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To keep it short: your articles on community-building (especially the social dynamics that come into play) have been highly valuable for me.
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BLUF:
* To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
* Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our...
Public service announcement
1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply...
TL;DR
* The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
* The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital...
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I would love to see some '40,000 hours' materials for mid-career people pivoting into EA work.
Our skills, needs, constraints, and opportunities are quite different from 20-somethings. For example, if one has financial commitments (child support, mortgage, debts, alimony), it's not realistic to go back to grad school or an unpaid internship to re-train. We also have geographical constraints -- partners, kids in school, dependent parents, established friendships, community commitments. And in mid-life, our 'crystallized intelligence' (stock of knowledge) is much higher than a 20-something's, but our 'fluid intelligence' (ability to solve abstract new problems quickly) is somewhat lower -- so it's easier to learn things that relate to our existing expertise, but harder to learn coding, data science, or finance from scratch.
On the upside, a '40k project' would allow EA to bring in a huge amount of talent -- people with credentials, domain knowledge, social experience, leadership skills, professional networks, prestige, and name recognition. Plus, incomes that would allow substantially larger donations than 20-something can manage.
Hi Geoffrey, we agree this would be very valuable. Our materials are already heading in that direction, but I think it will be at least a year or two before we do a major research push to produce that guide due to other competing priorities.