Wiki Contributions
When I was in the UK I bought one of these floodlights. You have to attach your own plug but that's easy enough. More frustrating is there's a noticeable flicker, and the CRI's pretty poor.
On the upside it's £70, compact, simple, and 40k lumens.
Yes! Though that engineer might not be interested in us.
In-person is required. We'll add something to the job descriptions in the new year, thanks for the heads up!
It's not impossible, but it appears unlikely for the foreseeable future. We do sponsor visas, but if that doesn't suit then I'd take a look at Cohere.ai, as they're one org I know of with a safety team who are fully-onboard with remote.
You're presenting it as a litmus test for engineers to apply to themselves, and that's fine as far as it goes
I can reassure you that it is in fact a litmus test for engineers to apply to themselves, and that's as far as it goes.
While part of me is keen to discuss our interview design further, I'm afraid you've done a great job of laying out some of the reasons not to!
I've been surprised by this too, and my best explanation so far is schools. Evidence in favour is that Scottish school holidays start end-of-June, while English school holidays start middle-of-July, and indeed there looks to be a two-week difference in the peaks for the two nations.
A good test for this will be this week's ONS report. This doesn't have the English turn-around in it yet, but if it is schools then there should be an extremely sharp drop in the school-age rates.
All that said, it's only my best hypothesis. A strong piece of evidence against it is that we haven't seen the same effect in the US, where school holidays started a while ago.
One piece of evidence against this: almost all the uptick in the UK is in folks under 40. Under 40s have a much lower vaccination rate due to the age-dependent rollout, but because of the blood clot scare under 40s have preferentially gotten Pfizer. Over 40s meanwhile have a very high vaccination rate but it's mostly AstraZeneca. Their case rate is flat.
Source
Nine months later I consider my post pretty 'shrill', for want of a better adjective. I regret not making more concrete predictions at the time, because yeah, reality has substantially undershot my fears. I think there's still a substantial chance of something 10x large being revealed within 18 months (which I think is the upper bound on 'timeline measured in months'), but it looks very unlikely that there'll be a 100x increase in that time frame.
To pick one factor I got wrong in writing the above, it was thinking of my massive update in response to GPT-3 as somewhere near to the median, rather than a substantial outlier. As another example of this, I am the only person I know of who, after GPT-3, dropped everything they were doing to re-orient their career towards AI safety. And that's within circles of people who you'd think would be primed to respond similarly!
I still think AI projects could be run at vastly larger budgets, so in that sense I still believe in there being an orders-of-magnitude overhang. Just convincing the people with those budgets to fund these projects is apparently much harder than I thought.
I am not unhappy about this.
(a)
Look, we already have superhuman intelligences. We call them corporations and while they put out a lot of good stuff, we're not wild about the effects they have on the world. We tell corporations 'hey do what human shareholders want' and the monkey's paw curls and this is what we get.
Anyway yeah that but a thousand times faster, that's what I'm nervous about.
(b)
Look, we already have superhuman intelligences. We call them governments and while they put out a lot of good stuff, we're not wild about the effects they have on the world. We tell governments 'hey do what human voters want' and the monkey's paw curls and this is what we get.
Anyway yeah that but a thousand times faster, that's what I'm nervous about.