Tangentially, this made me wonder whether the ppl running EAF/LW/etc are thinking about and "ready" wrt the risk of mass-produced BS from LLMs flooding online spaces, including potentially forums like these.
We did not consider the discussion on specific research projects to be within the scope of this post. As mentioned in the beginning, we tried to cover as much as we could that would be relevant to other field builders and related audiences.
It primarily focusses on information we think might be relevant for other people and initiatives in this space. We also do not go into specific research outputs produced by fellows within the scope of this post
There are a few reasons for why it made sense this way.
As discussed in other parts of this post, a lot of ...
TLDR; PIBBSS is hiring for a full-time Project Manager who will be responsible for running the second iteration of the PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship.
To apply, please complete this application form.
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PIBBSS aims to facilitate knowledge transfer from fields studying intelligent behaviour in natural systems to AI safety and alignment.
The Project Manager will be supported by TJ and Nora (who ran the fellowship in 2022) to help transfer learnings from last year’s fellowship, and work alongside (and manage) 1-3 team members...
What is the timeline of the Century Fellowship/application? Is there a time when applications will be closed?
Another thought in the gendre "consequentialism+": capabilitariansim à la Senn and Nussbaumer (e.g. here (h/t TJ) for an intro or SEP) seems attractive to me (among other reasons) because I believe it makes a practically useful abstraction from "what we believe ultimately matters" to "what are the best levers to affect that which we believe ultimatly matters". (In this case, the suggestion would be, while we might still think that some broad notion of utility is what we consider to ultimately matter morally, given the specific world we live in and its caus...
FWIW I would be a regular reader of Nuno's monthly (or some other interval) forum digest. Also think that having a number of other people (potentially with complementary profiles) could be valuable. Given the depth d breadth of EA/EA Forum these days, trying to find the "common denominator of relevance" in the form of a single digest will result in a digest that is of limited usefulness for most readers.
Some of the section ideas are great, in particularly "underupvoted underdogs".
PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship -- Q&A event
PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship -- Q&A event
Somewhat related: What to do with people? https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oNY76m8DDWFiLo7nH/what-to-do-with-people
Context: (1) Motivations for fostering EA-relevant interdisciplinary research; (2) "domain scanning" and "epistemic translation" as a way of thinking about interdisciplinary research
The following list of fields and leading questions could be interesting for interdisciplinry AI alignment reserach. I started to compile this list to provide some anchorage for evaluating the value of interdiscplinary research for EA causes, specifically AI alignment.
Some comments on the ...
Below, I briefly discuss some motivating reasons, as I see them, to foster more interdisciplinary thought in EA. This includes ways EA's current set of research topics might have emerged for suboptimal reasons.
The ocean of knowledge is vast. But the knowledge commonly referenced within EA and longtermism represents only a tiny fraction of this ocean.
I argue that EA's knowledge tradition is skewed for reasons including but not-limited-to the epistemic merit of those bodies of knowledge. There are...
The below provides definitions and explanations of "domain scanning" and "epistemic translation", in an attempt of adding further gears to how interdisciplinary research works.
I suggest understanding domain scanning and epistemic translation as a specific type of research that both plays (or ought to play) an important role as part of a larger research progress, or can be usefully pursued as “its own thing”.
By domain scanning, I mean the activity of searching through diverse bodies a...
I think the "so that they become more predictable [to the recommender algorithm]" is crucial in Russel's argument. IF human preferences were malleable in this way, and IF recommender algorithms are strong enough to detect that malleability, then the pressures towards the behaviour that Russel suggests is strong and we have a lot of reasons to expect it. I think the answer to both IFs is likely to be yes.
I agree something about influence is important. As a counterpoint, I think many manifestations of "having influence" don't store well (e.g. the fact that at a given time, a relatively large number of EAs have an "influential role" (whatever that means exactly) is only weakly related to how many EAs will have an influential role in t+1 (say a generation later).
Wrt accumulation, influence also seems less straightforward to grow when you compare it to e.g. money (and to a lesser extent to knowledge) which, thanks to interest rates, accumulates at a cer...
This made me think of the way David Deutsch talks about knoweldge creation - where knowledge manifests physically in e.g. the way a species is adapted to its niche. The process of natural selection that lead to this adapation is a process of "exploratiin" and "error correction" that accumulates knoweldge. That degree of adaptation is the physical manifestation of kowledge. DNA is an important substrate of this process - however, I expect that DNA won't be the most fruitful level of abstraction at which to think about the patient longtermist question....
Moral progress
I largely agree with your assessment that and how automation puts a lot of pressure on the fate of democracy (although, as you acknowledge, there are ways automation could strengthen democracy, and the way this will cash out sure seems liek it's subject to strong path dependency.)
When we compare pre-industrial times to post-industrial times, it is not only our economy and our arsenal of technologies that is different. Within these ~200-300 years, humanity has also undergone meaningful intellectual and moral progress. This includes thing...
What plausible outside views are there? How much to rely on which?
Here is another possible outside view one could take. Under this view, the question of how societies govern themselves is subject to evolutionary dynamics. (You allude to this a bit in one of your footnotes, when talking about economic determinism.) Different societies adopt different approaches, and societies with better approaches are more successful and become more dominant. Less successful societies either cease to exist or adopt the better approaches by imitation. Based on this view, we...
If democracy retreats, what will it be replaced by?
A lot of the time, people assume a natural dichotomy between democracy and authoritative regimes. While this is certainly a useful shorthand when looking at history, I think it is likely to be misleading when thinking about the future.
This "false dichotomy" between democracy and authoritative regimes often contrasts "my values and needs are adequately taken into account" (<> democracy) with "my values and needs basically don't matter" (<>authoritative regimes). By putting these things int...
Thanks, I enjoyed reading this.
Here are a few thoughts; they aren’t meant as critiques of things you say, but simple thoughts triggered by, building on or attempting to complement your analysis.
Meta: I haven’t seen this framing spelt out in these terms and think it’s a useful way of integrating considerations raised by patient longtermism into one overall EA worldview.
The considerations elucidated by patient longtermism, namely that our resources can “go further” in the future, are important. There is an analogous here to Singer’s drowning child argument, which says that, all else equal, you shouldn’t have a preference over helping someone who is spatially close to you compared to someone who is spatially far awa...
I agree there are those things, but I am overall probably more pessimistic than you; I think there is a (significant) assymmetry towards pollution-y and not-truth-conducive content production here.
(That said, I am not too concerned overall either; I think the solution of making it harder/require some form of verification to make an account.)