Diego Caleiro · 2016-01-09 · EA Forum
1) Convergence Analysis: The idea here is to create a Berkeley affiliated research institute that operates mainly in two fronts 1)Strategy on the long term future 2)Finding Crucial Considerations that have not been considered or researched yet. We have an interesting group of academics and I would take a mixed position of CEO and researcher.
2) Altruism: past, present, propagation: this is a book whose table of contents I already wrote, and would need further research and spelling out each of the 250 sections I have in mind. It is very different in nature from Will's book, or Singer's book. The idea here is not to introduce to EA, but to reason about the history of cooperation and altruism that led to us, and where this can be taken in the future, inclusive by the EA movement. This would be major intellectual undertaking, likely consuming my next three years and doubling as a PHD dissertation. Perhaps, tripling as a series of blog posts, for quick feedback loops and reliable writer motivation.
3) FLI grant proposal: Our proposal intended to increase our understanding psychological theories of human morality in order to facilitate later work in formalizing moral cognition to AIs, a subset of the value loading and control problems of Artificial Generalized Intelligence. We didn't win, so the plan here would be to try to find other funding sources for this research.
4) Accelerate the PHD: For that I need to do 3 field statements, one about the control problem in AI with Stuart, one about altruism with Deacon, and one to be determined, then only the dissertation would be still on the to do list.
All these plans scored sufficiently high in my calculations that it is hard to decide between them. Accelerating the PHD has a major disadvantage because it does not increase my funding. The book (via blog posts or not) has a strong advantage in that I think it will have sufficiently new material that it satisfies goal 1 best of all, it is probably the best for the world if I manage to get to the end of it and do it well. But again, it doesn't increase funding. Convergence has the advantage of co-working with very smart people, and if it takes off sufficiently well, it could solve the problem of continuing to live in Berkeley and that of financial constraints all at once, putting me in a stable position to continue doing research in relevant topics almost indeterminately, instead of having to make ends meet by downsizing the EA goal substantially among my priorities. So very high stakes, but uncertain probabilities. If AI is (nearly) all that matters, then the FLI grant will be the highest impact, followed by Convergence, the book and the acceleration.
In any event all of those are incredible opportunities which I feel lucky to even have in my consideration space. It is a privilege to be making that choice, but it is also very hard. So conditional on the goals I stated before: 1)Making the world better by the most effective means possible. 2)Continuing to live in Berkeley 3)Receive more funding 4)Not stop PHD 5)Use my knowledge and background to do (1).
I am looking for some light, some perspective from the outside that will make me lean one way or another. I have been uncomfortably indecisive for months, and maybe your analysis can help.
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