Had a long day pruning nodes? Goal extrapolation giving you grief? Can't look at another causal model? Then disregard previous instructions and come to this meetup for people working on technical alignment research!
The scene in London is small but growing, and most people haven't had much chance to meet and socialise with people from different labs. This event will have a relaxed setting where you'll have the chance to propose discussions around your area of interest unconference-style, but the emphasis is on putting names to faces and making friends rather than a formal conference.
Held at the incomparable Newspeak House in Bethnal Green.
I ran this by an epidemiologist friend and they pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 is mutating fairly quickly, so wide deployment of low-effectiveness vaccines (possibly including this one) would encourage the emergence and spread of vaccine-resistant strains of the virus.
This might become a big problem because vaccines are being rolled out whilst there is a lot of the virus circulating in the community.
Thanks for your comment, this is my first post but I have been reading LessWrong and adjacent sites for 6+ years, so I'm not unfamiliar with the rationalist community.
I don't think I have much to add beyond the pitch in the original post. This is an opportunity to help improve reasoning and decision-making in real-world institutions with significant influence. By participating you get access to training materials used to teach reasoning evaluation in such institutions, which may be of intrinsic methodological interest. Further, by completing the training you may learn new skills that you can apply to improve your own reasoning.
It is also an opportunity to benchmark your own reasoning evaluation skills against others: we will be sending out such feedback once the study is complete, and are currently looking at ways to incorporate benchmarking into the training itself.
Appreciate your comment - we are aware of that and this is just one of several recruitment avenues we are pursuing.
Cross-posted from the EA Forum.
TL;DR - My research group at the University of Melbourne is working to improve methods for evaluating quality of reasoning, particularly for use within government intelligence organisations. We’re conducting a study to compare a new evaluation method with the method currently used by intelligence agencies in the US. By participating, you get access to training materials in both the existing and proposed methods. You can sign up here.
It is important that conclusions reached by analysts working in professional intelligence organisations are accurate so that resulting decisions made by governments and other decision-makers are grounded in reality. Historically, failures of intelligence have contributed to decisions or oversights that... (read 780 more words →)