It feels like there is an implicit assumption in CFAR’s agenda that most of the important things are going to happen in one or two decades from now. Otherwise it would make sense to place more emphasis on creating educational programs for children where the long term impact can be larger (I think). Do you agree with this assessment? If so, how do you justify the short term assumption?
It feels like there is an implicit assumption in CFAR’s agenda that most of the important things are going to happen in one or two decades from now.
I don’t think this; it seems to me that the next decade or two may be pivotal, but they may well not be, and the rest of the century matters quite a bit as well in expectation.
There are three main reasons we’ve focused mainly on adults:
Adults can contribute more rapidly, and so can be part of a process of compounding careful-thinking resources in a shorter-term way. E.g. if adults are hired now by MIRI, they improve the ratio of thoughtfulness within those thinking about AI safety, and this can in turn impact the culture of the field, the quality of future years’ research, etc.
For reasons resembling (1), adults provide a faster “grounded feedback cycle”. E.g., adults who come in with business or scientific experience can tell us right away whether the curricula feel promising to them; students and teens are more likely to be indiscriminatingly enthusiastic. .
Adults can often pay their own way at the workshops; children can’t; we therefore cannot afford to run very many workshops for kids until we somehow acquire either more donation, or more financial resource in some other way.
Nevertheless, I agree with you that programs targeting children can be higher impact per person and are extremely worthwhile in the medium- to long-run. This is indeed part of the motivation for SPARC, and expanding such programs is key to our long-term aims; marginal donation is key to our ability to do these quickly, and not just eventually.
I disagree. My impression is that SPARC is important to CFAR’s strategy, and that aiming at younger people than that would have less long-term impact on how rational the participants become.
Hi Peter! I am Vadim, we met in a LW meetup in CFAR’s office last May.
You might be right that SPARC is important but I really want to hear from the horse’s mouth what is their strategy in this regard. I’m inclined to disagree with you regarding younger people, what makes you think so? Regardless of age I would guess establishing a continuous education programme would have much more impact than a two-week summer workshop. It’s not obvious what is the optimal distribution of resources (many two week workshops for many people or one long program for fewer people) but I haven’t seen such an analysis by CFAR.
Peer pressure matters, and younger people are less able to select rationalist-compatible peers (due to less control over who their peers are).
I suspect younger people have short enough time horizons that they’re less able to appreciate some of CFAR’s ideas that take time to show benefits. I suspect I have more intuitions along these lines that I haven’t figured out how to articulate.
Maybe CFAR needs better follow-ups to their workshops, but I get the impression that with people for whom the workshops are most effective, they learn (without much follow-up) to generalize CFAR’s ideas in ways that make additional advice from CFAR unimportant.
It feels like there is an implicit assumption in CFAR’s agenda that most of the important things are going to happen in one or two decades from now. Otherwise it would make sense to place more emphasis on creating educational programs for children where the long term impact can be larger (I think). Do you agree with this assessment? If so, how do you justify the short term assumption?
I don’t think this; it seems to me that the next decade or two may be pivotal, but they may well not be, and the rest of the century matters quite a bit as well in expectation.
There are three main reasons we’ve focused mainly on adults:
Adults can contribute more rapidly, and so can be part of a process of compounding careful-thinking resources in a shorter-term way. E.g. if adults are hired now by MIRI, they improve the ratio of thoughtfulness within those thinking about AI safety, and this can in turn impact the culture of the field, the quality of future years’ research, etc.
For reasons resembling (1), adults provide a faster “grounded feedback cycle”. E.g., adults who come in with business or scientific experience can tell us right away whether the curricula feel promising to them; students and teens are more likely to be indiscriminatingly enthusiastic. .
Adults can often pay their own way at the workshops; children can’t; we therefore cannot afford to run very many workshops for kids until we somehow acquire either more donation, or more financial resource in some other way.
Nevertheless, I agree with you that programs targeting children can be higher impact per person and are extremely worthwhile in the medium- to long-run. This is indeed part of the motivation for SPARC, and expanding such programs is key to our long-term aims; marginal donation is key to our ability to do these quickly, and not just eventually.
I disagree. My impression is that SPARC is important to CFAR’s strategy, and that aiming at younger people than that would have less long-term impact on how rational the participants become.
Hi Peter! I am Vadim, we met in a LW meetup in CFAR’s office last May.
You might be right that SPARC is important but I really want to hear from the horse’s mouth what is their strategy in this regard. I’m inclined to disagree with you regarding younger people, what makes you think so? Regardless of age I would guess establishing a continuous education programme would have much more impact than a two-week summer workshop. It’s not obvious what is the optimal distribution of resources (many two week workshops for many people or one long program for fewer people) but I haven’t seen such an analysis by CFAR.
Peer pressure matters, and younger people are less able to select rationalist-compatible peers (due to less control over who their peers are).
I suspect younger people have short enough time horizons that they’re less able to appreciate some of CFAR’s ideas that take time to show benefits. I suspect I have more intuitions along these lines that I haven’t figured out how to articulate.
Maybe CFAR needs better follow-ups to their workshops, but I get the impression that with people for whom the workshops are most effective, they learn (without much follow-up) to generalize CFAR’s ideas in ways that make additional advice from CFAR unimportant.