We have contact details and can send emails to 1500 students and former students who've received hard-cover copies of HPMOR (and possibly Human Compatible and/or The Precipice) because they've won international or Russian olympiads in maths, computer science, physics, biology, or chemistry.
This includes over 60 IMO and IOI medalists.
This is a pool of potentially extremely talented people, many of whom have read HPMOR.
I don't have the time to do anything with them, and people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.
The only thing that ever happened was an email sent to some kids still in high school about the Atlas Fellowship, and a couple of them became fellows.
I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people. I think for most researchers who understand AI x-risk well enough and can speak Russian, even manually going through IMO and IOI medalists, sending those who seem more promising a tl;dr of x-risk and offering to schedule a call would be a marginally better use of their time than most technical alignment research they could be otherwise doing, because it plausibly adds highly capable researchers.
If you understand AI x-risk, are smart, have good epistemics, speak Russian, and want to have that ball, please DM me on LW or elsewhere.
To everyone else, feel free to make suggestions.
We also have 6k more copies (18k hard-cover books) left. We have no idea what to do with them. Suggestions are welcome.
Here's a map of Russian libraries that requested copies of HPMOR, and we've sent 2126 copies to:
Sending HPMOR to random libraries is cool, but I hope someone comes up with better ways of spending the books.
I'm still a bit confused - that's a lot of books, especially since they are all in Russian! And 18k hardcover! I'm a bit more credulous about the impact of such an effort than others - actual insight in the books is less important than having a fun attraction to adjacent ideas. It's worked before: the growth of less wrong may be partly attributable to this and analogously some films, eg The China Syndrome, film/sci-fi novel nuclear doom conceptions may have had significant impact in molding the attitudes of the public.
But still that's a lot of books! And if I understand correctly, with no connection to the ones which were (or weren't?) successfully distributed by the 28k in grant money, before the project ended.
Why so many? What fraction of original copies made have been successfully distributed? I understand that this wasn't from grant money, I'm just curious about the story here is all.
Edit: saw this. So apparently 68k originally. Wow!
I'm confused about this discrepancy between LessWrong and EA Forum. (Feedback is welcome!)