Hi, I am a Physicist, an Effective Altruist and AI Safety student/researcher.
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What it's like to organise AISC
About once or twice per week this time of year someone emails me to ask:
Please let me break rule X
My response:
No you're not allowed to break rule X. But here's a loop hole that lets you do the thing you want without technically breaking the rule. Be warned that I think using the loophole is a bad idea, but if you still want to, we will not stop you.
Because not leaving the loophole would be too restrictive for other reason, and I'm not going to not tell people all their options.
The fact that this puts the responsibility back on them is a bonus feature I really like. Our participants are adults, and are allowed to make their own mistakes. But also, sometimes it's not a mistake, because there is no set of rules for all occasion, and I don't have all the context of their personal situation.
Quote from the AI voiced podcast version of this post.
Such a lab, separated by more than 1 Australian Dollar from Earth, might provide sufficient protection for very dangerous experiments.
1Same data but in cronlogical order
10th-11th
* 20 total applications
* 4 (20%) Stop/Pause AI
* 8 (40%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
12th-13th
* 18 total applications
* 2 (11%) Stop/Pause AI
* 7 (39%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
15th-16th
* 45 total application
* 4 (9%) Stop/Pause AI
* 20 (44%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
Stop/Puase AI stays at 2-4 per week, while the others go from 7-8 to 20
One may point out that 2 to 4 is a doubling suggesting noisy data, and also going from 7-8 is also just a doubling and might not mean much. This could be the case. But we should expect higher notice for lower numbers. I.e. a doubling of 2 is less surprising than a (more than) doubling of 7-8.
12th-13th
* 18 total applications
* 2 (11%) Stop/Pause AI
* 7 (39%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
15th-16th
* 45 total application
* 4 (9%) Stop/Pause AI
* 20 (44%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
All applications
* 370 total
* 33 (12%) Stop/Pause AI
* 123 (46%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
Looking at the above data, is directionally correct for you hypothesis, but it doesn't look statisically significant to me. The numbers are pretty small, so could be a fluke.
So I decided to add some more data
10th-11th
* 20 total applications
* 4 (20%) Stop/Pause AI
* 8 (40%) Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations
Looking at all of it, it looks like Stop/Pause AI are coming in at a stable rate, while Mech-Interp and Agent Foundations are going up a lot after the 14th.
1AI Safety interest is growing in Africa.
AISC 25 (out of 370) applicants from Africa, with 9 from Kenya and 8 from Nigeria.
Numbers for all countries (people with multiple locations not included)
AISC applicants per country - Google Sheets
The rest looks more or less in-line with what I would expect.
Sounds plausible.
> This would predict that the ratio of technical:less-technical applications would increase in the final few days.
If you want to operationalise this in terms on project first choice, I can check.
Side note:
If you don't tell what time the application deadline is, lots of people will assume its anywhere-on-Earth, i.e. noon the next day in GMT.
When I was new to organising I did not think of this, and kind of forgot about time zones. I noticed that I got a steady stream of "late" applications, that suddenly ended at 1pm (I was in GMT+1), and didn't know why.
Every time I have an application form for some event, the pattern is always the same. Steady trickle of applications, and then a doubling on the last day.
And for some reason it still surprises me how accurate this model is. The trickle can be a bit uneven, but the doubling the last day is usually close to spot on.
This means that by the time I have a good estimate of what the average number of applications per day is, then I can predict what the final number will be. This is very useful, for knowing if I need to advertise more or not.
For the upcoming AISC, the trickle was a late skewed, which meant that an early estimate had me at around 200 applicants, but the final number of on-time application is 356. I think this is because we where a bit slow at advertising early on, but Remmelt made a good job sending out reminders towards the end.
Application deadline was Nov 17.
At midnight GMT before Nov 17 we had 172 application.
At noon GMT Nov 18 (end of Nov 17 anywhere-on-Earth) we had 356 application
The doubling rule predicted 344, which is only 3% off
Yes, I count the last 36 hours as "the last day". This is not cheating since that's what I always done (approximately [1]), since starting to observe this pattern. It's the natural thing to do when you live at or close to GMT, or at least if your brain works like mine.
- ^
I've always used my local midnight as the divider. Sometimes that has been Central European Time, and sometimes there is daylight saving time. But it's all pretty close.
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2If people are ashamed to vote for Trump, why would they let their neighbours know?
I'm not surprised by this observation. In my experience rationalists also have more than base-rate of all sorts of gender non-conformity, including non-binary and trans people. And the trends are even stronger in AI Safety.
I think the explanation is:
I think that this is almost the correct explanation. We prioritise other things (writing, thinking about existential risk, working on cool projects perhaps) over caring about weather someone else got a haircut.