Move-in application for room in 4-bedroom house at south edge of Berkeley

Starting as early as November 1 (January move-ins also okay), and available at least until August 1, 2017 (longer if we renew the lease), we’ve got a room available in a nice-looking house in a classy neighborhood at the south edge of Berkeley with awesome housemates (all CFAR alumni).

Scroll all the way to the bottom to apply.

Price:

Pretty much the best deal you will find in a house this big and nice:
  • \$1370/mo for one person
  • \$1820/mo for two people

The House

Ours is a large house, with nice features like:

  • separate living room, dining room, and kitchen that are great for hosting events;
  • three restrooms including 3 toilets, 1 bath/shower, and 1 standing shower;
  • plenty of hot water (I’ve never run out during a long shower);
  • no smoking, and no furry pets (and we’re keeping it that way);
  • backyard with deck and bike shed;
  • washer/dryer in-house.

More house pics here.

The bedroom:

  • Main area: 143″ x 153″ (152 square feet)
  • Closet: 95″ x 25″ (16.5 square feet)
  • Height: 109″
  • Comes with a mattress, and a desk.

More bedroom pics here.

Location

  • approximately 6300 Colby Street (exact address available after you apply)
  • beautiful neighborhood at the south edge of Berkeley (lots of nice trees and flowers around)
  • 5 minute walk from the 6 line (to downtown Berkeley and downtown Oakland)
  • 6 minute walk to Safeway (24 hour grocery/drug store), Flavors of India, Mitama Japanese restaurant, Noah’s Bagels, Barcote Ethiopian restaurant.
  • 15 minute walk from both Rockridge station (yellow BART line) and Ashby station (Red/Orange BART lines).

People:

Your housemates will be:

  • Andrew Critch: AI postdoctoral researcher at MIRI and UC Berkeley (me)
  • Anjali Gopal: PhD student in bioengineering at UC Berkeley, and
  • Qiaochu Yuan: PhD student in mathematics at UC Berkeley.

We care a lot about about fun, rationality, team-work, learning, networking, and growth mindset.

Leave us your information below if you’re interested in moving in! We’ll contact you to arrange a visit to the house so you can check it out first.

Professional feedback form

Leveraging academia

Since a lot of interest in AI alignment has started to build, I’m getting a lot more emails of the form “Hey, how can I get into this hot new field?”. This is great. In the past I was getting so few messages like this that I could respond to basically all of them with many hours of personal conversation.

But now I can’t respond to everybody anymore, so I have a new plan: leverage academia.

To grossly oversimplify things, here’s the heuristic. If the typical prospective researcher (say, an inbound grad student at a top school) needs 100 hours of guidance/mentorship to become a productive contributor to AI alignment research, maybe only 10 of those hours need to come from someone already in the field, and the remaining 90 hours can come from other researchers in CS/ML/math/econ/neuro/cogsci. So if I have 100 hours of guidance to give this year, I can choose between mentoring 1 person, or 10 people who are getting 90% of their guidance elsewhere. The latter produces more researchers, and potentially researchers of a higher quality because of the diversity of views they’re seeing (provided the student has the filter-out-incorrect-views property, which is of course critical). So that’s what I’m doing, and this blog post is my generic response to questions about how to get into AI alignment research 🙂

I think this policy might also be a good filter for good-team-players, in the following sense: When you’re part of a team, it’s quite helpful if you can leverage resources outside your team to solve the team’s problems without having to draw heavily on the team’s internal resources. Thus, if you want to be part of a new/young field like AI alignment, it’s nice if you can draw on resources outside that field to make it stronger.

So! If I send you a link to this blog post, please don’t read me as saying “I don’t have any advice for you.” Because I do have some advice: aside from going to grad school and deliberately learning from it, and choosing Berkeley for your PhD/postdoc (or transferring there), I’m also advising that you acquire and demonstrate the quality of drawing from non-scarce resources to help produce scarce ones. Use non-scarce resources to decide what to learn (e.g., read this blog post by Jan Leike); use non-scarce resources to learn that stuff (e.g., college courses, online lectures, books), and use non-scarce resources to demonstrate what you’ve learned (standardized tests, competitions, publications), at least up to the point where you get admitted as a grad student to a top school. And if that school is Berkeley, I will help you find an advisor!

Seeking a paid part-time assistant for AI alignment research

Please share this if you think anyone you know might be interested.

Sometimes in my research I have to do some task on a computer that I could easily outsource, e.g., adding bibliographical data to a list of papers (i.e., when they were written, who the authors were, etc.). If you think you might be interested in trying some work like this, in exchange for

  • $20/hour, paid to you from my own pocket,
  • exposure to the research materials I’m working with, and
  • knowing you’re doing something helpful to AI alignment research, then
Continue reading

Interested in AI Alignment? Apply to Berkeley.

Summary: Researching how to control (“align”) highly-advanced future AI systems is now officially cool, and UC Berkeley is the place to do it.

Interested in AI alignment research? Apply to Berkeley for a PhD or postdoc (deadlines are approaching), or transfer into Berkeley from a PhD or postdoc at another top school. If you get into one of the following programs at Berkeley:

  • a PhD program in computer science, mathematics, logic, or statistics, or
  • a postdoc specializing in cognitive science, cybersecurity, economics, evolutionary biology, mechanism design, neuroscience, or moral philosophy,
… then I will personally help you find an advisor who is supportive of you researching AI alignment, and introduce you to other researchers in Berkeley with related interests.

This was not something I could confidently offer you two years ago. Continue reading

“Entitlement to believe” is lacking in Effective Altruism

Sometimes the world needs you to think new thoughts. It’s good to be humble, but having low subjective credence in a conclusion is just one way people implement humility; another way is to feel unentitled to form your own belief in the first place, except by copying an “expert authority”. This is especially bad when there essentially are no experts yet — e.g. regarding the nascent sciences of existential risks — and the world really needs people to just start figuring stuff out. Continue reading

Breaking news: Scientists Have Discovered the Soul

2016 is a great year for physics. Not only have we discovered gravitational waves, but just this week, physicists have announced the existence of a long sought after object: the human soul. Continue reading

Credence – using subjective probabilities to express belief strengths

There are surprisingly many impediments to becoming comfortable making personal use of subjective probabilities, or “credences”: some conceptual, some intuitive, and some social. However, Phillip Tetlock has found that thinking in probabilities is essential to being a Superforcaster, so it is perhaps a skill and tendency worth cultivating on purpose. Continue reading

A story about Bayes, Part 2: Disagreeing with the establishment

10 years after my binary search through dietary supplements, which found that a particular blend of B and C vitamins was particularly energizing for me, a CBC news article reported that the blend I’d used — called “Emergen-C” — did not actually contain all of the vitamin ingredients on its label. Continue reading

A story about Bayes, Part 1: Binary search

When I was 19 and just beginning my PhD, I found myself with a lot of free time and flexibility in my schedule. Naturally, I decided to figure out which dietary supplements I should take. Continue reading

Help me write LaTeX on a large e-ink display ($200 reward)

Edit: my employer was eventuslly able to order me an e-ink monitor, so the reward is off 🙂

I would like to write LaTeX on a wireless-enabled e-ink display with a 13″ or larger screen to avoid visual fatigue. If you solve this problem for me, I will pay you a $200 reward, be extremely grateful, and write a blog post explaining your solution so that others might benefit 🙂 Some examples that I would consider solutions: Continue reading

Seeking a paid personal assistant to create more x-risk research hours

My main bottleneck as a researcher right now is that I have various bureaucracies I need to follow up with on a regular basis, which reduce the number of long interrupted periods I can spend on research. I could really use some help with this. Continue reading

Use a giant notebook to think better

Having a space to write things down frees up your mind — specifically, your executive system — from the task of holding things in working memory, so you can focus your attention on generating new thoughts instead of looping on your most recent ones to keep them alive. Writing down what’s in your head — math, plans, feelings, whatever — can start paying cognitive dividends in about 5 seconds, and can make the difference between a productive thinking day and a lame one. Continue reading

A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course in the East Bay starting January 19

Summary: I think the standardized 8-week MBSR course format is better designed than most introductory meditation practices, and have found David Weinberg in particular to be an excellent mindfulness instructor. Since something like 30 to 100 people have asked me to recommend a way to learn/practice mindfulness, I’m batch-answering with this post. Continue reading

Why CFAR spreads altruism organically, and why Labs & Core make a great team

Following on “Why scaling slowly has been awesome for CFAR Core”, here are two other questions I’ve gotten repeatedly about CFAR:

Q2: Why isn’t altruism training an explicit part of CFAR’s core workshop curriculum?
Continue reading

Red-penning: rolling out an experimental rationality / creativity technique

Note: I’m writing about this technique to (1) reduce the overhead cost of testing it, and (2) illustrate what I consider good practices for “rolling out” a new technique to be added to a rationality curriculum. Despite seeming super-useful in my first-person perspective, experience says the technique itself probably needs to undergo several tests and revisions before it will actually work as intended, even for most readers of my blog I suspect. Continue reading

Why scaling slowly has been awesome for CFAR Core

Summary: Since I offered to answer questions about my pledge to donate 10% of my annual salary to CFAR as an existential risk reduction, the question “Why doesn’t CFAR do something that will scale faster than workshops?” keeps coming up, so I’m answering it here. Continue reading

Break your habits: be more empirical

Summary: The common attitude that “You think too much” might be better parsed as “You don’t experiment enough.” Once you’ve got an established procedure for living optimally in «setting», be a good scientist and keep trying to falsify your theory when it’s not too costly to do so.

Continue reading

Beat the bystander effect with minimal social pressure

Summary: Develop an allergy to saying “Will anyone do X?”. Instead query for more specific error signals: Continue reading

AI strategy and policy research positions at FHI (deadline Jan 6)

Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute has some new positions opening up at their Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre. I know these guys — they’re super awesome — and if you have the following three properties, then humanity needs you to step up and solve the future: Continue reading

The 2015 x-risk ecosystem

Summary: Because of its plans to increase collaboration and run training/recruiting programs for other groups, CFAR currently looks to me like the most valuable pathway per-dollar-donated for reducing x-risk, followed closely by MIRI, and GPP+80k. As well, MIRI looks like the most valuable place for new researchers (funding permitting; see this post), followed very closely by FHI, and CSER. Continue reading

Why I want humanity to survive — a holiday reflection

Life on Earth is almost 4 billion years old. During that time, many trillions of complex life forms have starved to death, been slowly eaten alive by predators or diseases, or simply withered away. But there has also been much joy, play, love, flourishing, and even creativity.

Continue reading

MIRI needs funding to scale with other AI safety programs

Summary: MIRI’s end-of-year fundraiser is on, and I’ve never been more convinced of what MIRI can offer the world. Continue reading

The Problem of IndignationBot, Part 4

Summary: I proved a parametric, bounded version of Löb’s Theorem that shows bounded self-reflective agents exhibit weird Löbian behavior, too. Continue reading

The Problem of IndignationBot, Part 3

Summary: Is strange “Löbian” self-reflective behavior a just theoretical symptom of assuming unbounded computational resources?

Continue reading

(Ignore this post)

Apologies to any subscribers; I needed to publish this in order to test sidebar-hiding with several different devices and login credentials 🙂   Continue reading

Embracing boredom as exploratory overhead cost

(Follow-up to Fun does not preclude burnout)

Sometimes I decide to spend a few weeks or months putting some of my social needs on hold in favor of something specific, like a deadline. But after that’s done, and I “have free time” again, I often find myself leaning toward work as a default pass-time. When I ask my intuition “What’s a fun thing to do this weekend?”, I get a resounding “Work!” Continue reading

Fun does not preclude burnout

As far as I can tell, I’ve never experienced burnout, but I think that’s only because I notice when I’m getting close. And in recent years, I’ve had a number of friends, especially those interested in Effective Altruism, make the mistake of burning out while having fun. So, I wanted to make a public service announcement: The fact that your work is fun does not mean that you can’t burn out. Continue reading

Use separate email threads for separate action-requests

When I realized this principle, I experienced around a 2x or 3x increase in my rate of causing-people-to-do-things-over-email, out of the “usually doesn’t work” range into the “usually works” range. I find myself repeating this advice a lot in an attempt to boost the effectiveness of friends interested in effective altruism and related work, so I’m making a blog post to make it easier. Continue reading

The Problem of IndignationBot, Part 2

Summary: Agents that can reason about their own source codes are weirder than you think.

Continue reading

What’s your vision of a beautiful life?

After releasing my Robust Rental Harmony algorithm, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction, like my friends and I had built something wholesome and beautiful.  Reflecting on this,  it occurred to me that I might want my life to feel like an artistic creation… like a beautiful substructure of mathematics that reflectively self-appreciates wherever it arises. This felt different from my desire to help the world at large, and also from my desire for moment-to-moment enjoyment. Continue reading

Deliberate Grad School

Among my friends interested in rationality, effective altruism, and existential risk reduction, I often hear: “If you want to have a real positive impact on the world, grad school is a waste of time. It’s better to use deliberate practice to learn whatever you need instead of working within the confines of an institution.” Continue reading

The Problem of IndignationBot, Part 1

I like to state the Prisoner’s Dilemma by saying that each player can destroy \$2 of the other player’s utility in exchange for \$1 for himself. Writing “C” and “D” for “cooperate” and “defect”, we have the following: Continue reading

Willpower Depletion vs Willpower Distraction

I once asked a room full of about 100 neuroscientists whether willpower depletion was a thing, and there was widespread disagreement with the idea. (A propos, this is a great way to quickly gauge consensus in a field.) Basically, for a while some researchers believed that willpower depletion “is” glucose depletion in the prefrontal cortex, but some more recent experiments have failed to replicate this, e.g. by finding that the mere taste of sugar is enough to “replenish” willpower faster than the time it takes blood to move from the mouth to the brain: Continue reading