Raising funds to establish a new AI Safety charity

[-]LawrenceC8y160

After looking into the prototype course, I updated upwards on this project, as I think it is a decent introduction to Dylan's Off-Switch Game paper. Could I ask what other stuff RAISE wants to cover in the course? What other work on corrigibility are you planning to cover? (For example Dylan's other work, MIRI's work on this subject and Smitha Mili's paper?)

Could you also write more about who your course is targeting? Why does RAISE believe that the best way to fix the talent gap in AI safety is to help EAs change careers via introductory AI Safety material, instead of, say, making it easier for CS PhD students to do research on AI Safety-relevant topics? Why do we need to build a campus, instead of co-opting the existing education mechanisms of academia?

Finally, could you link some of the mind maps and summaries RAISE has created?

[-][anonymous]7y60

After looking into the prototype course, I updated upwards on this project, as I think it is a decent introduction to Dylan's Off-Switch Game paper. Could I ask what other stuff RAISE wants to cover in the course? What other work on corrigibility are you planning to cover? (For example Dylan's other work, MIRI's work on this subject and Smitha Mili's paper?)

Thank you!

Expecting to know better after getting our hands dirty, we decided to take it one subfield at the time. We haven't decided which subfield to cover beyond Corrigibility. Though a natural choice seems to be Value Learning.

We have identified 9 papers within/adjacent to Corrigibility:

1) Russell & LaVictoire - "Corrigibility in AI systems" (2015)
https://intelligence.org/files/CorrigibilityAISystems.pdf
2) Omohundro - "The basic AI drives" (2008)
https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf
3) Soares et al. - "Corrigibility" (2015)
https://intelligence.org/files/Corrigibility.pdf
4) Hadfield-Menell et al. - "The Off-Switch Game" (2016)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08219
5) Orseau & Armstrong - "Safely Interruptible Agents" (2016)
https://intelligence.org/files/Interruptibility.pdf
6) Milli et al. - "Should robots be obedient?" (2017)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.09990
7) Carey - "Incorrigibility in the CIRL framework" (2017)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.06275
8) El Mhamdi et al. - "Dynamic Safe Interruptibility for Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" (2017)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.02882
9) Armstrong - "‘Indifference’ methods for managing agent rewards" (2018)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.06365

Could you also write more about who your course is targeting? Why does RAISE believe that the best way to fix the talent gap in AI safety is to help EAs change careers via introductory AI Safety material, instead of, say, making it easier for CS PhD students to do research on AI Safety-relevant topics? Why do we need to build a campus, instead of co-opting the existing education mechanisms of academia?

To do our views justice requires a writeup of it's own, but I can give a stub. This doesn't necessarily represent the official view of RAISE, because that view doesn't exist yet, but let me just try to grasp at my intuition here:

First of all, I think both approaches are valid. There are people entrenched in academia who should be given the means to do good work. But there are also people outside of academia that could be given the means to do even better work.

Here's just a first stab at ways in which academia is inadequate:

Academia lacks (various kinds of) customization. For example, each bachelor's degree takes 3 years. It's self-evident that not every field has an equal amount of knowledge to teach. Students don't get a lot of personal attention. They're exposed to all kinds of petty punishment schemes and I have found that this demeaning treatment can be strongly off-putting for some people.
Student culture allows for strongly negligent work habits. I only have data from the Netherlands, but I would guess that students put in about 15 hours per week on average. That's great if you want people to develop and self-actualize, but we would rather they study AIS instead. In my opinion, a standard of 60+ hours per week would be more fitting given the stakes we're dealing with.
There is barely any room for good distillation. I'm sure academics would like to take the time to craft better explanations, but they have to sacrifice it to keep up with the rat race of flashy publications. Most of them will just stick with the standard textbooks, and copy whatever slides they have laying around.
Partly because of all this, it takes at least 5 years from high school graduation to finally start doing useful work. My intuitive guess is that it shouldn't take much more than 2 years if people Actually Tried. Especially for those that are highly talented.

But hey, these are problems anyone could be having, right? Now the real problem isn't any of these specific bugs. The real problem is that academia is an old bureaucratic institution with all kinds of entrenched interests, and patching it is hard. Even if you jump through all the hoops and do the politics and convince some people, you will hardly gain any traction. Baseline isn't so bad, but we could do so much better.

The real problem that I have with academia isn't necessarily it's current form. It's the amount of optimization power you need to upgrade it.

Finally, could you link some of the mind maps and summaries RAISE has created?

Sure! Here's the work we've done for Corrigibility. I haven't read all of it, so I do not necessarily endorse the quality of every piece. If you'd like to look at the script we used for the first lesson, go to "script drafts" and have a look at script F.

[-]JJ Hepburn8y140

Really excited about this! Donation on the way

[-]habryka8y130

This is excellent, and I am happy that you are working on it.

We do have a rule of not having organizational announcements on the frontpage (for example, we moved both the MIRI and CFAR fundraising posts to the personal section) so I moved this to your personal blog.

[-]Linda Linsefors5y50

Is this rule still in place?

Why do you have this rule? It seems to me like banning organizational announcement will make it much harder to get new initiatives of the ground.

[-]habryka5y60

I know that I wrote about this at length somewhere else, but I can't currently find it, so here is a super short summary:

One of the primary goals of the frontpage guidelines is to avoid making the site only feel welcome to people who share all the social context of the rationality community. I want people to feel welcome if they are good at rationality, and don't want them to feel like their membership is conditional on having lots and lots of social connections. Organizational announcements often assume a massive amount of context and create an in-groupy feeling that I think distracts from the goals of LessWrong.
I think it's quite bad if someone shows up to LessWrong and the first thing they see is someone asking them to donate money to them. I think it creates a much more epistemically adversarial environment than is healthy, and generally will make people (justifiedly) think that all the other content on the site is just there to sell you these organizations that want money from you. There are few things a website can do to make me trust them less than to ask me for money in the first few minutes of showing up.
Eliezer (I think) went through the same line of thinking with the original sequences, which is why he avoided talking about any organizational announcements or any requests for donations during the whole period in which he wrote the sequences. I think this was quite important and good for the site.

Organizational announcements can still get a lot of traction on people's personal blog. Most people who have enough context to be interested in that kind of announcement have the personal blog filter for the frontpage turned off, so I think this doesn't actually hurt organizations very much (and overall I think it creates an environment of higher trust in which people are much less likely to feel spammed or inundated by requests for donations and organizational announcements, which I think is overall better for communicating about projects and getting early-stage projects off the ground).

Edited to add:

Another major component for not having organizational announcements is our attempt at encouraging timeless content on LessWrong, and generally trying to disentangle LessWrong from news and other time-driven content. The vast majority of organizational announcements have almost no value when read a year or two after they were posted, and one of the goals of the frontpage/personal distinction is to create a space where content tries to be timeless and long-lasting.

[-]Linda Linsefors5y40

That makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

[-]ESRogs5y*40

It seems to me like banning organizational announcement will make it much harder to get new initiatives of the ground.

Incidentally, anyone in this space trying to get a new initiative off the ground may want to apply to SurvivalAndFlourishing.org's first funding round. (We'll be providing funding, as well as ~~fiscal sponsorship~~ some administrative support. Applications due by October 1st.)

[Edited to clarify that we won't provide full fiscal sponsorship. We will provide some administrative support via SEE (who is SAF's fiscal sponsor). Project seeking long-term fiscal sponsorship may want to apply directly to SEE (perhaps after bootstrapping via SAF). See more details on our announcement page.]

[-]MalcolmOcean7y30

Epic. I remember talking to some people about this at EA Global last year, and I'm excited to see that you've continued working on it and are ready to double down.

I've donated & shared this article on FB!

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