We put together a survey to study the opinions of timelines and probability of human extinction of the employees at Conjecture. The questions were based on previous public surveys and prediction markets, to ensure that the results are comparable with people’s opinions outside of Conjecture.
The survey results were polled in April, 2023. There were 23 unique responses from people across teams.
The specific questions the survey asked were:
I wonder how this played out? Specifically:
Book: "Statistical Rethinking" by Richard McElreath
Description: in-depth introduction to Bayesian statistical analysis
Positives:
- Each chapter begins with an intuitive short story of what the meaning of the statistical concept is in real life
- Contains exercises in the end of the chapters
- Wide variety of example types, not constrained to just one field
Negatives:
- It is pretty much a textbook otherwise - it's the narrative style stories in the beginnings of each chapter that makes me share this. For all intents and purposes you may ignore the parts where he tries to teach you Bayesian stats via R :)
This is a cool attempt to get some insight into what's going on in AI safety! It makes sense we have had so few surveys directly about this, as they are seriously difficult to do correctly - especially in a field like AI safety where there is a lot of vagueness in how people think about positive and negative outcomes.
Most of the comments are and will be about how the survey could be better and more elaborate in what it's asking, which would mean that the survey would probably ideally be several pages long and take about 30min to answer - at the least. And there's a bit of a cut-off where... (read 392 more words →)
This is beautiful! Does come off as a utopia. There are student cities which are special because they have actually spaced out the university buildings across the entire town - it makes education more visible, but not necessarily more accessible (I'd be curious as to what metric could be used to compare a university town to a university that is more closed off in a location outside of where people normally go).
Denmark has a way of opening up public libraries for everyone - they have made libraries where books are almost hidden away - you can order them to be able to lend them, and a combination of man and machine will... (read more)
This is an interesting way to depict how different scenarios of AI takeover would look like. There's a lot of uncertainty around how the scenarios will play out but if they're written out like this (with the epic links as well), then it'd be much easier for people to understand the different failure modes. Great work! ^^