There’s a few more days left to have donations matched by Lightcone Infrastructure. I wanted to talk a bit about my own personal donations here.
I wanted to donate to authors who a) didn’t show up in the top 15 and were less likely to end up receiving money from The Voting Results Prize, b) who contributed novel information that actually changed my plans in some important ways. I aim to donate about 1% of my post-necessary-expenses income per year, and this year decided it was worth putting that towards LW authors who have changed my strategic thinking.
This is partly because I directly think these posts are worth paying money for, and particular because I want to signal support for the idea that paying for ideas that changed your life is worthwhile.
$100 for Abram Demski’s “Most Prisoner’s Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems”. This was a very crystallizing read on how to think about game theory. It both gave me a sense of what real coordination problems look like, as well as a visceral experience of what it looks like to see a formalization that carries through multiple stages of abstraction.
$100 for Zvi’s “The Road to Mazedom”. This was crisp model of how organizations can become pathological, which changes what I keep an eye out for when the Lightcone team is considering expanding, and when I interact with other organizations.
$100 for landfish’s “Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction”. While I already wasn’t working on nuclear risk reduction, this post shifted my beliefs from “AI is more important” to “actually nuclear risk just doesn’t seem like it’s in the top 10 things I should be thinking about, and probably shouldn’t be in other people’s either”, which affects my approach to x-risk fieldbuilding.
$50 for Mark Xu’s “The First Sample Gives the Most Information”. This concept was something I was already vaguely familiar with, but it turned out to shape my thinking quite a bit in the last year.
$50 for Malcolm Ocean’s “Reveal Culture”. After the results of this Review, I’ve given up on making “Reveal Culture” happen as a phrase. But I still think this post heavily informs my take on what is required for a culture to succeed, which is relevant beyond the specific “reveal culture” idea.
There’s a few more days left to have donations matched by Lightcone Infrastructure. I wanted to talk a bit about my own personal donations here.
I wanted to donate to authors who a) didn’t show up in the top 15 and were less likely to end up receiving money from The Voting Results Prize, b) who contributed novel information that actually changed my plans in some important ways. I aim to donate about 1% of my post-necessary-expenses income per year, and this year decided it was worth putting that towards LW authors who have changed my strategic thinking.
This is partly because I directly think these posts are worth paying money for, and particular because I want to signal support for the idea that paying for ideas that changed your life is worthwhile.
$100 for Abram Demski’s “Most Prisoner’s Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems”. This was a very crystallizing read on how to think about game theory. It both gave me a sense of what real coordination problems look like, as well as a visceral experience of what it looks like to see a formalization that carries through multiple stages of abstraction.
$100 for Zvi’s “The Road to Mazedom”. This was crisp model of how organizations can become pathological, which changes what I keep an eye out for when the Lightcone team is considering expanding, and when I interact with other organizations.
$100 for landfish’s “Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction”. While I already wasn’t working on nuclear risk reduction, this post shifted my beliefs from “AI is more important” to “actually nuclear risk just doesn’t seem like it’s in the top 10 things I should be thinking about, and probably shouldn’t be in other people’s either”, which affects my approach to x-risk fieldbuilding.
$50 for Mark Xu’s “The First Sample Gives the Most Information”. This concept was something I was already vaguely familiar with, but it turned out to shape my thinking quite a bit in the last year.
$50 for Malcolm Ocean’s “Reveal Culture”. After the results of this Review, I’ve given up on making “Reveal Culture” happen as a phrase. But I still think this post heavily informs my take on what is required for a culture to succeed, which is relevant beyond the specific “reveal culture” idea.
$50 to Rick Korzekwa for “Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it”. This directly caused me to buy myself a bunch of lights, which made my life better.