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Matt Putz — LessWrong

Relevant classic paper from Steven Levitt. Abstract [emphasis mine]:

Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This paper reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), those who make a change (regardless of the outcome of the coin toss) report being substantially happier two months and six months later. This correlation, however, need not reflect a causal impact. To assess causality, I use the outcome of a coin toss. Individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are much more likely to make a change and are happier six months later than those who were told by the coin to maintain the status quo. The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.

Replying toAI Timelines

Matt Putz1y*

AI Timelines

I've updated toward the views Daniel expresses here and I'm now about half way between Ajeya's views in this post and Daniel's (in geometric mean).

I'm curious what the biggest factors were that made you update?

Matt Putz1y

Regarding our career development and transition funding (CDTF) program:

The default expectation for CDTF grants is that they’re one-off grants. My impression is that this is currently clear to most CDTF grantees (e.g., I think most of them don't reapply after the end of their grant period, and the program title explicitly says that it’s “transition funding”).
- (When funding independent research through this program, we sometimes explicitly clarify that we're unlikely to renew by default).
Most of the CDTF grants we make have grant periods that are shorter than a year (with the main exception that comes to mind being PhD programs). I think that’s reasonable (esp. given that the grantees know this when they accept the funding). I’d guess most of the people we fund through this program are able to find paid positions after <1 year.

(I probably won't have time to engage further.)

Matt Putz1y

Just wanted to flag quickly that Open Philanthropy's GCR Capacity Building team (where I work) has a career development and transition funding program.

The program aims to provide support—in the form of funding for graduate study, unpaid internships, self-study, career transition and exploration periods, and other activities relevant to building career capital—for individuals at any career stage who want to pursue careers that could help reduce global catastrophic risks (esp. AI risks). It’s open globally and operates on a rolling basis.

I realize that this is quite different from what lemonhope is advocating for here, but nevertheless thought it would be useful context for this discussion (and potential applicants).

Replying to5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors

Matt Putz1y

5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll forward it to our team.

I think I basically agree with you that from reading the RFP page, this project doesn’t seem like a central example of the projects we’re describing (and indeed, many of the projects we do fund through this RFP are more like the examples given on the RFP page).

Some quick reactions:

FWIW, our team generally makes a lot of grants that are <$100k (much more so than other Open Phil teams).
I agree the application would probably take most people longer than the description that Gavin gave on Manifund. That said, I think it’s still relatively lean considering the distribution of projects we fund, though I

Matt Putz1y

5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors

I work at Open Philanthropy, and I recently let Gavin know that Open Phil is planning to recommend a grant of $5k to Arb for the second project on your list: Overview of AI Safety in 2024 (they had already raised ~$10k by the time we came across it). Thanks for writing this post Austin — it brought the funding opportunity to our attention.

Like other commenters on Manifund, I believe this kind of overview is a valuable reference for the field, especially for newcomers.

I wanted to flag that this project would have been eligible for our RFP for work that builds capacity to address risks from transformative AI. I worry that not... (read more)

There are two very similar pages. This one and https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/scoring-rules/

Why we're not founding a human-data-for-alignment org

L Rudolf L

L Rudolf L, Matt Putz

TL;DR

One-paragraph summary: we (two recent graduates) spent about half of the summer exploring the idea of starting an organisation producing custom human-generated datasets for AI alignment research. Most of our time was spent on customer interviews with alignment researchers to determine if they have a pressing need for such a service. We decided not to continue with this idea, because there doesn’t seem to be a human-generated data niche (unfilled by existing services like Surge) that alignment teams would want outsourced.

In more detail: The idea of a human datasets organisation was one of the winners of the Future Fund project ideas competition, still figures on their list of project ideas, and had been advocated before then... (read 8430 more words →)

Replying toWithout specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover

Matt Putz4y

Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover

By "refining pure human feedback", do you mean refining RLHF ML techniques?

I assume you still view enhancing human feedback as valuable? And also more straightforwardly just increasing the quality of the best human feedback?

Replying toAnnouncing the LessWrong Curated Podcast

Matt Putz4y

Announcing the LessWrong Curated Podcast

Amazing! Thanks so much for making this happen so quickly.

To anyone who's trying to figure out how to get it to work on Google Podcasts, here's what worked for me (searching the name didn't, maybe this will change?):

Go to the Libsyn link. Click the RSS symbol. Copy the link. Go to Google Podcasts. Click the Library tab (bottom right). Go to Subscriptions. Click symbol that looks like adding a link in the upper right. Paste link, confirm.

Replying toLate 2021 MIRI Conversations: AMA / Discussion

Matt Putz4y

Late 2021 MIRI Conversations: AMA / Discussion

Hey Paul, thanks for taking the time to write that up, that's very helpful!