Hi! I’m looking for help with a project. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, it would be really great if you let me know/share. I’ll check the forum forum for dms.
Help with acausal research and get mentoring to learn about decision theory
Motivation: Caspar Oesterheld (inventor/discoverer of ECL/MSR), Emery Cooper and I are doing a project where we try to get LLMs to help us with our acausal research.
Our research is ultimately aimed at making future AIs acausally safe.
Project: In a first step, we are trying to train an LLM classifier that evaluates critiques of arguments. To do so, we need a large number of both good and bad arguments about decision theory (and other areas of Philosophy.)
How you’ll learn: If you would like to learn about decision theory, anthropics, open source game theory, …, we supply you with a curriculum. There’s a lot of leeway for what exactly you want to learn about. You go through the readings.
If you already know things and just want to test your ideas, you can optionally skip this step.
Your contribution: While doing your readings, you, write up critiques of arguments you read.
Bottom-line: We get to use your arguments/critiques for our projects and you get our feedback on them. (We have to read and label them for the project anyway.)
Logistics: Unfortunately, you’d be a volunteer. I might be able to pay you a small amount out-of-pocket, but it’s not going to be very much. Caspar and Em are both university employed and I am similar in means to an independent researcher. We are also all non-Americans based in the US which makes it harder for us to acquire money for projects and such for boring and annoying reasons.
Why are we good mentors: Caspar has dozens of publications on related topics. Em has a handful. And I have been around.
2. Be a saint and help with acausal research by doing tedious manual labor and getting little in return We also need help with various grindy tasks that aren’t super helpful for learning, e.g. turning pdfs with equations etc. into sensible txts to feed to LLMs. If you’re motivated to help with that, we would be extremely grateful.
Hi! I’m looking for help with a project. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, it would be really great if you let me know/share. I’ll check the forum forum for dms.
Help with acausal research and get mentoring to learn about decision theory
Motivation: Caspar Oesterheld (inventor/discoverer of ECL/MSR), Emery Cooper and I are doing a project where we try to get LLMs to help us with our acausal research.
Our research is ultimately aimed at making future AIs acausally safe.
Project: In a first step, we are trying to train an LLM classifier that evaluates critiques of arguments. To do so, we need a large number of both good and bad arguments about decision theory (and other areas of Philosophy.)
How you’ll learn: If you would like to learn about decision theory, anthropics, open source game theory, …, we supply you with a curriculum. There’s a lot of leeway for what exactly you want to learn about. You go through the readings.
If you already know things and just want to test your ideas, you can optionally skip this step.
Your contribution: While doing your readings, you, write up critiques of arguments you read.
Bottom-line: We get to use your arguments/critiques for our projects and you get our feedback on them. (We have to read and label them for the project anyway.)
Logistics: Unfortunately, you’d be a volunteer. I might be able to pay you a small amount out-of-pocket, but it’s not going to be very much. Caspar and Em are both university employed and I am similar in means to an independent researcher. We are also all non-Americans based in the US which makes it harder for us to acquire money for projects and such for boring and annoying reasons.
Why are we good mentors: Caspar has dozens of publications on related topics. Em has a handful. And I have been around.
2. Be a saint and help with acausal research by doing tedious manual labor and getting little in return
We also need help with various grindy tasks that aren’t super helpful for learning, e.g. turning pdfs with equations etc. into sensible txts to feed to LLMs. If you’re motivated to help with that, we would be extremely grateful.
I have a weird amount of experience with the second thing (dealing with formatted PDFs) and may be able to help—feel free to DM!