Help Fund Lukeprog at SIAI

By check? Can you PM or email me with the name? The reason I ask is so that I can figure out how close HPMOR is to the 4-day update threshold, add it into my calculations in advance, and make sure it doesn't get double-counted when the actual check arrives. (BTW, do you want credit with my thousands of fanatic readers for bringing the threshold closer?)

Feels counterintuitive, but if just 50 people establish arrangements like this one, SingInst gets a reliable supply of funding on the current spending level independent of funding rallies or big-sum donors.

Do you want credit with HPMOR's grateful readers, and if so should it be under Rain or your true name?

Luke has shown this skill publicly on Less Wrong and also on his blog, with this distilled analysis of Eliezer's writing "Reading Yudkowsky."

Do you have links handy? :)

By doing that, you gain "maximum info" for yourself while denying it to others; in particular, if there's a last-minute rush then anyone donating before the end of that rush may well be misled about whether the limit is likely to be reached.

It's not necessarily wrong to favour yourself over others. But it seems a bit weird to do so in the context of a charitable donation...

Among the ultimate criteria for the minicamps is their impact on long-term life success. To assess this, both minicamp participants and a control group completed a long, anonymous survey containing many indicators of life success (income, self-reported happiness and anxiety levels, many questions about degree of social connectedness and satisfaction with relationships, etc.); we plan to give it again to both groups a year after mini-camp, to see whether minicampers improved more than controls. I’m eager to see and update from those results, but we’re only a couple months into the year’s waiting period. (The reason we decided ahead of time to wait a year is that minicamp aimed to give participants tools for personal change; and, for example, it takes time for improved social skills, strategicness, and career plans to translate into income.)

Meanwhile, we’re working with self-report measures because they are what we have. But they are more positive than I anticipated, and that can’t be a bad sign. I was also positively surprised by the number of rationality, productivity, and social effectiveness habits that participants reported using regularly, in response to my email asking, two months out. To quote a significant fraction of the numerical data from the exit survey (from the last day of minicamp), for those who haven’t seen participants’ ratings:

• In answer to “Zero to ten, are you glad you came?”, the median answer was 10 (mean was 9.3).
• In answer to “Zero to ten, will your life go significantly differently because you came to mini-camp?” the median answer was 7.5 (the mean was 6.9). [This was the response that was most positively surprising to me.]
• In answer to “Zero to ten, has your epistemic rationality improved?”, the median answer was 7 (mean 6.9)
• In answer to “Zero to ten, are you more motivated to learn epistemic rationality, than you were when you came?”, the median answer was 8.5 (mean 8.1)
• In answer to “Zero to ten, have you become more skilled at modifying your emotions and dispositions?”, the median answer was 7 (mean 6.3).
• In answer to “Zero to ten, are you more motivated to modify your emotions and dispositions, than you were when you came?”, the median answer was 9 (mean 8.3).
• In answer to “Zero to ten, are you more motivated to gain social skills than you were when you came?”, the median answer was 8 (mean 7.7).
• In answer to “Zero to ten, have you gained social skills since coming?”, the median answer was 7.5 (mean 7.2).
• In answer to “zero to ten, did you like Luke’s sessions?”, the median answer was 9 (mean answer 8.7).

Some excerpts from the survey, about about Luke’s sessions in particular:

• “Luke is an excellent presenter. These sessions exceeded my expectations: I am convinced I have under-valued social interaction and techniques and that I can accelerate my success curve by aggressively adopting them. ”
• “I really liked Luke's sessions. They were fun and interactive and well put together. There is an effect of being a bit more personally interested in the material.”
• “Very useful content. Great presentation of it. Very good at handling the practical camp-issues and also useful fashion tips.”
• “Luke’s sessions were concise, and well structured. Good PPT templates!”
• “The social effectiveness and fashion sessions were very useful for me. ”
• “Some parts of some sessions i felt went too slowly... but mostly extremely valuable information. wish we could have more social skills sessions - i would take another camp just for these super low-hanging fruit.”
• “Luke gave concrete examples and advice. It was very helpful.”
• “Luke was great as a session leader. His sessions were very clearly, cleanly organized, and discussions in his sessions were handled very well. Luke has, by far, the presence to lead a discussion among 16 people. :)”
• “Luke was great. His sessions hit the relevant points in an effective manner.”
• “Luke was very helpful and knowledgeable. The pace of his sessions was really good, and there was a lot of room for discussion. Luke also gave some helpful and specific fashion advice. ”
• “Pretty much everything with Luke was phenomenal... Luke really made this whole camp worthwhile. I know this is more praise than constructive feedback, but I legitimately can't think of anything!”

I worked on mini-camp with Luke, and I can honestly say that it’s only because of Luke that we were able to hold minicamp at all, and also that he was a phenomenal work partner in organizing the camp, getting all the logistics together, and generally making it a positive and, for many, life-changing experience.

More generally: In minicamp and other SingInst projects, Luke combines energy, reliable ability to carry projects to completion, and strategicness as to which projects make sense and which aspects of those projects are most worth the extra effort; if you’re looking to reduce existential risk, making it possible for SingInst to stably hire Luke seems to me to offer unusually good bang for your buck.

SilasBarta,

We collected lots of data before and during minicamp. We are waiting for some time to pass before collecting followup data, because it takes time for people's lives to change, if they're going to change. Minicamp was only a couple months ago.

Minicampers are generally still in contact, and indeed we are still gathering data. For example, several minicampers sent me before and after photos concerning their fashion (which was part of the social effectiveness section of the minicamp) and I'm going to show them to people on the street and ask them to choose which look they prefer (without indicating which is 'before' and which one is 'after').

So yes: by all qualitative measures, minicamp seems to have been a success. The early quantitative measures have been taken, but before-and-after results will have to wait a while.

As for future rationality training, we are taking the data gathered from minicamp and boot camp and also from some market research we did and trying to build a solid curriculum. To my knowledge, four people are seriously working on this project, and Eliezer is one of them.

Cheers,

Luke

I agree with 'more testing and evidence, please', but you often come across as adversarial and I think that generally makes it harder for you to convince the people you want to convince.

As an aside, remember that the minicamp was a relatively unplanned event; it came about because SIAI had extra time and space. I will be more concerned if the megacamp has a similar lack of testing.

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One of the many things I updated on as a result of the 9-week bootcamp is the importance of tone. I'm sympathetic to your data-crusade, but the way in which you're prosecuting it is leading me to dislike you.

You've made a number of posts indicating that you place a high priority on finding and joining a rationalist community. That will be more difficult if you are generally perceived by rationalists as a hostile conversationalist; you should be more strategic about achieving your goals.

Upvoted, and props for sticking to your guns on this.

I appreciate that substantiating this sort of thing is non-trivial, but I would like to see at least an effort at some sort of evaluation.

At the very least I would like to see some kind of plan for evaluating future ventures... it may be too late now for anything but post-hoc qualitative for the mini-camp (or mega-camp?). Except that we did take a survey just before the camp, whose general idea I remember but not the specific questions, and I think there are plans to send it out again 10 months from now. Unfortunately that survey is available online IIRC, but I won't go look at it.

I take it $100 was the lower bound on the various donations you were considering?

Thanks, this is good to know and really should have been stated on the donations page.

Because of this, I set up a $50/month pledge (instead of a one-time donation of $500), and I hope this drive causes lots of people to do the same.

Had already donated; but learning this prompted me to add a monthly donation as well. What makes it qualify as a 12-month-pledge though, as opposed to an indefinite-period-direct-debit? I didn't see any language to that effect. Is there a super-secret form I should have used?

You missed my favorite comment of all time, by dripgrind. I think a reason it wasn't more widely publicized is expressed by Plasmon.

Hi wmorgan, you should sign up for the SIAI email list for future announcements. It's on the singinst.org homepage where it says "Email sign up". Thanks for your donation!

lukeprog doesn't need food; he needs subscription access.

Luke subsists on tritium and modafinil.

May I suggest that with regard to Eliezers HP/MOR-Challenge the page gets updated at least once every 24 hours, possible even more often?

Also, will Bitcoin donations be matched by their dollar exchange rate?

I came up with a better idea than waiting for an answer to this: I just donated 2.74 bitcoin to SIAI. According to MtGox, the last trade was at a price of $10.8 per bitcoin, so that works out to about $30. If you are reading this, I encourage you to take the initiative and match this contribution yourself.

Thanks for donating, and for taking advantage of the monthly subscription counting for a full year of pledged funds.

Should this really be under main, and promoted at that?

Yes, absolutely. Calls for action in support of causes associated with this site are material for promoted front page articles. It is valuable to send the message that participating, actually donating money rather than just thinking "That's nice, SIAI is hiring another research fellow", is important by giving prominence to the announcement.

Does that now include pengvado's $10,000?

From the article, my semi-guess is that the SIAI has a number of things they'd like to fund, one of which is hiring Luke. If you think that hiring Luke is more important than other things the SIAI could be doing with immediate income right now, then you can specify that in your donation and make it happen.

Which brings up a question: what are the other things the SIAI would be spending new money on other than hiring Luke? Nothing against Luke, who is clearly awesome, but it's hard to build an ordered list of preferences if every choice but one is labelled "???".

#include "dripgrind.h"

Will you?

It does charge a 5% fee which is not small.

By the off chance that you'd happen to have a Visa Electron, PayPal will accept it as if it were a credit card.

Paypal monthly donation can do it using a registered bank account (direct debit), or any other source accepted by Paypal.

Saying "the rationality minicamp was highly successful" before you have analyzed the data you have gathered to assess the success of the rationality minicamp is irrational.

I am in the mind of Einstein's Arrogance here. The people involved in the camps received a lot of evidence that (obviously) isn't available to us, because we weren't there. They might have enough evidence to be convinced that it worked already - but of course, they also set up data-gathering mechanisms so that they could have enough evidence to convince people who necessarily don't have access to the the physical experience of the camp that it worked.

I expect that this is the case, and Eliezer sees absolutely no problem with citing this as something in favour of Luke's hire.

I would be unsurprised if later transparent analysis showed the minicamp to be highly successful

What do you mean by unsurprised? Some words don't communicate as well as we feel they do.

I was at the camp. It was spectacularly awesome in my judgement, too, and Luke was a big part of that. \end{soft.bayesian.evidence}

Specifically, the camp is tied for the title of the most life-altering workshop-like event of my life, and I've been to many such events, inside and outside academia (~3 per year for the past 10 years). The tie is with the workshop that got me onto my PhD topic (graphical causal modelling), so that's saying something.