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Steven Byrnes

@SteveByrnes

AGI safety / alignment and neuroscience researcher at Astera Institute

https://sjbyrnes.com/
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About Me

I'm an AGI safety / AI alignment researcher in Boston with a particular focus on brain algorithms. Research Fellow at Astera. See https://sjbyrnes.com/agi.html for a summary of my research and sorted list of writing. Physicist by training.

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Steven Byrnes

5 months ago

As a full-time AGI safety / alignment researcher (see my research output), I can say with confidence that I wouldn’t have been able to get into the field in the first place, and certainly wouldn’t have made a fraction as much progress, without lesswrong / alignment forum (LW/AF). I continue to be extremely reliant on it for my research progress. For example, I sometimes consider publishing AGI safety ideas in peer-reviewed journals, but every time I think it through, I wind up deciding not to, for one of various reasons (1, 2). (And even if I do academic-style publication on occasion in the future, there’s no chance it would make sense for me to do so exclusively.) Likewise, I sometimes consider switching to substack, but contra @Austin, I do think LW/AF benefits strongly from being a community forum and not just a blogging platform. In particular, my own experience is that the comment threads on LW/AF have been (and still remain) systematically much more intellectually productive than on other parts of the internet—I get great comments on my posts, and have highly fruitful discussions, often with people whom I feel like I’ve gotten to know very well over time. I think this productivity is the result of a million carefully-considered decisions by the Lightcone team around not only moderation and onboarding but also every tiny detail of the site and comment sections and so on, leading to a community with sufficient shared background knowledge, shared discourse norms, etc. to have very deep and productive and patient conversations. In general, I think “abundant back-and-forth written correspondence” has long been the backbone of intellectual progress—e.g. Darwin wrote 7,500 letters and Einstein wrote 14,000—and I think Lightcone via LW/AF is really doing pioneering work to push that medium forward.

I don’t have much opinion about Lightcone’s other projects. For example, I don’t live in California and have only been to Lighthaven very briefly. (It seemed nice though!) But I’m so very enthusiastic about how LW/AF is run that I’m happy to give the team my money without restrictions and trust them to make good decisions.

I don’t have a lot of money to donate, but I expect Lightcone to be my primary (or maybe only) x-risk-oriented donation. I gave $3250 to Lightcone (via CFAR) in 2023, and plan to give a similar (or hopefully greater) amount next time I do my donations (probably late 2024 or January 2025 depending on my tax situation). However, I’m also giving a $100 token donation right now, just as a show of good faith to go along with this comment. :)

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