Today I was appointed the new Executive Director of Singularity Institute.
Because I care about transparency, one of my first projects as an intern was to begin work on the organization's first Strategic Plan. I researched how to write a strategic plan, tracked down the strategic plans of similar organizations, and met with each staff member, progressively iterating the document until it was something everyone could get behind.
I quickly learned why there isn't more of this kind of thing: transparency is a lot of work! 100+ hours of work later, plus dozens of hours from others, and the strategic plan was finally finished and ratified by the board. It doesn't accomplish much by itself, but it's one important stepping stone in building an organization that is more productive, more trusted, and more likely to help solve the world's biggest problems.
I spent two months as a researcher, and was then appointed Executive Director.
In further pursuit of transparency, I'd like to answer (on video) submitted questions from the Less Wrong community just as Eliezer did two years ago.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed into one paragraph, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) I will generally answer the top-voted questions, but will skip some of them. I will tend to select questions about Singularity Institute as an organization, not about the technical details of some bit of research. You can read some of the details of the Friendly AI research program in my interview with Michael Anissimov.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for 7 days, at which time I will decide which questions to begin recording video responses for.
I might respond to certain questions within the comments thread and not on video; for example, when there is a one-word answer.
That was the most horribly designed thing I've ever seen anyone do on LessWrong, as I once described here so please, please, no video.
The questions are text. Have your answer on text too, so that we can actually read them -- unless there's some particular question which would actually be enhanced by the usage of video, (e.g. you'd like to show an animated graph or a computer simulation or something)
If there's nothing I can say to convince you against using video, then I beg you to atleast take the time to read my more specific problems in the link above and correct those particular flaws - a single audio that we can atleast play and listen in the background, while we're doing something else, instead of 30 videos that we must individually click. If not that, atleast a clear description of the questions on the same page (AND repeated clearly on the audio itself), so that we can see the questions that interest us, instead of a link to a different page.
But please, just consider text instead. Text has the highest signal-to-noise ratio. We can actually read it in our leisure. We can go back and forth and quote things exactly. TEXT IS NIFTY.
I disagree completely, as video has value not present in text, and text is easily derived from video. If this has not been done for Eliezer's videos, I volunteer to transcribe them - please let me know.