NunoSempere

Director, Head of Foresight @ Sentinel
12805 karmaJoined
nunosempere.com/blog

Bio

I run Sentinel, a team that seeks to anticipate and respond to large-scale risks. You can read our weekly minutes here. I like to spend my time acquiring deeper models of the world, and generally becoming more formidable.  I'm also a fairly good forecaster: I started out on predicting on Good Judgment Open and CSET-Foretell, but now do most of my forecasting through Samotsvety, of which Scott Alexander writes:

Enter Samotsvety Forecasts. This is a team of some of the best superforecasters in the world. They won the CSET-Foretell forecasting competition by an absolutely obscene margin, “around twice as good as the next-best team in terms of the relative Brier score”. If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”.


I used to post prolifically on the EA Forum, but nowadays, I post my research and thoughts at nunosempere.com / nunosempere.com/blog rather than on this forum, because:

  • I disagree with the EA Forum's moderation policy—they've banned a few disagreeable people whom I like, and I think they're generally a bit too censorious for my liking.
  • The Forum website has become more annoying to me over time: more cluttered and more pushy in terms of curated and pinned posts (I've partially mitigated this by writing my own minimalistic frontend)
  • The above two issues have made me take notice that the EA Forum is beyond my control, and it feels like a dumb move to host my research in a platform that has goals different from my own. 

But a good fraction of my past research is still available here on the EA Forum. I'm particularly fond of my series on Estimating Value.


My career has been as follows:

  • Before Sentinel, I set up my own niche consultancy, Shapley Maximizers. This was very profitable, and I used the profits to bootstrap Sentinel. I am winding this down, but if you have need of estimation services for big decisions, you can still reach out.
  • I used to do research around longtermism, forecasting and quantification, as well as some programming, at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI). At QURI, I programmed Metaforecast.org, a search tool which aggregates predictions from many different platforms—a more up to date alternative might be adj.news. I spent some time in the Bahamas as part of the FTX EA Fellowship, and did a bunch of work for the FTX Foundation, which then went to waste when it evaporated. 
  • I write a Forecasting Newsletter which gathered a few thousand subscribers; I previously abandoned but have recently restarted it. I used to really enjoy winning bets against people too confident in their beliefs, but I try to do this in structured prediction markets, because betting against normal people started to feel like taking candy from a baby.
  • Previously, I was a Future of Humanity Institute 2020 Summer Research Fellow, and then worked on a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to do "independent research on forecasting and optimal paths to improve the long-term."
  • Before that, I studied Maths and Philosophy, dropped out in exasperation at the inefficiency, picked up some development economics; helped implement the European Summer Program on Rationality during 2017, 2018 2019, 2020 and 2022; worked as a contractor for various forecasting and programming projects; volunteered for various Effective Altruism organizations, and carried out many independent research projects. In a past life, I also wrote a popular Spanish literature blog, and remain keenly interested in Spanish poetry.

You can share feedback anonymously with me here.

Note: You can sign up for all my posts here: <https://nunosempere.com/.newsletter/>, or subscribe to my posts' RSS here: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/index.rss>

Sequences
3

Vantage Points
Estimating value
Forecasting Newsletter

Comments
1213

Topic contributions
14

Did you get this sorted?

Thanks for mentioning Sentinel. Two points:

  • Who is paying attention to reports? Although people reading our minutes is a nice side effect (and a rod for serendipity, etc.), the point is also that we have an emergency response team that could act in the event of an incipient catastrophe.
  • Sentinel is also valuable if the generators for being worried about AI x-risk are right, but the specifics are wrong. In some sense we expect to be surprised.

That is a perspective you could inhabit, but it also seems contradictory with the vibe in "Hmm, I wonder what we would bet on"

You could make a bet about whether PauseAI will have any salient successes, or otherwise be able to point to why it did achieve a reduction in existential risk of, say, half a basis point, in the next five years, according to an external judge such as myself.

I think there is something powerful about noticing who is winning and trying to figure out what the generators for their actions are.

On this specifically:

the most cost effective way a billionaire entrepreneur and major government contractor could get valuable ROI out of an easily-flattered president with overlapping interests was by buying Twitter

This is not how I see it. Buying Twitter and changing its norms was a surprisingly high-leverage intervention in a domain where turning money into power is notoriously difficult. One of the effects, but not the only one, was influencing the outcome of the 2024 US elections.

him going all in on 60/40 odds

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. From my or your perspective, this might have been 60/40 (or even 40/60). But a more informed actor can have better probabilities.

I've done some work for someone at the $200K/year level. Maybe one option would be to put in together three to ten people at your $20k-$100k range and pitch in to hire a researcher for a month to answer your pressing common questions.

I'm also kinda frustrated by the low number of funders for speculative not AI-specific gcr work (perhaps like your own Nucleic Acid Observatory, or my own Sentinel). I've thought about starting a donor circle for this, but then I'd just have an obvious conflict of interest. Still, I'd like such a thing to exist.

My sense is that the polls were heavily reweighted by demographics, rather than directly sampling from the population. That said, I welcome your nitpicks, even if brief

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