[legal status: not financial advice™] Most crypto is held by individuals[1] Individual crypto holders are disproportionately tech savvy, often programmers Source: Well known, just look around you. AI is starting to eat the software engineers market Already entry level jobs, which doesn't matter for crypto markets that much.[2] But judging...
[Epistemic status: Shallow dive into research questions, backed by some years of on-and-off thinking about this kind of plan.] Introduction There is some chance that civilization will cease to function before we hit an intelligence explosion. If it does, it would be good to preserve existing alignment research for future...
I am an earlyish crypto investor who has accumulated enough to be a mid-sized grantmaker, and I intend to donate most of my money over the next 5-10 years to try and increase the chances that humanity has a wonderful future. My best guess is that this is mostly decided...
[legal status: not financial advice™]
Already entry level jobs, which doesn't matter for crypto markets that much.[2]
But judging by progress at other tasks AI climb the seniority ladder to where most crypto holders are within the next few years. SWE Bench Verified went from single digit %s to 64% in a year and a bit, and the METR evals are not looking hopeful for humanity's lead. Tech giants are doing increasing amounts of their work with AI.[3]
For reasons that maybe no normal person really understands, in an outcome that the theory's inventors found very surprising, some people seem to be insane in a way that seizes very hard on a twisted version of this theory.
Oh... huh. @Eliezer Yudkowsky, I think I figured it out.
In a certain class of altered state,[1] a person's awareness includes a wider part of their predictive world-model than usual. Rather than perceiving primarily the part of the self model which models themselves looking out into a world model, the normal gating mechanisms come apart and they perceive much more of their world-model directly (including being able to introspect on their brain's copy of other people... (read more)
I am donating half my net worth over the next few years towards efforts to make it more likely that we end up in one of the better futures (focusing on highly frugal people, as they are more neglected by major grantmakers and my funds will go further), alongside most of my productive energies.
If anyone wants to commit to joining the effort, please reach out. There are many low hanging fruit in the alignment ecosystem space.
I am getting ready to help launch two more in the next couple of weeks, one for alignment grantmakers (gated to people who can verify they've directed $10k+ towards alignment), one for software engineers who want to help with alignment. They're not polished yet so not ready for a big announcement, but feel free to turn up early if you're sold on the idea already.
(also, neat, I got cited!)
Fixed, thanks.
I'm hopeful that most people would see the difference between "rich people trying to save their own skin" and "allowing researchers who are trying to make sure humanity has a long-term future at all to continue their work", but I would be very happy to have leads on who to talk to about presenting this well.
[Epistemic status: Shallow dive into research questions, backed by some years of on-and-off thinking about this kind of plan.]
There is some chance that civilization will cease to function before we hit an intelligence explosion. If it does, it would be good to preserve existing alignment research for future generations who might rebuild advanced technology, and ideally have safe havens ready for current and future researchers to spend their lives adding to that pool of knowledge.
This might delay capabilities research by many decades, centuries, or longer while allowing basic theoretical alignment research to continue, and so be a potential Yudkowskian positive model violation for which we should prepare.
Setting this infrastructure up is a... (read 1456 more words →)
Rob's is invite-only right now, but I have an invite and sent you it. I'm adding links to the two public ones to the main post, the investing one is private and I don't have any invites, but they're considering switching to an open invite next week so I'll get back to you.
For how to get on the radar of grantmakers, I think applying to microgrants programs like ACX+ or LTFF is a reasonable start (one of my grantees was from there ACX+). Another idea which should open up soon with impact certificates is just going ahead and doing something of value then selling your impact. Talking to AI Safety Support is also a near-universally good thing to do for people who want to help. I'd also be open to hearing more about your situation in DM.
A lot of that makes sense, other than I don't understand the angle-grating part?
I am an earlyish crypto investor who has accumulated enough to be a mid-sized grantmaker, and I intend to donate most of my money over the next 5-10 years to try and increase the chances that humanity has a wonderful future. My best guess is that this is mostly decided by whether we pass the test of AI alignment, so that’s my primary focus.
AI alignment has lots of money flowing into it, with some major organizations not running fundraisers, Zvi characterizing SFF as having “too much money”, OpenPhil expanding its grantmaking for the cause, FTX setting themselves up as another major grantmaker, and ACX reporting the LTFF’s position as:
... (read 531 more words →)what actually happened was
Having done a bunch of this, yes, great idea. You can have pretty spectacular impact, because the motivation boost and arc of "someone believes in me" is much more powerful than the one you get from funding stress.
My read is that good-taste grants of this type are dramatically, dramatically more impactful than those by larger grantmakers, e.g. I proactively found and funded the upskilling grant of a math PhD who found glitch tokens, which was for a while the third most upvoted research on the alignment forum. This cost $12k for I think one year of upskilling, as frugal geniuses are not that rare if you hang out in the right places.
However!... (read 465 more words →)