This is great feedback! Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
One possible target audience is e.g. graduate students who are looking for research funding. One possible risk of engaging this audience people have talked about is that they might be more interested in optimizing their own career growth than actually solving x-risk-related problems. I’m not sure how worried to be about that.
Targeting graduate students is an excellent idea. I think the risk you mention is one worth considering. I’ve thought of two possible reasons why:
1) This project could end up amounting to nothing more than a waste of my time. Given how much time I currently expect to invest, I’m not very concerned with that at the moment. I haven’t decided how much time I’m willing to potentially waste on this but it’s a good idea to keep track of the time I’m putting into it.
2) If the project is successful, it could direct more people to these organizations to request funding. If these additional people are likely to care more about their own career growth than actually solving x-risk-related problems, this could make it more difficult to make good decisions about which applicants should receive funding. Making it so that there is a small barrier to finding out about these funding opportunities (e.g. needing to pay attention to what’s happening in the LW community) might actually be a good thing. Right now, I’m not convinced that it is a good thing.
I’ll continue to think about this.
Once you know who your target audience is, that makes marketing easier because you can market your site wherever that target audience hangs out. It might be that the most natural target audience is “people with math/CS expertise who are interested in working on the alignment problem”, in which case you could expand your scope and also list things like open positions at MIRI, the AI safety reading group, lists of open problems, recent publications, etc.
I like the suggestions here and will make use of them.
Actionable stuff:
Target math/cs/philosophy grad students, focus on AI alignment research funding only, expand scope to include useful related information.
I’ll start working on some changes to the site soon. Maybe the name should change too? I’m not sure.
This is great feedback! Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
Targeting graduate students is an excellent idea. I think the risk you mention is one worth considering. I’ve thought of two possible reasons why:
1) This project could end up amounting to nothing more than a waste of my time. Given how much time I currently expect to invest, I’m not very concerned with that at the moment. I haven’t decided how much time I’m willing to potentially waste on this but it’s a good idea to keep track of the time I’m putting into it.
2) If the project is successful, it could direct more people to these organizations to request funding. If these additional people are likely to care more about their own career growth than actually solving x-risk-related problems, this could make it more difficult to make good decisions about which applicants should receive funding. Making it so that there is a small barrier to finding out about these funding opportunities (e.g. needing to pay attention to what’s happening in the LW community) might actually be a good thing. Right now, I’m not convinced that it is a good thing.
I’ll continue to think about this.
I like the suggestions here and will make use of them.
Actionable stuff:
Target math/cs/philosophy grad students, focus on AI alignment research funding only, expand scope to include useful related information.
I’ll start working on some changes to the site soon. Maybe the name should change too? I’m not sure.