Technical staff at Anthropic (views my own), previously #3ainstitute; interdisciplinary, interested in everything, ongoing PhD in CS, bets tax bullshit, open sourcerer, more at zhd.dev
Zac Hatfield-Dodds
Karma: 3,037
For what it’s worth I think this accurately conveys “Zac endorses the Lightcone fundraiser and has non-trivially donated”, and dropping the word “unusually” would leave the sentence unobjectionable; alternatively maybe you could have dropped me from the list instead.
I just posted this because I didn’t want people to assume that I’d donated >10% of my income when I hadn’t :-)
I (and many others) recently received an email about the Lightcone fundraiser, which included:
Many people with (IMO) strong track records of thinking about existential risk have also made unusually large personal donations, including …, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, …
and while I’m honored to be part of this list, there’s only a narrow sense in which I’ve made an unusually large personal donation: the $1,000 I donated to Lightcone is unusually large from my pay-what-I-want budget, and I’m fortunate that I can afford that, but it’s also much less than my typical annual donation to GiveWell. I think it’s plausible that Lightcone has great EV for impartial altruistic funding, but don’t count it towards my efffective-giving goal—see here and here.
(I’ve also been happy to support Lightcone by attending and recommending events at Lighthaven, including an upcoming metastrategy intensive, and arranging a donation swap, but don’t think of these as donations)
If they’re not, let me know by December 27th and I’ll be happy to do the swap after all!
I reached out to Lucie and we agreed to swap donations: she’d give 1000€ to AMF, and I’d give an additional[1] $810 to Lightcone (which I would otherwise send to GiveWell). This would split the difference in our tax deductions, and lead to more total funding for each of the organizations we want to support :-)
We ended up happily cancelling this plan because donations to Lightcone will be deductible in France after all, butI’m glad that we worked through all the details and would have done it. update: because we’re doing it after all!
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I think it’s plausible that Lightcone has great EV for impartial altruistic funding, but due to concerns about community dynamics / real-or-perceived conflicts of interest / etc, I don’t give to AI-related or socially-close causes out of my 10+% to effective charity budget. But I’ve found both LessWrong and Lighthaven personally valuable, and therefore gave $1,000 to Lightcone on the same basis that I pay-what-you-want for arts or events that I like. I also encouraged Ray to set up rationality.training in time for end-of-2024 professional development spending, and I’m looking forward to just directly paying for a valuable service!
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We’ve been in touch, and agreed that MatHatter will make the donation by end of February. I’ll post a final update in this thread when I get the confirmation from GiveWell.
I’d run the numbers for higher-throughput, lower-filtration filters—see eg cleanairkits writeup—but this looks great!
Hey @MadHatter—Eliezer confirms that I’ve won our bet.
I ask that you donate my winnings to GiveWell’s All Grants fund, here, via credit card or ACH (preferred due to lower fees). Please check the box for “I would like to dedicate this donation to someone” and include zac@zhd.dev as the notification email address so that I can confirm here that you’ve done so.
IMO “major donors won’t fund this kind of thing” is a pretty compelling reason to look into it, since great opportunities which are illegible or structurally-hard-to-fund definitely exist (as do illegible-or-etc terrible options; do your diligence). On the other hand I’m pretty nervous about the community dynamics that emerge when you’re granting money and also socially engaged with and working in the field. Caveat donor!
I think your argument also has to establish that the cost of simulating any that happen to matter is also quite high.
My intuition is that capturing enough secondary mechanisms, in sufficient-but-abstracted detail that the simulated brain is behaviorally normal (e.g. a sim of me not-more-different than a very sleep-deprived me), is likely to be both feasible by your definition and sufficient for consciousness.
Why do you focus on this particular guy?
Because I saw a few posts discussing his trades, vs none for anyone else’s, which in turn is presumably because he moved the market by ten percentage points or so. I’m not arguing that this “should” make him so salient, but given that he was salient I stand by my sense of failure.
https://www.cleanairkits.com/products/luggables is basically one side of a Corsi-Rosenthal box, takes up very little floor space if placed by a wall, and is quiet, affordable, and effective.
SQLite is ludicrously well tested; similar bugs in other databases just don’t get found and fixed.
I don’t remember anyone proposing “maybe this trader has an edge”, even though incentivising such people to trade is the mechanism by which prediction markets work. Certainly I didn’t, and in retrospect it feels like a failure not to have had ‘the multi-million dollar trader might be smart money’ as a hypothesis at all.
(4) is infeasible, because voting systems are designed so that nobody can identify which voter cast which vote—including that voter. This property is called “coercion resistance”, which should immediately suggest why it is important!
I further object that any scheme to “win” an election by invalidating votes (or preventing them, etc) is straightforwardly unethical and a betrayal of the principles of democracy. Don’t give the impression that this is acceptable behavior, or even funny to joke about.
let’s not kill the messenger, lest we run out of messengers.
Unfortunately we’re a fair way into this process, not because of downvotes[1] but rather because the comments are often dominated by uncharitable interpretations that I can’t productively engage with.[2]. I’ve had researchers and policy people tell me that reading the discussion convinced them that engaging when their work was discussed on LessWrong wasn’t worth the trouble.
I’m still here, sad that I can’t recommend it to many others, and wondering whether I’ll regret this comment too.
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I also feel there’s a double standard, but don’t think it matters much. Span-level reacts would make it a lot easier to tell what people disagree with though.
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Confidentiality makes any public writing far more effortful than you might expect. Comments which assume ill-faith are deeply unpleasant to engage with, and very rarely have any actionable takeaways. I’ve written and deleted a lot of other stuff here, and can’t find an object-level description that I think is worth posting, but there are plenty of further reasons.
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I’d find the agree/disagree dimension much more useful if we split out “x people agree, y disagree”—as the EA Forum does—rather than showing the sum of weighted votes (and total number on hover).
I’d also encourage people to use the other reactions more heavily, including on substrings of a comment, but there’s value in the anonymous dis/agree counts too.
(2) ✅ … The first is from Chief of Staff at Anthropic.
The byline of that piece is “Avital Balwit lives in San Francisco and works as Chief of Staff to the CEO at Anthropic. This piece was written entirely in her personal capacity and does not reflect the views of Anthropic.”
I do not think this is an appropriate citation for the claim. In any case, They publicly state that it is not a matter of “if” such artificial superintelligence might exist, but “when” simply seems to be untrue; both cited sources are peppered with phrases like ‘possibility’, ‘I expect’, ‘could arrive’, and so on.
If grading I’d give full credit for (2) on the basis of “documents like these” referring to Anthopic’s constitution + system prompt and OpenAI’s model spec, and more generous partials for the others. I have no desire to litigate details here though, so I’ll leave it at that.
Proceeding with training or limited deployments of a “potentially existentially catastrophic” system would clearly violate our RSP, at minimum the commitment to define and publish ASL-4-appropriate safeguards and conduct evaluations confirming that they are not yet necessary. This footnote is referring to models which pose much lower levels of risk.
And it seems unremarkable to me for a US company to ‘single out’ a relevant US government entity as the recipient of a voluntary non-public disclosure of a non-existential risk.
And I’ve received an email from Mieux Donner confirming Lucie’s leg has been executed for 1,000€. Thanks to everyone involved!
If if anyone else is interested in a similar donation swap, from either side, I’d be excited to introduce people or maybe even do this trick again :D