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Chi Nguyen's Shortform
20Chi Nguyen
1Rauno Arike
1Chi Nguyen
Looking for help with an acausal safety project. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, it would be really great if you let me know/share
- Help with acausal research and get mentoring to learn about decision theory
- Motivation: Caspar Oesterheld (inventor/discoverer of ECL/MSR), Emery Cooper and I are doing a project where we try to get LLMs to help us with our acausal research.
- Our research is ultimately aimed at making future AIs acausally safe.
- Project: In a first step, we are trying to train an LLM classifier that evaluates critiques of arguments. To do so, we need a large number of both good and bad arguments about decision theory (and other areas of Philosophy.)
- How you’ll learn: If you would like to learn about decision theory, anthropics, open source game theory, …, we supply you with a curriculum. There’s a lot of leeway for what exactly you want to learn about. You go through the readings.
- If you already know things and just want to test your ideas, you can optionally skip this step.
- Your contribution: While doing your readings, you, write up critiques of arguments you read.
- Bottom-line: We get to use your arguments/critiques for our projects and you get our feedback on them. (We have to read and label them for the project anyway.)
- Logistics: Unfortunately, you’d be a volunteer. I might be able to pay you a small amount out-of-pocket, but it’s not going to be very much. Caspar and Em are both university employed and I am similar in means to an independent researcher. We are also all non-Americans based in the US which makes it harder for us to acquire money for projects and such for boring and annoying reasons.
- Why are we good mentors: Caspar has dozens of publications on related topics. Em has a handful. And I have been around.
2. Be a saint and help with acausal research by doing tedious manual labor and getting little in return
We also need help with various grindy tasks that aren’t super helpful for learning, e.g. turning pdfs with equations etc. into sensible txts to feed to LLMs. If you’re motivated to help with that, we would be extremely grateful.
2What's the minimum capacity in which you're expecting people to contribute? Are you looking for a few serious long-term contributors or are you also looking for volunteers who offer occasional help without a fixed weekly commitment?
My current guess is that occasional volunteers are totally fine! There's some onboarding cost but mostly, the cost on our side scales with the number of argument-critique pairs we get. Since the whole point is to have critiques of a large variety of quality, I don't expect the nth argument-critque pair we get to be much more useable than the 1st one. I might be wrong about this one and change my mind as we try this out with people though!
(Btw I didn't get a notification for your comment, so maybe better to dm if you're interested.)
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