Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck.
Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soare...
A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, ...
"King Emeric's gift has thus played an important role in enabling us to live the monastic life, and it is a fitting sign of gratitude that we have been offering the Holy Sacrifice for him annually for the past 815 years."
(source: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2019/07/10/king-emeric-of-hungary/ )
It seems to me like longtermists could learn something from people like this. (Maintaining a point of view for 800 years, both keeping the values aligned enough to do this and being around to be able to.)
(Also a short blog post by me occasioned by these monks about "being orthogonal to history" https://formulalessness.blogspot.com/2019/07/orthogonal-to-history.html )