cranberry lemon university
dani roytburg
Karma: 6
Agree with Leo that this is not a hard thing to distinguish, provided that value alignment matters for these fellowships.
When we do interviews for CMU’s AI Safety org, it seems like open-ended questions about viewpoints (e.g. “what about the current pace of AI keeps you up at night?” or “if you weren’t doing AI Safety research, what would the alternative be?”) enable us not just to distinguish between people who “speak the language”. Another shibboleth is actually under-awareness of the community—someone who is quick to recite a bunch of names may be less concerned with the issues at hand. Whether we want to do this is another question.
FWIW, MATS clearly does still source people who are excited about safety; most other fellows in my cohort act as if they are fighting for their future! Still others are intrigued by the more challenging theoretical and empirical questions. I trust the staff in their experience vetting out people who do not wish to engage the space genuinely.
Alternatively, do you see a benefit to having a company leading on capability development articulate its principles, evaluations and findings on safety so thoroughly? While odds that the U.S. federal government imposes (useful) regulations on American frontier labs seem low (1:7?), for the near-mid future the upside to “safety-washing” could be consensus-building among norms for OpenAI, DeepMind, and so forth.
Tangentially related, but still: is there a world where survival-weighted hedging is mediated through belief markets like Polymarket or Kalshi? How does this mode of decision analysis apply to making short-term bets on trajectories to AGI?
Why, exactly?
(1) I don’t see why this supports the claim that Bores may be of “below-average integrity”. His view on what safety looks like on Capitol Hill might be a superset of yours (ours?). That does not mean that he believes one thing and does another. It means your definitions do not overlap.
(2) What is the threat model or tradeoff here? I don’t see what the mutual exclusivity point is here, though perhaps that is short-sighted of me. An election forces a constrained preference, and I’d hesitate to price “may be bad, may backfire, may be a cost” against nothing.
(3) What platform do you believe would satisfy both your interests and those of his constituency in UWS/UES/Midtown? Appealing to voters is a difficult task; the role of an elected official is to represent their community. Unless you are running for an open seat on CA-Telegraph Avenue, articulating these views in an accessible, publicly understood manner does require eschewing the focus on existential risk. This is not a narrative that the public appears to understand yet—just look at Cal Newport’s recent post.