Chris Lonsberry
Bio
Participation2
- Launching in 2023 > EA Cleveland - stay tuned.
- Currently organizing > AI Safety Quest - We help people navigate the AI Safety landscape, build the community, and shorten the time to upskill and contribute.
How others can help me
- Mentor me!
- Help me be a better coach and advisor.
- Cybersecurity (as an IT Generalist rather than SWE or product builder). Industrial Control System experience would be a huge plus.
- Improve my perspective on the AI Safety landscape.
- Best practices for managing and optimizing and org that relies on volunteers for their core mission.
How I can help others
- Plan and achieve Financial Independence (FIRE), or whatever financial runway you need to be maximally effective.
- I have experience working with a wide variety of process industries (chemicals, oil and gas, bulk transportation, energy) when I worked with OSIsoft PI System (owned by AVEVA)
Posts 1
Comments10
Topic contributions1
Copying my comment from the EA Forum version of this thread
Mentorship is one of the most frequently requested services that AI Safety Quest sees when conducting Navigation calls. I hope this service can help bridge the gap between "I want to do something about AI safety" and "I'm working on a meaningful AIS project". Many thanks to you both for making this happen.
This was posted to lesswrong 4 days ago; consider checking out the comments to the lesswrong version. There are 18 comments at the time I'm writing this.
"but why hasn't EA done this already?"
still seems like a fair question. I think the underlying problem you're pointing to might be that people will then give up on their projects or ideas without having come up with a good answer. An "EMH-style" mindset seems to point to an analytical shortcut: if it hasn't already been done, it probably isn't worth doing. Which, I agree is wrong.
I still think EMH has no relevance in this context and that should be the main argument against applying it to EA projects.
I had to use Wikipedia to get a concise definition of EMH, rather than rely on my memory:
The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information. [1]
This appears to me to apply exclusively to financial (securities) markets and I think we would be taking (too) far out of its original context in trying to use it to answer questions about whether great EA projects exist. In that sense, I completely agree with you that:
it's a poor way to model the situation that will lead you to make systematically wrong judgments
In the real (non-financial) world, there are plenty of opportunities to make money, which is one reason entrepreneurs exist and are valuable. Are you aware of people using EMH to suggest we should not expect to find good philanthropic opportunities?
Should we also link out to https://80000hours.org/podcast/effective-altruism-an-introduction/ as an alternate way to consume similar content?
What is the relationship between this handbook and the one hosted at https://www.effectivealtruism.org/handbook/ ?
The handbook at the above link is available in epub, mobi, and pdf formats, which seems to answer the requests in the comments here. Is it an older version? The cover indicates that it is the second edition, but sadly does not include a revision date.
I removed the Blue Dot AISF link.
> We no longer maintain an AI safety job board.