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, ...
Sorry can you elaborate on the context? Agency is used in different ways in different contexts in ea settings. For example it means a different thing in community building vs ai alignment.
Isn't there something about agency in community building and ai alignment that they share in common? Are all notions of agency unified by some underlying concept or are they fundamentally distinct? Or do we simply not know enough to say one way or the other?
I think it's a tricky, loosely defined concept: see the Wikipedia entries about
Something that they all seem to have in common is that things that have agency "make decisions and enact them on the world".
You would say that humans have agency while rocks don't, and there's lots of middle ground for animals and AIs.
Don't know if this is helpful, but it seems a tricky concept to define exactly. There's also the related usage in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent , which isn't necessarily consistent with the definitions above