We have contact details and can send emails to 1500 students and former students who've received hard-cover copies of HPMOR (and possibly Human Compatible and/or The Precipice) because they've won international or Russian olympiads in maths, computer science, physics, biology, or chemistry.

This includes over 60 IMO and IOI medalists.

This is a pool of potentially extremely talented people, many of whom have read HPMOR.

I don't have the time to do anything with them, and people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.

The only thing that ever happened was an email sent to some kids still in high school about the Atlas Fellowship, and a couple of them became fellows.

I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people. I think for most researchers who understand AI x-risk well enough and can speak Russian, even manually going through IMO and IOI medalists, sending those who seem more promising a tl;dr of x-risk and offering to schedule a call would be a marginally better use of their time than most technical alignment research they could be otherwise doing, because it plausibly adds highly capable researchers.

If you understand AI x-risk, are smart, have good epistemics, speak Russian, and want to have that ball, please DM me on LW or elsewhere.

To everyone else, feel free to make suggestions.

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We also have 6k more copies (18k hard-cover books) left. We have no idea what to do with them. Suggestions are welcome.

Here's a map of Russian libraries that requested copies of HPMOR, and we've sent 2126 copies to:

Sending HPMOR to random libraries is cool, but I hope someone comes up with better ways of spending the books.

Ok, probably a silly idea but... Maybe have some kind of competition for young people involving something like math / computer science / essay writing / puzzle solving / jailbreaking LLMs... Give a cash prize for the top three, and send books to a bunch of the runners up.

Sounds like something that would take a lot of organization effort, so somebody would need to be excited enough about this idea to want to spearhead it.

It would be cool if someone organized that sort of thing (probably sending books to the cash prize winners, too).

For people who’ve reached the finals of the national olympiad in cybersecurity, but didn’t win, a volunteer has made a small CTF puzzle and sent the books to students who were able to solve it.

I already have a Logic Tournament ques ion and rule set built for middle and high schoolers if you want to use it. 

Possibly look for other skills / career paths, besides math and computer science?  Glancing through 80,000 Hours' list:

- AI governance and policy -- I'm guessing that seeking out "policy people" will be a non-starter in Russia, either because it's dangerous or because there are fewer such people (not whole graduating classes at Harvard, etc, waiting to become the next generation of DC elites).

- AI safety technical research -- of course you are already thinking about this via IOM, IOI, etc. Others have mentioned trying to expand to LLM-specific competitions / clubs / etc.  Alternately, consider expanding beyond IOM to more generic super-smart-person competitions, like chess tournaments?

- Biorisk research, strategy, and policy -- I'm guessing that tying HPMOR to any kind of biosecurity message would probably be a bad idea in Russia.  Although HPMOR does have a very strong anti-death message, which might resonate especially well with medical students with aspirations to discover cures for diseases like cancer, alzheimers, the aging process, etc.  So maybe giving it away to high-achieving medical students (with no biosecurity message attached; rather a general triumph-over-death message) could be sort of impactful -- obviously it's unrelated to AI, but perhaps this idea is better than giving it away to random libraries.

- Cybersecurity -- sounds like you're already thinking about this.

- Expert in AI hardware -- it's less clear that this field needs HPMOR-pilled rationalists at the helm, and it's my understanding that Russia's semiconductor industry is far behind the rest of the world.  But idk, maybe there's something worth doing here?

- China-related AI safety and governance paths -- this is policy-related, thus perhaps has the same problems I mentioned earlier about AI governance/policy roles.  But it does seem like Russians might have a natural comparative advantage in the field of "influencing how China thinks about AI", compared to people from contries that China percieves as rivals / enemies.  I'm not sure what kind of competitions / scholarships / fellowships / study-abroad programs you could use to target giving the books -- you'd be looking for technically-minded, ambitious, high-achieving Russian speakers with ties to China or interest in China, and ideally also an interest in AI -- but maybe there's something.  (Go tournaments??)

- Nuclear weapons safety & security -- probably a non-starter in Russia for political reasons

  • Yep, we've also been sending the books to winners of national and international olympiads in biology and chemistry.
  • Sending these books to policy-/foreign policy-related students seems like a bad idea: too many risks involved (in Russia, this is a career path you often choose if you're not very value-aligned. For the context, according to Russia, there's an extremist organization called "international LGBT movement").
  • If you know anyone with an understanding of the context who'd want to find more people to send the books to, let me know. LLM competitions, ML hackathons, etc. all might be good.
  • Ideally, we'd also want to then alignment-pill these people, but no one has a ball on this. 

You've probably thought of this and have reasons for and against it, but maybe some hotels (bedside) and restaurants (on tables) would be willing to take copies too? Seems much less likely that libraries though.

Probably less efficient than other uses and is in the direction of spamming people with these books. If they’re everywhere, I might be less interested if someone offers to give them to me because I won a math competition.

I'd recommend against that. It's too similar to Mormonism w/ Marriott.

This screams "cult tactic" to me. Is the point of EA to identify high-value targets and get them to help the EA community, or to target high-value projects that help the broader community?

huh?

I would want people who might meaningfully contribute to solving what's probably the most important problem humanity has ever faced to learn about it and, if they judge they want to work on it, to be enabled to work on it. I think it'd be a good use of resources to make capable people learn about the problem and show them they can help with it. Why does it scream "cult tactic" to you?

What about trying to use the existing infrastructure in Russia, e.g.

  • Donating to school libraries of math magnet schools (starting with "usual suspects" of 57, 2, 43 in Moscow, 239 in St Petersburg, etc, and then going down the list)?
  • Contacting a competition organizers (e.g. for тургор - турнир городов which tends to have a higher diversity of participants compared to the Olympiad system) and coordinating to use the books as prises for finalists?

Besides not having to reinvent the wheel, kids might be more open to the ideas if the book comes from a local, more readily trusted party.

Some of these schools should have the book in their libraries. There are also risks with some of them, as the current leadership installed by the gov might get triggered if they open and read the books (even though they probably won’t).

It’s also better to give the books directly to students, because then we get to have their contact details.

I’m not sure how many of the kids studying there know the book exists, but the percentage should be fairly high at this point.

Do you think the books being in local libraries increases how open people are to the ideas? My intuition is that the quotes on гпмрм.рф/olymp should do a lot more in that direction. Do you have a sense that it wouldn’t be perceived as an average fantasy-with-science book?

We’re currently giving out the books to participants of summer conference of the maths cities tournament — do you think it might be valuable to add cities tournament winners to the list? Are there many people who would qualify, but didn’t otherwise win a prize in the national math olympiad?

Getting to the national math Olympiad requires access to regional Olympiad first, then being able to travel. Smart kids from "middle of nowhere" places - exactly to the kinds of kids you want to reach - are more likely to participate in the cities tournament. I wonder whether kids who were eligible for the summer camp, but did not make it there are more of your target audience than those who participated in the camp.

 

P.S. my knowledge of this is primarily based on how things were ~35 years ago, so I could be completely off.

I think travel and accommodation for the winners of regional olympiads to the national one is provided by the olympiad organizers.

Is there a good Russian-language introduction to AI alignment?

I’m not aware of one.

I tried to get a grant to write one, but it was rejected.

Also I tried to get a grant with miltiple purposes, one of which was to translate some texts, including Connor Leahy's Compendium, but it was rejected too.

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