Great to hear, thanks :-)
Zoe Williams
Karma: 396
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (21 Aug − 27 Aug 22′)
Super interesting, thanks!
If you were running it again, you might want to think about standardizing the wording of the questions—it varies from ‘will / is’ to ‘is likely’ to ‘plausible’ and this can make it hard to compare between questions. Plausible in particular is quite a fuzzy word, for some it might mean 1% or more, for others it might just mean it’s not completely impossible / if a movie had that storyline, they’d be okay with it.
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (28 Aug − 3 Sep 22’)
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (5 − 11 Sep 22′)
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (12 − 18 Sep ’22)
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (19 − 25 Sep 22′)
Thanks for the info—added to post
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (26 Sep − 9 Oct 22′)
Thanks, great to hear!
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (10 − 16 Oct 22′)
Thanks, realized I forgot to add the description of the top / curated section—fixed. Everything in there occurs in it’s own section too.
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (17 − 23 Oct 22′)
Thanks for the feedback! I’ve passed it on.
It’s mainly because we wanted to keep the episodes to ~20m, to make them easy for people to keep up with week to week—and the LW posts tended toward the more technical side, which doesn’t translate as easily in podcast form (it can be hard to take in without the writing in front of you). We may do something for the LW posts in future though, unsure at this point.
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (24 − 30th Oct 22′)
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (31st Oct − 6th Nov 22′)
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (7th Nov − 13th Nov 22′)
EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary (14th Nov − 27th Nov 22′)
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Last year, the author wrote up an plan they gave a “better than 50⁄50 chance” would work before AGI kills us all. This predicted that in 4-5 years, the alignment field would progress from preparadigmatic (unsure of the right questions or tools) to having a general roadmap and toolset.They believe this is on track and give 40% likelihood that over the next 1-2 years the field of alignment will converge toward primarily working on decoding the internal language of neural nets—with interpretability on the experimental side, in addition to theoretical work. This could lead to identifying which potential alignment targets (like human values, corrigibility, Do What I Mean, etc) are likely to be naturally expressible in the internal language of neural nets, and how to express them. They think we should then focus on those.
In their personal work, they’ve found theory work faster than expected, and crossing the theory-practice gap mildly slower. In 2022 most of their time went into theory work like the Basic Foundations sequence, workshops and conferences, training others, and writing up intro-level arguments on alignment strategies.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Good point, thank you—I’ve had a re-read of the conclusion and replaced the sentence with “Due to this, he concludes that climate change is still an important LT area—though not as important as some other global catastrophic risks (eg. biorisk), which outsize on both neglectedness and scale.”
Originally I think I’d mistaken his position a bit based on this sentence: “Overall, because other global catastrophic risks are so much more neglected than climate change, I think they are more pressing to work on, on the margin.” (and in addition I hadn’t used the clearest phrasing) But the wider conclusion fits the new sentence better.