Posts By: Rob Bensinger

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, the LessWrong team has put together a database of resources for learning about the disease and staying updated, and 80,000 Hours has a new write-up on ways to help in the fight against COVID-19. In my non-MIRI time, I've been keeping my own quick and informal notes on various sources' COVID-19… Read more »

Updates Colm reviews our 2019 fundraiser: taking into account matching, we received a total of $601,120 from 250+ donors. Our thanks again for all the support! Evan Hubinger's Exploring Safe Exploration clarifies points he raised in Safe Exploration and Corrigibility. The issues raised here are somewhat subtler than may be immediately apparent, since we tend to discuss things in ways that… Read more »

Updates Our 2019 fundraiser ended Dec. 31. We'll have more to say in a few weeks in our fundraiser retrospective, but for now, a big thank you to the ~240 donors who together donated more than $526,000, including $67,484 in the first 20 seconds of Giving Tuesday (not counting matching dollars, which have yet to be announced).  Jan. 15… Read more »

From now through the end of December, MIRI's 2019 Fundraiser is live! See our fundraiser post for updates on our past year and future plans. One of our biggest updates, I'm happy to announce, is that we've hired five new research staff, with a sixth to join us in February. For details, see Workshops and… Read more »

I'm happy to announce that Nate Soares and Ben Levinstein's “Cheating Death in Damascus” has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Philosophy (previously voted the second-highest-quality journal in philosophy). In other news, MIRI researcher Buck Shlegeris has written over 12,000 words on a variety of MIRI-relevant topics in an EA Forum AMA. (Example topics: advice… Read more »

Updates Ben Pace summarizes a second round of AI Alignment Writing Day posts. The Zettelkasten Method: MIRI researcher Abram Demski describes a note-taking system that's had a large positive effect on his research productivity. Will MacAskill writes a detailed critique of functional decision theory; Abram Demski (1, 2) and Matthew Graves respond in the comments. News and… Read more »

Updates We ran a very successful MIRI Summer Fellows Program, which included a day where participants publicly wrote up their thoughts on various AI safety topics. See Ben Pace’s first post in a series of roundups. A few highlights from the writing day: Adele Lopez's Optimization Provenance; Daniel Kokotajlo's Soft Takeoff Can Still Lead to Decisive Strategic Advantage and The… Read more »

Updates MIRI research associate Stuart Armstrong is offering $1000 for good questions to ask an Oracle AI. Recent AI safety posts from Stuart: Indifference: Multiple Changes, Multiple Agents; Intertheoretic Utility Comparison: Examples; Normalising Utility as Willingness to Pay; and Partial Preferences Revisited. MIRI researcher Buck Shlegeris has put together a quick and informal AI safety reading… Read more »