get experts to talk to you. Once for a job I had to find out this super obscure thing about the Federal Reserve. Instead of spending hours trying to research it on my own (which I don't think would have gone anywhere), I found a Fed expert at a think tank. He also didn't know the answer to the question, but helped immensely in tracking an answer down. I was surprised by how much time he spent on it! If you're becoming an expert in something neglected, chances are there won't be good public writing about it, so you should really lean on speaking with experts.
7
Tessa
7mo
+1 on "specialist experts are surprisingly accessible to enthusiastic youth", cf some relevant advice from Alexey Guzey

Have you considered cutting down on EAG attendees overall by reducing the proportion of AI-Safety participants, and instead hosting (or support others doing so) large AI-Safety only conferences?

These in turn could be subsidized by industry - yes, this can be a huge conflict of interest, but given the huge cost on the one hand and the revenue in AI on the other, could be worth consideration.

3
Daniel_Eth
7mo
I think the idea of having AI safety conferences makes sense, but I think it would be a pretty bad idea for these conferences to be subsidized by industry. Insofar as we want to work with industry on AI safety related stuff, I think there's a lot of other stuff ahead of conferences that both: a) industry would be more excited about subsidizing, and b) I'd worry less about the COI leading to bad effects. (For instance, industry subsidies for mechanistic interpretability research.)

Do you think the PPE/PAPR example is part of that very small subset? It just happens to be the area I started working on by deference, and I might've gotten unlucky.

Or is the crux here response vs prevention?

1
freedomandutility
8mo
I think PAPR / developing very high quality PPE can probably be justified on the basis of accidental release risks and discussing deliberate threats wouldn’t add much to the argument, but stockpiles for basic PPE would be easily justified on just natural threats

Thanks for your comment!

On what is lacking: It was written for reading groups, which is already a softly gatekept space. It doesn't provide guidance on other communication channels: what people could write blogs or tweets about, what is safe to talk to LLMs about, what about google docs, etc. Indeed, I was concerned about infinitely abstract galaxy-brain infohazard potential from this very post.

On dissent:

  1. I wanted to double down on the message in the document itself that is preliminary and not the be-all-end-all.
  2. I have reached out to one person I have in m
... (read more)
2
Abby Hoskin
8mo
Thank you, super helpful contect!

Open Philanthropy has biosecurity scholarships which have also funded career transitions in the past. In the past, they opened applications around September.

Thanks for writing this up! Just a few rough thoughts:

Regarding the absorbency of AI Safety Researcher: I have heard people in the movement tossing around that 1/6th of the AI landscape (funding, people) being devoted to safety would be worth aspiring to. That would be a lot of roles to fill (most of which, to be fair, don't exist as of yet), though I didn't crunch the numbers. The main difference to working in policy would be that the profile/background is a lot more narrow. On the other hand, a lot of those roles may not fit what you mean by "researcher"... (read more)

Hey Henry, thanks for sharing and your ambitious donation goal!

I haven't looked into locum work yet, as I won't be working as a doctor in the long term but figured it would make sense to write down my experience here anyway for others.

My intuition is that I would need a lot more experience for locum work and that especially anesthesiology is very well-suited for it, because you can adapt to new patients and environments more quickly. In the (urban) clinics where I work, I never met someone on locum work. We do have one experienced resident who is employed ... (read more)

Hey Markus, thanks, and thanks for asking, I made a mistake there and I'm glad you and another friend who is coincidentally also named Markus pointed it out.

Yes, it's supposed to be the amount one could (conservatively estimated) donate within the first year of residency in Switzerland.

I made the mistake of adding up the "difference in donations" and the "monthly remaining" with the Swiss income (2,364.57 * 12 + 15217.25 = 43592.09). That doesn't make sense.

I have now corrected it to 2,364.57 * 12 + 4,834.25 = 33209.09 in annual donations.