Vael Gates
Posts 12
Comments38
I would love a way to interface with EAGs where (I pay no money, but) I have access to the Swapcard interface and I talk only with people who request meetings with me. I often want to "attend" EAGs in this way, where I don't interface with the conference but I'm available as a resource if people want to talk to me, for which I will schedule remote 1:1s over Zoom. It'd be nice to be helpful to people at a time where they're available and can see I'm available on Swapcard. Are there any kind of "virtual, restricted" options like this?
Nice, yeah! I wouldn't have expected a statistically significant difference between a mean of 5.7 and 5.4 with those standard errors, but it's nice to see it here.
I considered doing a statistical test, and then spent some time googling how to do something like a "3-paired" ANOVA on data that looks like ("s" is subject, "r" is reading):
[s1 r1 "like"] [s1 r1 "agreement"] [s1 r1 "informative"]
[s2 r1 "like"] [s2 r1 "agreement"] [s2 r1 "informative"]
... [s28 r1 "like"] [s28 r1 "agreement"] [s28 r1 "informative"]
[s1 r2 "like"] [s1 r2"agreement"] [s1 r2 "informative"]
[s2 r2 "like"] [s2 r2 "agreement"] [s2 r2 "informative"]
...
because I'd like to do an ANOVA on the raw scores, rather than the means. I did not resolve my confusion about about what to do about the 3-paired data (I guess you could lump each subject's data in one column, or do it separately by "like", "agreement", and "informative", but I'm interested in how good each of the readings are summed across the three metrics). I then gave up and just presented the summary statistics. (You can extract the raw scores from the Appendix if you put some work into it though, or I could pass along the raw scores, or you could tell me how to do this sort of analysis in Python if you wanted me to do it!)
When I look at these tables, I'm also usually squinting at the median rather than mean, though I look at both. You can see the distributions in the Appendix, which I like even better. But point taken about how it'd be nice to have stats.
The authors were not anonymized, no.
This is not directly related, but I would love a way to interface with EAGs where (I pay no money, but) I have access to the Swapcard interface and I talk only with people who request meetings with me. I often want to "attend" EAGs in this way, where I don't interface with the conference (physically or virtually) but I'm available as a resource if people want to talk to me, for which I will schedule remote 1:1s over Zoom. It'd be nice to be helpful to people at a time where they're available and can see I'm available on Swapcard, but I don't want to pay to do this (nor make the event organizers pay for my non-physical presence if I do end up applying-- I usually want a "virtual only" ticket).
I'm not going to comment too much here, but if you haven't seen my talk (“Researcher Perceptions of Current and Future AI” (first 48m; skip the Q&A) (Transcript)), I'd recommend it! Specifically, you want the timechunk 23m-48m in that talk, when I'm talking about the results of interviewing ~100 researchers about AI safety arguments. We're going to publish much more on this interview data within the next month or so, but the major results are there, which describes some AI researchers cruxes.
(in response to the technical questions)
Mostly n=28 for each document, some had n =29 or n= 30; you can see details in the Appendix, quantitative section.
The Carlsmith link is to the Youtube talk version, not the full report -- we chose materials based on them being pretty short.
Keeping a running list of field-building posts I personally want to keep track of:
Project ideas:
- Akash's: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yoP2PN5zdi4EAxdGA/ai-safety-field-building-projects-i-d-like-to-see
- Ryan's: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v5z6rDuFPKM5dLpz8/probably-good-projects-for-the-ai-safety-ecosystem
Survey analysis:
- Ash's: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SuvMZgc4M8FziSvur/analysis-of-ai-safety-surveys-for-field-building-insights
- Daniel Filan's: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rXSBvSKvKdaNkhLeJ/takeaways-from-a-survey-on-ai-alignment-resources
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12852 (Bowman NLP Survey)
- AI Impacts surveys generally, 2022 and 2016, also GovAI has some
Presentation of ideas: (though this should also be updated in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gdyfJE3noRFSs373q/resources-i-send-to-ai-researchers-about-ai-safety )
- Marius's: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8JazqnCNrkJtK2Bx4/why-eas-are-skeptical-about-ai-safety
- Lukas's: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8JazqnCNrkJtK2Bx4/why-eas-are-skeptical-about-ai-safety
- Mine: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/q49obZkQujkYmnFWY/vael-gates-risks-from-advanced-ai-june-2022 // https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LfHWhcfK92qh2nwku/transcripts-of-interviews-with-ai-researchers
The application form is actually really restrictive once you open it-- when I filled it out, it explicitly instructed not to write any new material and only attach old material that was sent to FTXFF, and only had a <20 word box and <150 word box for grant descriptions. Today when I open the form even those boxes have disappeared. I think it's meant to be a quite quick form, where they'll reach out for more details later.
Just updated my post on this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8sAzgNcssH3mdb8ya/resources-i-send-to-ai-researchers-about-ai-safety
I have different recommendations for ML researchers / the public / proto-EAs (people are more or less skeptical to begin with, rely on different kinds of evidence, and are willing to entertain weirder or more normative hypotheses), but that post covers some introductory materials.
If they're a somewhat skeptical ML researcher and looking for introductory material, my top recommendation at the moment is “Why I Think More NLP Researchers Should Engage with AI Safety Concerns” by Sam Bowman (2022), 15m (Note: stop at the section “The new lab”)
No, the same set of ~28 authors read all of the readings.
The order of the readings was indeed specified:
Researchers had the option to read the transcripts where transcripts were available; we said that consuming the content in either form (video or transcript) was fine.