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Neel Nanda

4336 karmaJoined neelnanda.io

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I lead the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team

Comments
329

I like Caleb's answer. Some more thoughts

  • Clearly writing out the evidence that you're a good candidate for the grant. This can look like conventional credentials, past projects, references, etc, just anything which increases my probability that it's a good idea
  • Scoping out the purpose of the grant. In particular, I generally expect that when someone without a track record of AI Safety/similar research does an independent research project, it's fairly unlikely to actually result in impactful research (doing good research is really hard!), and that most of the impact comes from helping the person skill up, test fit, and either get a job or do better projects in future. You tend to skill up best when making a sincere effort to do good research, so this doesn't mean don't think about it all, but I would also discuss the skilling up benefits to you and why that matters

apply to several funders where possible

I'm surprised by this one! I see how it's in the applicant's interests, but why does it matter to you?

How is it silly? It seems perfectly acceptable, and even preferable, for people to be involved in shaping EA only if they agree for their leadership to be scrutinized.

My argument is that barring them doesn't stop them from shaping EA, just mildly inconveniences them, because much of the influence happens outside such conferences

With all the scandals we've seen in the last few years, I think it should be very evident how important transparency is

Which scandals do you believe would have been avoided with greater transparency, especially transparency of the form here (listing the names of those involved, with no further info)? I can see an argument that eg people who have complaints about bad behaviour (eg Owen's, or SBF/Alameda's) should make them more transparently (though that has many downsides), but that's a very different kind of transparency.

I'm not expressing an opinion on that. The post makes a clear claim that their legal status re tax deductibility will change if more EU citizens sign up. This surprises me and I want to understand it better. I agree there are other benefits to having more members, I'm not disputing that

I'm surprised that having more members let's you offer better tax deductions (and that they don't even need to be Danish taxpayers!), what's up with that? 

Seems like she'll have a useful perspective that adds value to the event, especially on brand. Why do you think it should be arms length?

This seems fine to me - I expect that attending this is not a large fraction of most attendee's impact on EA, and that some who didn't want to be named would have not come if they needed to be on a public list, so barring such people seems silly (I expect there's some people who would tolerate being named as the cost of coming too, of course). I would be happy to find some way to incentivise people being named.

And really, I don't think it's that important that a list of attendees be published. What do you see as the value here?

Seems reasonable (tbh with that context I'm somewhat OK with the original ban), thanks for clarifying!

when they're considering buying mansions in the Oxford countryside/other controversial multimillion dollar calculations, publishing the cost-benefit calculation rather than merely asserting its existence

Huh? That wasn't CEAs decision, they just fiscally sponsored Wytham

1 is very true, 2 I agree with apart from the word main, it seems hard to label any factor as "the main" thing, and there's a bunch of complex reasoning about counterfactuals - eg if GDM stopped work that wouldn't stop Meta, so is GDM working on capabilities actually the main thing?

I'm pretty unconvinced that not sharing results with frontier labs is tenable - leaving aside that these labs are often the best places to do certain kinds of safety work, if our work is to matter, we need the labs to use it! And you often get valuable feedback on the work by seeing it actually used in production. Having a bunch of safety people who work in secret and then unveil their safety plan at the last minute seems very unlikely to work to me

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