Working through these slowly; should be up to date by 4/24.

WAISS, MSFP, CfML, and (for high-school-aged folk) EuroSPARC all have some ability to apply for travel assistance.

Alas, yes; I found that unfortunate as well, since I, too, had wanted to attend both!

It feels like there is an implicit assumption in CFAR's agenda that most of the important things are going to happen in one or two decades from now.

I don't think this; it seems to me that the next decade or two may be pivotal, but they may well not be, and the rest of the century matters quite a bit as well in expectation.

There are three main reasons we've focused mainly on adults:

1. Adults can contribute more rapidly, and so can be part of a process of compounding careful-thinking resources in a shorter-term way. E.g. if adults are hired now by MIRI, they improve the ratio of thoughtfulness within those thinking about AI safety, and this can in turn impact the culture of the field, the quality of future years’ research, etc.

2. For reasons resembling (1), adults provide a faster “grounded feedback cycle”. E.g., adults who come in with business or scientific experience can tell us right away whether the curricula feel promising to them; students and teens are more likely to be indiscriminatingly enthusiastic. .

3. Adults can often pay their own way at the workshops; children can’t; we therefore cannot afford to run very many workshops for kids until we somehow acquire either more donation, or more financial resource in some other way.

Nevertheless, I agree with you that programs targeting children can be higher impact per person and are extremely worthwhile in the medium- to long-run. This is indeed part of the motivation for SPARC, and expanding such programs is key to our long-term aims; marginal donation is key to our ability to do these quickly, and not just eventually.

It's true there are situations in which this isn't the case, but I think they're rare enough that it's worth acknowledging the value of hesitation in many cases and trying to be clear about distinguishing valid from invalid hesitation.

It seems to me that thinking through uncertainties and scenarios is often really really important, as is making specific safeguards that will help you if your model turns out to be wrong; but I claim that there is a different meaning of "hesitation" that is like "keeping most of my psyche in a state of roadblock while I kind-of hang out with my friend while also feeling anxious about my paper", or something, that is very different from actually concretely picturing the two scenarios, and figuring out how to create an outcome I'd like given both possibilities. I'm not expressing it well, but does the distinction I am trying to gesture at make sense?

If you take a weighted sum of (75% likely 60mph forward) + (25% likely 60 mph backward), you get (30 mph forward).

Stopping briefly to choose a plan might've been sensible, if it was easier to think while holding still; stopping after that (I had no GPS or navigation ability) wouldn't've helped; I had to proceed in some direction to find out where the hotel was, and there was no point in doing that not at full speed.

Often a person should hedge bets in some fashion, or should take some action under uncertainty that is different from the action one would take if one were certain of model 1 or of model 2. The point is that "hedging" or "acting under uncertainty" in this way is different in many particulars from the sort of "kind of working" that people often end up accidentally doing, from a naiver sort of average. Often it e.g. involves running info-gathering tests at full speed, one after another. Or e.g., betting "blue" each time in this experiment, while also attempting to form better models.