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Thanks to Drake Thomas for feedback. I. Here’s a fun scatter plot. It has two thousand points, which I generated as follows: first, I drew two thousand x-values from a normal distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Then, I chose the y-value of each point by taking the x-value and then adding noise to it. The noise is also normally distributed, with mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Notice that there’s more spread along the y-axis than along the x-axis. That’s because each y-coordinate is a sum of two independently drawn numbers from the standard normal distribution. Because variances add, the y-values have variance 2 (standard deviation 1.41), not 1. Statisticians often talk about data forming an “elliptical cloud”.

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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nnDTgmzRrzDMiPF9B/how-much-do-you-believe-your-results

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We've just passed the half-year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey — all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already! 

Original text:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9QcmyGAjERHRFfrr7/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-1st-to-7th-may-2023

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.

Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).

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How worried about AI risk will we feel in the future, when we can see advanced machine intelligence up close? We should worry accordingly now.  

Original article:
https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/05/08/predictable-updating-about-ai-risk

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We've just passed the half-year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey — all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already! 

Original text:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wzn7hEj3BSz7us7ge/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-24th-30th-april-2023

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.

Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).

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People often ask me for career advice related to AGI safety. This post summarizes the advice I most commonly give. I’ve split it into three sections: general mindset, alignment research and governance work. For each of the latter two, I start with high-level advice aimed primarily at students and those early in their careers, then dig into more details of the field. See also this post I wrote two years ago, containing a bunch of fairly general career advice. ## General mindset In order to have a big impact on the world you need to find a big lever. This document assumes that you think, as I do, that AGI safety is the biggest such lever. There are many ways to pull on that lever, though—from research and engineering to operations and field-building to politics and communications. I encourage you to choose between these based primarily on your personal fit—a combination of what you're really good at and what you really enjoy. In my opinion the difference between being a great versus a mediocre fit swamps other differences in the impactfulness of most pairs of AGI-safety-related jobs.

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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xg7gxsYaMa6F3uH8h/agi-safety-career-advice

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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m2Y6HheC2Q2GLQ3oS/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-17th-23rd-april-2023
This podcast has just passed the 6-month mark! Please give us your feedback and suggestions so we can continue to improve — the survey should take no more than 10 minutes, and we really appreciate your input!

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.

Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).

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The excellent report from Rethink Priorities was my main source for this. Many of the substantial points I make are taken from it, though errors are my own. It’s worth reading! The authors are Gavriel Kleinwaks, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, Jam Kraprayoon, and Josh Morrison.

Clean water

In the mid 19th century, London had a sewage problem. It relied on a patchwork of a few hundred sewers, of brick and wood, and hundreds of thousands of cesspits. The Thames — Londoners’ main source of drinking water — was near-opaque with waste. Here is Michael Faraday in an 1855 letter to The Times:

"Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface even in water of this kind […] The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water. It was the same as that which now comes up from the gully holes in the streets. The whole river was for the time a real sewer […] If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness."

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https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WLok4YuJ4kfFpDRTi/first-clean-water-now-clean-air

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feed_id: agi_sf__alignment
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qa: mds
qa_time: 0h15m
---
One step towards building safe AI systems is to remove the need for humans to write goal functions, since using a simple proxy for a complex goal, or getting the complex goal a bit wrong, can lead to undesirable and even dangerous behavior. In collaboration with DeepMind’s safety team, we’ve developed an algorithm which can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviors is better.

Original article:
https://openai.com/research/learning-from-human-preferences

Authors:
Dario Amodei, Paul Christiano, Alex Ray

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This article is featured on the AGI Safety Fundamentals: Alignment course curriculum.

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This is a linkpost for a new 80,000 hours episode focused on how to engage in climate from an effective altruist perspective.

• The podcast lives here, including a selection of highlights as well as a full transcript and lots of additional links. Thanks to 80,000hours’ new feature rolled out on April 1st you can even listen to it!
• My Twitter thread is here.

Rob and I are having a pretty wide-ranging conversation, here are the things we cover which I find most interesting for different audiences:

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A3ZLLanDZZt9sgGQ9/new-80-000-hours-podcast-on-high-impact-climate-philanthropy

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This is a post about mental health and disposition in relation to the alignment problem. It compiles a number of resources that address how to maintain wellbeing and direction when confronted with existential risk. 

Many people in this community have posted their emotional strategies for facing Doom after Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Death With Dignity” generated so much conversation on the subject. This post intends to be more touchy-feely, dealing more directly with emotional landscapes than questions of timelines or probabilities of success. 

The resources section would benefit from community additions. Please suggest any resources that you would like to see added to this post.

Please note that this document is not intended to replace professional medical or psychological help in any way. Many preexisting mental health conditions can be exacerbated by these conversations. If you are concerned that you may be experiencing a mental health crisis, please consult a professional.

Original article:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLLeGA7aGaJpgCkof/mental-health-and-the-alignment-problem-a-compilation-of#

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