MIRI's 2013 Summer Matching Challenge

I continue to donate $1000 per month despite a 20% pay cut.

Wrote a cheque for $5,000.

(I put the redacted image of my donation online because someone else decided to start an ad-hoc fundraising effort for MIRI on FIMFiction.)

Donated 500 USD (~530 CAD).

Donated $50 (on top of my automated monthly donation).

Donated $500.

$200, and finally signed up for monthly donations as well.

$10.00

I'm a student and this is my second PayPal transaction ever, so I was a bit scared to donate more.

Hopefully my example will inspire anybody else. $10.00 isn't very much, but come on, it's not like it is worse than not donating anything at all.

$1,200 donated.

I'd like to remark on something that annoys me: Your "donation meter" (at least the one on your site, if not the one in the post above) ought either be certain to be updated daily, or at the very least it should note when it was last updated. I find the phrase "raised to date" frustrating and annoying when I can't trust that the "to date" is actually current.

yadda yadda, continuing to donate 1/3 of my income, yadda yadda

feed me karma

$3,000.00

I'd like to say that PMs from private_messaging disparaging this drive and my donations will NOT deter me from funding the mission I feel will help lead to the best possible future.

$1,000 and my employer will match it.

I donated $1000 and then went and bought Facing the Intelligence Explosion for the bare minimum price. (Just wanted to put that out there.)

I've also left myself a reminder to consider another donation a few days before this runs out. It'll depend on my financial situation, but I should be able to manage it.

I donated. My employers match charitable donations, though not always in a timely fashion. I'm hoping that their contribution can be further matched.

Wow, MIRI is more underfunded than I thought. I donated again, after freeing up some cash.

Donated 1400$

Currently between jobs; donated $100 anyway, as the world is not a story and will not wait for my montage to finish.

I donated $5000.

Donated $50.

$50.

Donated $50.

Donated 0.9766578425 bitcoins, a number I chose since that's Chaitin's Omega for the shortest FAI.

Donated $50.

Just curious, whatever happened to EY's rationality books? You invested months of effort into them. Did you pull a sunk cost reversal? Or is publishing them not on the schedule till next year.

66$, with some help of a friend.

I've only just now gotten a job, and may owe my dad too much money to make this donation drive, but I'll see what I can do. If things go as planned, I might be able to give 700 by the deadline.

Also, isn't three weeks something of a short window?

The links to Eliezer's Open Problems in FAI papers are broken.

For the goal of eventually creating FAI, it seems work can be roughly divided into making the first AGI (1) have humane values and (2) keep those values. Current attention seems to be focused on the 2nd category of problems. The work I've seen in the first category: CEV (9 years old!), Paul Christiano's man-in-a-box indirect normativity, Luke's decision neuroscience, Daniel Dewey's value learning... I really like these approaches but they are only very early starting points compared to what will eventually be required.

Do you have any plans to tackle the humane values problem? Do MIRI-folk have strong opinions on which direction is most promising? My worry is that if this problem really is as intractable as it seems, then working on problem (2) is not helpful, and our only option might be to prevent AGI from being developed through global regulation and other very difficult means.

I think small donors should also state their donations amounts of 50-100 dollars. Having counted the medium and large donations in this thread to a rough total of 11,000 dollars, it seems unlikely that the goal is being reached with just those, and I have a feeling there will be some sort of "breaking the ice" effect if small donors chirped up about their chip ins, so to speak. Right now the number of medium and large donors represented in this thread eclipses the smalls.

I was going to donate (a not-huge amount) but I can't because Paypal won't accept my credit card. Don't know why. I did have a Paypal account that got blocked years ago for some unknown reason that I've never bothered to fix since it requires faxing documentation or some such nonsense.

I wonder, if this community has the allegiance of at least 100 rationalists in the 80th percentile for rationality, how much money could be raised if all of them tried to form separate start-ups as feeder companies for MIRI?