Does Anyuan(安远) have a website? I haven’t heard of them and am curious. (I’ve heard of Concordia Consulting https://concordia-consulting.com/ and Tianxia https://www.tian-xia.com/.)
Vael Gates
Karma: 743
Small update: Two authors gave me permission to publish their transcripts non-anonymously!
Interview with Michael L. Littman (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GoSIdQjYh21J1lFAiSREBNpRZjhAR2j1oI3vuTzIgrI/edit?usp=sharing)
Interview with David Duvenaud (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lulnRCwMBkwD9fUL_QgyHM4mzy0al33L2s7eq_dpEP8/edit?usp=sharing)
Two authors gave me permission to publish their transcripts non-anonymously! Thus:
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Interview with Michael L. Littman (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GoSIdQjYh21J1lFAiSREBNpRZjhAR2j1oI3vuTzIgrI/edit?usp=sharing)
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Interview with David Duvenaud (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lulnRCwMBkwD9fUL_QgyHM4mzy0al33L2s7eq_dpEP8/edit?usp=sharing)
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Anonymous comment sent to me, with a request to be posted here:
“The main lede in this post is that pushing the materials that feel most natural for community members can be counterproductive, and that getting people on your side requires considering their goals and tastes. (This is not a community norm in rationalist-land, but the norm really doesn’t comport well elsewhere.)”
was this as helpful for you/others as expected?
I think these results, and the rest of the results from the larger survey that this content is a part of, have been interesting and useful to people, including Collin and I. I’m not sure what I expected beforehand in terms of helpfulness, especially since there’s a question “helpful with respect to /what/”, and I expect we may have different “what”s here.
are you planning related testing to do next?
Good chance of it! There’s some question about funding, and what kind of new design would be worth funding, but we’re thinking it through.
I wonder if it would be valuable to first test predictions among communicators
Yeah, I think this is currently mostly done informally—when Collin and I were choosing materials, we had a big list, and were choosing based on shared intuitions that EAs / ML researchers / fieldbuilders have, in addition to applying constraints like “shortness”. Our full original plan was also much longer and included testing more readings—this was a pilot survey. Relatedly, I don’t think these results are very surprising to people (which I think you’re alluding to in this comment) -- somewhat surprising, but we have a fair amount of information about researcher preferences already.
I do think that if we were optimizing for “value of new information to the EA community” this survey would have looked different.
I wonder about the value of trying to build an informal panel/mailing list of ML researchers
Instead of contacting a random subset of people who had papers accepted at ML conferences? I think it sort of depends on one’s goals here, but could be good. A few thoughts: I think this may already exist informally, I think this becomes more important as there’s more people doing surveys and not coordinating with each other, and this doesn’t feel like a major need from my perspective / goals but might be more of a bottleneck for yours!
My guess is that people were aware (my name was all over the survey this was a part of, and people were emailing with me). I think it was also easily inferred that the writers of the survey (Collin and I) supported AI safety work far before the participants reached the part of the survey with my talk. My guess is that my having written this talk didn’t change the results much, though I’m not sure which way you expect the confound to go? If we’re worried about them being biased towards me because they didn’t want to offend me (the person who had not yet paid them), participants generally seemed pretty happy to be critical in the qualitative notes. More to the point, I think the qualitative notes for my talk seemed pretty content focused and didn’t seem unusual compared to the other talks when I skimmed through them, though would be interested to know if I’m wrong there.
Yeah, we were focusing on shorter essays for this pilot survey (and I think Richard’s revised essay came out a little late in the development of this survey? Can’t recall) but I’m especially interested in “The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective”, since it was created for an ML audience.
Whoa, at least one of the respondents let me know that they’d chatted about it at NeurIPS—did multiple people chat with you about it? (This pilot survey wasn’t sent out to that many people, so curious how people were talking about it.)
Edited: talking via DM
Thanks! (credit also to Collin :))
Agreed that status / perceived in-field expertise seems pretty important here, especially as seen through the qualitative results (though the Gates talk did surprisingly well, given not an AI researcher, but the content reflects that). We probably won’t have [energy / time / money] + [we have limited access to researchers] to test something like this, but I think we can hold “status is important” as something pretty true given these results, Hobbhann’s (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kFufCHAmu7cwigH4B/lessons-learned-from-talking-to-greater-than-100-academics), and a ton of anecdotal evidence from a number of different sources.
(I also think the Sam Bowman article is a great article to recommend, and in fact recommend that first a lot of the time.)
(Just a comment on some of the above, not all)
Agreed and thanks for pointing out here that each of these resources has different content, not just presentation, in addition to being aimed at different audiences. This seems important and not highlighted in the post.
We then get into what we want to do about that, where one of the major tricky things is the ongoing debate of “how much researchers need to be thinking in the frame of xrisk to make useful progress in alignment”, which seems like a pretty important crux, and another is “what do ML researchers think after consuming different kinds of content”, where Thomas has some hypotheses in the paragraph “I’d guess...” but we don’t actually have data on this and I can think of alternate hypotheses, which also seems quite cruxy.
These results were actually embedded in a larger survey, and were grouped in sections, so I don’t think it came off as particularly long within the survey. (I also assume most people watched the video at faster than 1x.) People also seemed to like this talk, so I’d guess that they watched it as or more thoroughly than they did everything else. We don’t have analytics regretfully. (I also forgot to add that we told people to skip the Q&A, so we had them watch the first 48m.)
I told him I only wanted the bare-bones of interactions, and he’s been much better to work with!
I see there’s an associated talk now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIhE84kH2QI
Re: “Targeted Outreach to Experienced Researchers”
Please apply to work with the aforementioned AISFB Hub! I am actively trying to hire for people who I think would be good fits for this type of role, and offer mentorship / funding / access to and models of the space. Note that you’ll need to have AI safety knowledge (for example, I want you to have read / have a plan for reading all of the main readings in the AGISF Technical Curriculum) and high generalist competence, as two of the most important qualifications.
I think most people will not be a good fit for this role (there’s more complicated status hierarchies and culture within experienced researchers than are visible at first glance), and like Akash I caution against unilateral action here. I’m psyched about meeting people who are good fits, however, and urge you to apply to work with me if you think that could be you!
Some Rudi communication style anecdotes:
Rudi: “Aren’t you a beautiful young woman!” almost immediately when we saw each other on video call for the first time (I identify as nonbinary) (<-- this anecdote is a from a few years ago and from memory, though, so he might have just said something quite similar)
Rudi, in a Google Calendar invite note, as a closing: “Let’s talk, dear Vael...as I recall, we liked each other a lot.:)”
Me in an email back:
”(Ah, and just one other quick note: in the Google Calendar invite, you’ve included the line “Let’s talk, dear Vael...as I recall, we liked each other a lot.:)”. This feels like flirting to me, and I’m not sure but imagine you wouldn’t include this in emails to men, so I just wanted to state a preference that I’d enjoy if sentences like this weren’t included in the future! Many thanks, and looking forward to talking to you in June!)”
Rudi back:
“Hi Vael,
Of course, and thank you for nicely stating your preference, and just for the record I would include a phrase like this with men, women, or non-gendered individuals. (Also for the record, maybe I should re-think this.) And I still appreciate your observation, and will endeavor to be more circumspect in the future. :)
Warm and decidedly professional regards,
Rudi :)”
I’ve similarly heard he doesn’t do this with men. He also answered my questions when emailing back and forth. But yeah, be ready!
Seems like it’s great to do one-on-ones with people who could be interested and skilled from all sorts of fields, and top researchers in similar fields could be a good group to prioritize! Alas, I feel like the current bottleneck is people who are good fits to do these one-on-ones (I’m looking to hire people, but not currently doing them myself); there’s many people I’d ideally want to reach.
Thanks for doing that Kat!
Sure! This isn’t novel content; the vast majority of it is drawn from existing lists, so it’s not even particularly mine. I think just make sure the things within are referenced correctly, and you should be good to go!
FAQ
This is cool! Why haven’t I heard of this?
Arkose has been in soft-launch for a while, and we’ve been focused on email outreach more than public comms. But we’re increasingly public, and are in communication with other AI safety fieldbuilding organizations!
How big is the team?
3 people: Zach Thomas and Audra Zook are doing an excellent job in operations, and I’m the founder.
How do you pronounce “Arkose”? Where did the name come from?
I think whatever pronunciation is fine, and it’s the name of a rock. We have an SEO goal for arkose.org to surpass the rock’s Wikipedia page.
Where does your funding come from?
The Survival and Flourishing Fund.
Are you kind of like the 80,000 Hours 1-1 team?
Yes, in that we also do 1-1 support calls, and that there are many people for whom it’d make sense to do a call with both 80,000 Hours and Arkose! One key difference is that Arkose is aiming to specifically support mid-career people interested in getting more involved in technical AI safety.
I’m not a mid-career person, but I’d still be interested in a call with you. Should I request a call?
Regretfully no, since we’re currently focusing on professors, PhD students, or industry researcher or engineers who have AI / ML experience. This may expand in the future, but we’ll probably still be pretty focused on mid-career folks.
Is Arkose’s Resource page special in any way?
Generally, our resources are selected to be most helpful to professors, PhD students, and industry professionals, which is a different focus than most other resource lists. We also think arkose.org/papers is pretty cool: it’s a list of AI safety papers that you can filter by topic area. It’s still in development and we’ll be updating it over time (and if you’d like to help, please contact Vael!)
How can I help?
• If you know someone who might be a good fit for a call with Arkose, please pass along arkose.org to them! Or fill out our referral form.
• If you have machine learning expertise and would like to help us review our resources (for free or for pay), please contact vael@arkose.org.
Thanks everyone!