I should have chosen a clearer phrase than "not through formal channels". What I meant was that my much of my forecasting work and experiences came about through my participation on Metaculus, which is "outside" of academia; this participation did not manifest as forecasting publications or assistantships (as would be done through a Masters or PhD program), but rather as my track record (linked in CV to Metaculus profile) and my GitHub repositories. There was also a forecasting tournament I won, which I also linked on the CV. 

I agree with this.

"Number of publications" and "Impact per publication" are separate axes, and leaving the latter out produces a poorer landscape of X-risk research. 

Glad to hear that the links were useful!

Keeping by Holden's timeline sounds good, and I agree that AGI > HLMI in terms of recognizability. I hope the quiz goes well once it is officially released!

I am not the best person to ask this question (@so8res, @katja_grace, @holdenkarnofsky) but I will try to offer some points.

• These links should be quite useful: 
  • 2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI
  • What do ML researchers think about AI in 2022? (37 years until a 50% chance of HLMI) 
  • LW Wiki - AI Timelines (e.g., roughly 15% chance of transformative AI by 2036 and ~75% of AGI by 2032)
  • (somewhat less useful) LW Wiki - Transformative AI; LW Wiki - Technological forecasting
• I don't know of any recent AI expert surveys for transformative AI timelines specifically, but have pointed you to very recent ones of human-level machine intelligence and AGI. 
• For comprehensiveness, I think you should cover both transformative AI (AI that precipitates a change of equal or greater magnitude to the agricultural or industrial revolution) and HLMI. I have yet to read Holden's AI Timelines post, but believe it's likely a good resource to defer to, given Holden's epistemic track record, so I think you should use this for the transformative AI timelines. For the HLMI timelines, I think you should use the 2022 expert survey (the first link). Additionally, if you trust that a techno.-optimist leaning crowd's forecasting accuracy generalizes to AI timelines, then it might be worth checking out Metaculus as well.
  • the community here has an IQR forecast of (2030, 2041, 2075) for When will the first general AI system be devised, tested, and publicly announced?  
  • the uniform median forecast is 54% for Will there be human/machine intelligence parity by 2040?
• Lastly, I think it might be useful to ask under the existential risk section what percentage of ML/AI researchers think AI safety research should be prioritized (from the survey: "The median respondent believes society should prioritize AI safety research “more” than it is currently prioritized. Respondents chose from “much less,” “less,” “about the same,” “more,” and “much more.” 69% of respondents chose “more” or “much more,” up from 49% in 2016.")

I completed the three quizzes and enjoyed it thoroughly. 

Without any further improvements, I think these quizzes would still be quite effective. It would be nice to have a completion counter (e.g., an X/Total questions complete) at the bottom of the quizzes, but I don't know if this is possible on quizmanity. 

Got through about 25% of the essay and I can confirm it's pretty good so far. 

Strong upvote for introducing me to the authors and the site. Thank you for posting. 

Every time I think about how I can do the most good, I am burdened by questions roughly like

• How should value be measured? 
• How should well-being be measured? 
• How might my actions engender unintended, harmful outcomes? 
• How can my impact be measured? 

I do not have good answers to these questions, but I would bet on some actions being positively impactful on the net.

For example

• Promoting vegetarianism or veganism
• Providing medicine and resources to those in poverty
• Building robust political institutions in developing countries
• Promoting policy to monitor develops in AI

W.r.t. the action that is most  positively impactful, my intuition is that it would take the form of safeguarding humanity's future or protecting life on Earth. 

Some possible actions that might fit this bill:  

• Work that robustly illustrates the theoretical limits of the dangers from and capabilities of superintelligence.
• Work that accurately encodes human values digitally  
• A global surveillance system  for human and machine threats
• A system that protects Earth from solar weather and NEOs

The problem here is that some of these actions might spawn harm, particularly (2) and (3). 

Thoughts and Notes: October 5th 0012022 (1) 

As per my last shortform, over the next couple of weeks I will be moving my brief profiles for different catastrophes from my draft existential risk frameworks post into shortform posts to make the existential risk frameworks post lighter and more simple. 

In my last shortform, I included the profile for the use of nuclear weapons and today I will include the profile for climate change. 

Climate change 

• Risk: (sections from the well written Wikipedia page on Climate Change): "Contemporary climate change includes both global warming and its impacts on Earth's weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current rise in global average temperature is more rapid and is primarily caused by humans.^[2][3] Burning fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, most importantly carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane. Greenhouse gases warm the air by absorbing heat radiated by the Earth, trapping the heat near the surface. Greenhouse gas emissions amplify this effect, causing the Earth to take in more energy from sunlight than it can radiate back into space." In general, the risk from climate change mostly comes from the destabilizing downstream effects it has on civilization, rather than from its direct effects, such as the ice caps melting or increased weather severity. One severe climate change catastrophe is the runaway greenhouse effect, but this seems unlikely to occur, as the present humans activities and natural processes contributing to global warming don't appear capable of engendering such a catastrophe anytime soon. 
• Links: EAF Wiki; LW Wiki; Climate Change (Wikipedia); IPCC Report 2022; NOAA Climate Q & A; OWID Carbon Dioxide and Emissions (2020); UN Reports on CC; CC and Longtermism (2022); NASA Evidence of CC (2022)
• Forecasts: If climate catastrophe by 2100, human population falls by >= 95%? - 1%; If global catastrophe by 2100, due to climate change or geoengineering? - 10%; How much warming by 2100? - (1.8, 2.6, 3.5) degrees; When fossil fuels < 50% of global energy? - (2038, 2044, 2056)

Thoughts and Notes: October 3rd 0012022 (1)

I have been working on a post which introduces a framework for existential risks that  I have not seen covered on the either LW or EAF, but I think I've impeded my progress by setting out to do more than I originally intended. 

Rather than simply introduce the framework and compare it to the Bostrom's 2013 framework and the Wikipedia page on GCRs, I've tried to aggregate all global and existential catastrophes I could find under the "new" framework. 

Creating an anthology of global and existential catastrophes is something I would like to complete at some point, but doing so in the post I've written would be overkill and would not in line with the goal of"making the introduction of this little known framework brief and simple". 

To make my life easier, I am going to remove the aggregated catastrophes section of my post. I will work incrementally (and somewhat informally) on accumulating links and notes for and thinking about each global and/or existential catastrophe through shortform posts. 

Each shortform post in this vein will pertain to a single type of catastrophe. Of course, I may post other shortforms in between, but my goal generally is to cover the different global and existential risks one by one via shortform. 

As was the case in my original post, I include DALLE-2 art with each catastrophe, and the loose structure for each catastrophe is Risk, Links, Forecasts. 

Here is the first catastrophe in the list. Again note that I am not aiming for comprehensiveness here, but rather am trying to get the ball rolling for a more extensive review of the catastrophic or existential risks that I plan to complete at a later date. The forecasts were observed on October 3 0002022 and represent the community's uniform median forecast. 

Use of Nuclear Weapons(Anthropogenic, Current, Preventable) 

• Risk: The use of a nuclear weapon on a well populated region could directly kill thousands to millions of people. The indirect effects, which include radiation poisoning from the fallout and heightened instability, contributes to additional death. In the event one nuke is deployed, the use of many more nuclear weapons might follow; the soot released into the stratosphere from these blasts could block out the sun - a nuclear winter - leading to the collapse agricultural systems and subsequently to widespread famine. Both scenarios - the use of one nuclear weapon or the use of many - could precipitate a chain of events culminating in societal collapse.
• Links: EAF Wiki;  LW Wiki; Nuclear warfare (Wikipedia); Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction (2021); Nuclear War Map; OWID Article (2022); On Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War (2021); Model for impact of nuclear war (2020); "Putin raises possibility of using nuclear weapons for the war" (YouTube, LW 2022)
• Forecasts: Nuke used in Ukraine before 2023? - 5%; US nuke detonated in Russia before 2023? - 1%; Russian nuke detonated in Ukraine before 2023 - 1%; >=1 nuke used in war by 2050? - 28%; No non-test nukes used by 2035? - 76%; If global catastrophe by 2100, due to nuclear war? - 25%; Global thermonuclear war by 2070? - 10%