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Mikhail Samin

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Mikhail Samin

22 days ago

@mdickens We mainly plan to use ads targeting different narrow audiences; and then to compare the impact different messages have on the engagement and on actions people than take on a website (we’ll also be asking them to complete surveys, though that won’t be very informative due to selection effects).

There are downsides (the feedback is somewhat low-resolution, social media algorithms might add noise as they won’t be showing the ads to random samples of people), but it seems much cheaper than using mechanical turks/focus groups and provides much shorter feedback loops.

(I also shared a bit on our longer-term strategy and how we'll use our results with Michael.)

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Mikhail Samin

2 months ago

@Austin thanks! I vaguely remembered this being explicitly allowed but couldn’t quickly find it was from the FAQ

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Mikhail Samin

3 months ago

@Arepo I’ve looked at all projects in the AI governance category (though I don’t think I opened/read all of them).

(I’m generally pretty skeptical about most things people are doing and none of the very valuable AI governance EA projects are represented on Manifund.)

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Mikhail Samin

3 months ago

@Arepo

  • (I am confused about the comparison to prisoner’s dilemma. In true prisoner’s dilemma, you want to mutually cooperate, but also, you defect against a stone with “cooperate” written on it. But this is not a prisoner’s dilemma, true or otherwise? I assume you just meant “defection” and weren’t referring to prisoner’s dilemma-class games.)

  • Quadratic matching of funding means that donating a lot to your own project if others don’t doesn’t produce corresponding matching. There could be a form of prisoner’s dilemma cooperation, where people associated with 5 orgs donated to the others equally, resulting in a lot of funds matched, without providing a lot of informational value. That would’ve been off-putting to a funder considering this and defection from something expected (and sad if EAs tried to play the system this way).

  • I’ve donated >$30k of own money to many of my own projects, as they often seem to me to be the highest impact opportunities (this is why I run them). I’m confused how donating instead to something that doesn’t seem as cost-effective would make the donation based on more valuable information.

  • I’m honestly unaware of better impact opportunities. $700 is seven thousand people clicking on a website explaining x-risk from AI. I’ve added to my balance here and donated $50 to Lightcone, but that was mostly purchasing fuzzies, not utilons.

  • I’m assuming donating to one’s own project is ok and it’s assumed that people can freely do that if they decide to. If a future funder doesn’t want that to happen, they ask people not to (and receive slightly less information).

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Mikhail Samin

3 months ago

LW is the most-visited website on my phone. I’m not sure how valuable a marginal donation is, but seems vaguely good to support

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Mikhail Samin

3 months ago

@NeelNanda thanks a lot for flagging this! DMed him.

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Mikhail Samin

3 months ago

@NeelNanda not intentionally- where do I edit this?

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Mikhail Samin

9 months ago

Thoughts:

  • Rowling now limits printing fan fiction to 25 copies. (It’s not clear to what extent she would care, but beware that it might be illegal/etc.; you can contact her agent if seems important and you’re unsure.)

  • Getting people with high potential to read HPMOR might be great.

  • Getting random people to read HPMOR via giving them printed books is probably not cost-effective, you can do that cheaper.

  • In Russia, we have thousands of copies essentially for free (it was impossible to to spend on anything other than printing), the cost of delivery to people is usually <$5, and we target winners of national and international olympiads&competitions. To get a book, a student needs to be actively interested and fill out a form. A bunch of people whose opinions high-potential students in Russia might value endorsed HPMOR, which we use, and there are huge network effects we achieved and used. I have no idea how you get to anything similar without first getting some sort of influencers to endorse the book.

  • (We also buy and give copies of The Precipice and Human Compatible to students who receive HPMOR. And we do surveys etc. to have some measure of the impact.)

  • So far, we’ve sent copies of HPMOR to 1.3k winners of olympiads. Again, I have no idea how anything like that would be possible to achieve without having aligned media, aligned people who prepare regional & national teams for olympiads, aligned famous science communicators, literary critics, etc. (it got to the point of even an unaligned most famous modern Russian sci fi author talking negatively about the book).

  • Possibly think about other ways to get people with high potential to read HPMOR? I expect it could be much more cost-effective than via printing physical copies.

Transactions

ForDateTypeAmount
Testing and spreading messages to reduce AI x-riskabout 2 months agoproject donation700
Lightcone Infrastructure3 months agoproject donation50
Manifund Bank3 months agomana deposit+50
Manifund Bank3 months agodeposit+700