The $125,000 Summer Singularity Challenge

You deserve praise. Would you like some praise?

Thank you SO MUCH for the clarification VNKKET linked to. I was worried. I would usually discourage someone from donating all of their savings to any cause including this one, but in this case it looks like you have thought it through and what you are doing a) make sense and b) is the result of a well thought out lifestyle optimization process.

I'd be happy to talk with you or exchange email (my email is public) to discuss the details, both to better learn to optimize my life and to try to help you with yours, since I expect that efforts will be high return, given the evidence that you are a person who actually does the things that you think would be good lifestyle optimizations at least some of the time.

I'm also desperately interested in better characterizing people who optimize their lifestyles and who try to live without fear etc.

Nice! And for anyone freaked out by the "current balance of my bank account" part, there's an explanation here.

This is admirable.

However, it's important to note that the path that maximizes your own individual hardship is not necessarily the one that maximizes your contribution to humanity's future. For example, it's possible that by keeping some of that money, you could buy luxuries (like, say, a Netflix subscription) that would allow you to recover more quickly from work-related weariness and spend your evenings starting an online company (or acquiring the skills necessary to start an online company, and then starting an online company) that would result in a larger expected donation to SIAI in the long term.

I used to have your attitude of "live very frugally and give SIAI every spare dollar". My new attitude is optimize for both high income and low expenses (keeping in mind that spending money on myself increases my expected income up to a certain point), and to not donate to SIAI automatically--I'm thinking of starting a rival charity in the long run (due to vague intuition, based on very limited evidence, that healthy competition can be good for charities, and the fact that I have some ideas that I think might be better than SIAI's that Michael Vassar doesn't seem interested in).

By the way, I declare Crocker's Rules--it would be extremely valuable if someone provided persuasive evidence that I'm on the wrong track.

Only on this site would you see perfectly ordinary charity fundraising techniques described as "dark arts", while in the next article over, the community laments the poor image of the concept of beheading corpses and then making them rise again.

Agreed; I'd personally like if a planned schedule for major grants was disclosed regularly, maybe annually.

Anyway, I donated 500 USD.

Disagree about the dark arts, but upvoted for donating anyways.

It did this ("Anonymous Donor") to me, too.

There's a major conflict of interest in accepting donations from Clippy.

I would accept donations from Lucifer himself if he was silly enough to give them to me. I don't see a problem. :)

Really? If a paperclipper loses resources and the SIAI gains resources, the benefit is probably greater than if a human donated the same amount.

No, there isn't.

By the way, I think I'll go to the Singularity Summit this year. It is 385 USD if done before the end of July 31 EST.

We're a cooperative bunch.

I actually do think it's a big deal, as well as being flashy, though not an extremely big deal. Something along the lines of the best narrow AI accomplishment of any given year and the flashiest of any given 3-5 year period.

Further to my previous comment, I found the second final Jeopardy puzzle to be instructive. The category was "US Cities" and the clue was this:

Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.

A reasonably smart human will come up with an algorithm on the fly for solving this, which is to start thinking of major US cities (likely to have 2 or more airports); remember the names of their airports, and think about whether any of the names sound like a battle or a war hero. The three obvious cities to try are Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. And "Midway" definitely sounds like the name of a battle.

But Watson was totally clueless. Even though it had the necessary information, it had to rely on pre-programmed algorithms to access that information. It was apparently unable to come up with a new algorithm on the fly.

Probably Watson relies heavily on statistical word associations. If the puzzle has "Charles Shulz" and "This Dog" in it, it will probably guess "Snoopy" without really parsing the puzzle. I'm just speculating here, but my impression is that AI has a long way to go.

I found Watson to be pretty disappointing.

For one thing, it's big advantage was inhuman button-pushing speed since an actuator is much faster than a human finger. Now, one might argue that pushing the button is part of the game, but to that I would respond that reading the puzzles off of the right screen is part of the game too and Watson didn't have to do that -- the puzzles were inputted in the form of a text file. Also, travelling to Los Angeles is part of the game and Watson didn't have to do that either. If the game had been played in Los Angeles instead of New York, then all of Watson's responses would have been delayed by a few hundredths of a second.

Another problem is that a lot of the puzzles on Jeopardy don't actually require much intelligence to solve particularly if you can write a specialized program for each puzzle category. For example, I would guess a competent computer science grad student could pretty easily write a program that did reasonably well in "state capitals" And of the puzzles which do require some intelligence, the two human champions will split the points.

I'm not saying that Watson wasn't impressive, just that it's win was not convincing.

This seems relevant:

Five: US tax law prohibits public charities from getting too much support from big donors.

Under US tax law, a 501(c)(3) public charity must maintain a certain percentage of "public support". As with most tax rules, this one is complicated. If, over a four-year period, any one individual donates more than 2% of the organization's total support, anything over 2% does not count as "public support". If a single donor supported a charity, its public support percentage would be only 2%. If two donors supported a charity, its public support percentage would be at most 4%. Public charities must maintain a public support percentage of at least 10% and preferably 33.3%. Small donations - donations of less than 2% of our total support over a four-year period - count entirely as public support. Small donations permit us to accept more donations from our major supporters without sending our percentage of public support into the critical zone. Currently, the Singularity Institute is running short on public support - so please don't think that small donations don't matter!

Here's my totally non-binding plan for my $1100 extra dollars that really were just lying around, budgeted but projected to not be spent: If we meet the full challenge, donate $1100 to SingInst and have Microsoft match it as well. If we meet only e.g. 80%, donate 80% of $1100 and have Microsoft match it, and spend the rest on a party I wouldn't have had otherwise and link y'all to tasteful pictures. That's a x3 multiplier on ~1% of the $125,000.

Before your post, bentarm, my plan was somewhat different but I estimate it gave at least a 2.9x multiplier.

Status affiliation, feeling even better about donating, creating an "event" which can be linked to and discussed, providing encouragement to others, and likely other reasons I'm not thinking of right now.

I'm betting Peter Thiel also used it to judge popular support for the idea when he ran a $400,000 challenge in 2007. IIRC, they didn't even make it halfway by the deadline, which likely reduced his subsequent donations.

I sent an internet email to User:Kevin describing the terms of my matching donor pledge, and then signed the internet email with my GPG key.

Essentially, the claim is that 20 of SingInst's regular donors have extra money lying around that they are willing to donate to SingInst iff someone else donates the same amount.

Bear with my broad strokes here.

Let the utility u of donating x dollars to SingInst be diminishing: u = x^(1/3).

Assume that hedonistic spending can be spread over enough options to make diminishing returns negligible: u = x

The donor then donates their first dollar to SingInst, whereupon hedonistic spending provides them more utils.

The utility u of providing x dollars of a dollar-for-dollar service for SingInst donors is: u = (2x)^(1/3), and the donor gets up to ~1.415 dollars (to gain 2.83 dollars worth of donating utility!) before hedonistic spending is a better option. So this answers the first claim: they are willing to donate extra money iff someone else donates, and they intend to spend it on some other form of utility otherwise. The nature of dollar-for-dollar matching increases the utility they gain from their dollar.

As for the second part... there's no need to commit to a binding agreement to not donate the leftover to SingInst at the end. Say the donor donated a dollar by themselves, then offered up to 41 cents matching contribution. Other donors take advantage of this offer by 20 cents - the donor still has another 21 cents of positive utility before hedonistic spending takes over, but the matching period ends at this point in time. (Why end the matching period? I'll get there in a second). At this point, those 21 cents will generate .21 utils if spent hedonistically, but only .06 utils if donated without matching.

So the nature of diminishing utility will produce this behaviour. It's not so suspicious a premise, in the end.

There are two questions here that deserve separate consideration: donating to existential risk reduction vs. other (nearer-term, lower-uncertainty) philanthropy, and donating to SI vs. other x-risk reduction efforts. It seems to me that you should never be weighing SI against malaria nets directly; if you would donate to (SI / malaria nets) conditional on their effectiveness, you've already decided (for / against) x-risk reduction and should only be considering alternatives like (FHI / vaccination programs).

They planned on doing an academic paper on the topic, though it hasn't been completed yet. Here's Anna Salamon's presentation, estimating 8 lives saved per dollar donated to SingInst.

And for something in the developing world aid space, Village Reach is generally considered to be the most efficient.

http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villagereach

The method of donation will change what you see: the Causes.com form started with a pre-fill of $25.

The Humble Indie Bundle team actually did A/B testing with multiple donation forms, one of which included a set dollar amount, another which included rolling average, and at least one other. Such testing may show that a running average would discourage large donors, thereby reducing overall donations.

A running-average pre-fill sounds much better to me.

I think it is a good signal of more broad-based support when this sort of thing is promoted by supporters. Go for it.

(And getting things done can be more important than making things "official".)

I have to say, I've seen SIAI and Yudkowsky criticized as wasting their time & money many times before, but I think this is the first time I've seen someone identify the waste as a waste of eugenics!

The actual bottom line is that, as a potential confounding factor that might prevent a singularity from ever happening, dysgenic decline is even less of a threat than global warming. But thanks for playing!