Peter Wildeford
Bio
Along with my co-founder, Marcus A. Davis, I run Rethink Priorities. I'm also a Grant Manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund and a top forecaster on Metaculus. Previously, I was a professional data scientist.
How others can help me
My goal is to scalably employ many well-qualified researchers to work on the world's most important problems.
Posts 89
Comments1630
Topic Contributions1
Rethink Priorities unfortunately wasn't able to offer our own Fellowship this year due to capacity reasons and financial constraints (especially post-FTX), but we would be excited to potentially run one next year.
Instead this year we put a lot of our ops capacity behind the Existential Risks Alliance via our Special Projects program and helped them run a large fellowship this year. I hope that was helpful to the community.
I think I'm also just generally more excited to create more permanent jobs in AI governance and strategy work than do fellowships (though of course we can and will do both) as I think a bigger bottleneck right now is what people do after they do a fellowship and making sure we have enough permanent opportunities for people. I think the "what do I do after SERI MATS?" is also a problem too.
just to check, are the metaculus numbers the likelihood of that risk being picked as the most likely one, not their likelihood ratings?
No, this is not apples to apples. Metaculus is predicting the probability of the actual risk, whereas the "public (RP)" is the percentage of people who think this is the highest risk regardless of the probability they give.
I thought about this a moderate amount as my wife was dying. This is definitely personal for me. But I still think the potential risks are too great and that the overall balance favors caution, even if people like my wife won't be able to benefit. Cost-benefit analysis is often very sad like that.
What do you think of your sample size? Is it hard to draw inferences from 300 people?
Also I'd be careful about drawing inferences from data via Prolific without attempts to reweigh the sample for representativeness. The raw Prolific crew is quite liberal and quite educated. 74% of them voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump.