I (Gretta) will be leading the communications team at MIRI, working with Rob Bensinger, Colm Ó Riain, Nate, Eliezer, and other staff to create succinct, effective ways of explaining the extreme risks posed by smarter-than-human AI and what we think should be done about this problem.
I just sent an invite to Eliezer to Rational Animations’ private Discord server so that he can dump some thoughts on Rational Animations’ writers. It’s something we decided to do when we met at Manifest. The idea is that we could distill his infodumps into something succinct to be animated.
That said, if in the future you have from the outset some succinct and optimized material you think we could help spread to a wide audience and/or would benefit from being animated, we can likely turn your writings into animations on Rational Animations, as we already did for a few articles in The Sequences.
The same invitation extends to every AI Safety organization.
EDIT: Also, let me know if more of MIRI’s staff would like to join that server, since it seems like what you’re trying to achieve with comms overlaps with what we’re trying to do. That server basically serves as central point of organization for all the work happening at Rational Animations.
I think I got a lot out of not knowing anything about the broader rationalist community while reading the sequences. I think that consideration weighs against.
There’s this notion of how the average member of a group is very different from the ideal member of a group, which definitely holds for rationalists. And there’s a common failure-mode when trying to join a group of acting superficially like their average member rather than their ideal member. There’s some blog post somewhere which discusses this that I can’t find. Having as little contact as possible with the community while making your plan on how to act like their ideal member nips this failure-mode in the butt.
Similarly to 1, there’s some evidence that showing students’ their relative performance on average reduces their outcomes, since many overestimate the competition, and work harder for it. I know this happened with me.
Also, did you know that the bottom of each post on ReadTheSequences.com has a link to the comments section for that post, via GreaterWrong…?)
I did know that, but the comments are old and sparse, and perhaps necessary when trying to understand a tricky post. The community ignorance consideration definitely weighs against those, but the ‘help me make sense of this post’ consideration made the comments net good when I was reading them first.
Hmm, I think I see your general point. However, I am still not clear on what connection a video has to that point. Or are you thinking of YouTube comments under the video…?
Nothing big, just comments as you said, art made by rationalists giving a sense of the skill distribution of the movement, the view counter giving a sense of the popularity of the ideas, and potentially other inferences one could make.
For Rational Animations, there’s no problem if you do that, and I generally don’t see drawbacks.
Perhaps one thing to be aware of is that some of the articles we’ll animate will be slightly adapted. Sorting Pebbles and The Power of Intelligence are exactly like the original. The Parable of The Dagger has deletions of words such as “replied” or “said” and adds a short additional scene at the end. The text of The Hidden Complexity of Wishes has been changed in some places, with Eliezer’s approval, mainly because the original has some references to other articles. In any case, when there are such changes, I write it in the LW post accompanying the videos.
Thanks, much appreciated! Your work is on my (long) list to check out. Is there a specific video you’re especially proud of that would be a great starting point?
Feel free to send me a discord server invitation at gretta@intelligence.org.
If you just had to pick one, go for The Goddess of Everything Else.
Here’s a short list of my favorites.
In terms of animation:
- The Goddess of Everything Else - The Hidden Complexity of Wishes - The Power of Intelligence
In terms of explainer:
- Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. [written by me] - Everything might change forever this century (or we’ll go extinct). [mostly written by Matthew Barnett]
I just sent an invite to Eliezer to Rational Animations’ private Discord server so that he can dump some thoughts on Rational Animations’ writers. It’s something we decided to do when we met at Manifest. The idea is that we could distill his infodumps into something succinct to be animated.
That said, if in the future you have from the outset some succinct and optimized material you think we could help spread to a wide audience and/or would benefit from being animated, we can likely turn your writings into animations on Rational Animations, as we already did for a few articles in The Sequences.
The same invitation extends to every AI Safety organization.
EDIT: Also, let me know if more of MIRI’s staff would like to join that server, since it seems like what you’re trying to achieve with comms overlaps with what we’re trying to do. That server basically serves as central point of organization for all the work happening at Rational Animations.
Question for you (the Rational Animations guys) but also for everyone else: should I link to these videos from readthesequences.com?
Specifically, I’m thinking about linking to individual videos from individual essays, e.g. to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Figerh89g from https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Power-Of-Intelligence. Good idea? Bad idea? What do folks here think?
I think I got a lot out of not knowing anything about the broader rationalist community while reading the sequences. I think that consideration weighs against.
Could you say more about this? I’m not sure that I quite see what you mean.
(Also, did you know that the bottom of each post on ReadTheSequences.com has a link to the comments section for that post, via GreaterWrong…?)
Two main considerations I have here:
There’s this notion of how the average member of a group is very different from the ideal member of a group, which definitely holds for rationalists. And there’s a common failure-mode when trying to join a group of acting superficially like their average member rather than their ideal member. There’s some blog post somewhere which discusses this that I can’t find. Having as little contact as possible with the community while making your plan on how to act like their ideal member nips this failure-mode in the butt.
Similarly to 1, there’s some evidence that showing students’ their relative performance on average reduces their outcomes, since many overestimate the competition, and work harder for it. I know this happened with me.
I did know that, but the comments are old and sparse, and perhaps necessary when trying to understand a tricky post. The community ignorance consideration definitely weighs against those, but the ‘help me make sense of this post’ consideration made the comments net good when I was reading them first.
Hmm, I think I see your general point. However, I am still not clear on what connection a video has to that point. Or are you thinking of YouTube comments under the video…?
Nothing big, just comments as you said, art made by rationalists giving a sense of the skill distribution of the movement, the view counter giving a sense of the popularity of the ideas, and potentially other inferences one could make.
I like the idea!
For Rational Animations, there’s no problem if you do that, and I generally don’t see drawbacks.
Perhaps one thing to be aware of is that some of the articles we’ll animate will be slightly adapted. Sorting Pebbles and The Power of Intelligence are exactly like the original. The Parable of The Dagger has deletions of words such as “replied” or “said” and adds a short additional scene at the end. The text of The Hidden Complexity of Wishes has been changed in some places, with Eliezer’s approval, mainly because the original has some references to other articles. In any case, when there are such changes, I write it in the LW post accompanying the videos.
Thanks, much appreciated! Your work is on my (long) list to check out. Is there a specific video you’re especially proud of that would be a great starting point?
Feel free to send me a discord server invitation at gretta@intelligence.org.
If you just had to pick one, go for The Goddess of Everything Else.
Here’s a short list of my favorites.
In terms of animation:
- The Goddess of Everything Else
- The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
- The Power of Intelligence
In terms of explainer:
- Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. [written by me]
- Everything might change forever this century (or we’ll go extinct). [mostly written by Matthew Barnett]
Also, I’ve sent the Discord invite.