why the longtermist branding? seems unnecessary and risks dragging critical people into distracting philosophical tangents
5
Make ALERT happen
The idea of a rapid emergency response team, like ALERT [^1]has been floating around. Subsequent people have at times partially taken up the mantle, but because of the vicissitudes of life, they have each given up.
I think the project is one of the more promising ideas to come out of the EA brain trust in recent years. I don't think the project is limited on theorizing (see e.g., a past detailed proposal [^2]), but on execution:
- Gather a team of reservists -- done by previous projects, easy to pick up
- Immediate next step: Sort through those who could join a pop-up effort immediately, and those who are interested in theory. Have the more committed reservists talk with bosses to be able to drop their day job during an emergency.
- Step after that: Look for funding so that reservists don't have to internalize the costs completely. Organize reservists so that they are some available at any timezone.
- Gather a team of forecasters and alert signals -- easy to do in collaboration with, for instance, Samotsvety, or with the deep pool of talent around the forecasting community
- Immediate next step: Set up an MVP, any MVP, of a method which could call a rapid response team into action.
- Step after that: Improve alarm raising so that it catches more emergencies in time, and throws up fewer false positives.
- Run training exercises
- Immediate next step: Design a training exercise that has the team of reservists deal with something which, to them, was an "unknown unknown". This could be a completely made-up exercise, but my preference would be for this to be a regional event of some significance, or an attempt to solve a valuable but non-urgent problem urgently.
- Step after that: Using the forecasting/alert signal team, choose the next non-catastrophic event as it pops up, and react and act in real-time.
Personally, I am interested in this project because it doesn't require me to trust the concepts [^3] or for us to be able to forecast AI precisely [^4]; it doesn't require future catastrophes from AI to correspond to the Yudkowskian framework, or to any preconceived notion of AI. Indeed, in generality, having a reserve team that can act during emergencies doesn't require future threats to humanity to come in the shape of AI; the more surprising the future turns out to be, the better this intervention looks related to alternatives. It is a bet on variance. I have been looking for a project to commit to, and this seems like a good fit.
- The ask: Cash money to get this started; to do the steps in "immediate next steps". I will also put money and time of my own, financed by my lucrative consulting [^5]. But this is easier if a few people each pitch $20K to $50K.
- The ambitious ask: A sizable budget to carry out the "step after that" items, and to not be bottlenecked on money, ever. Previous projects aimed to get this and failed. I think this is a red-herring, because it requires getting the trust of large funders, who tend to move slow and be slow to trust.
- The institutional structure: I will set up an institutional structure if I have to, but prefer not to, at least at first.
[^1]: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sgcxDwyD2KL6BHH2C/case-for-emergency-response-teams
[^2]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IStSw8MIU1z68NjAmMHBM3gvzaBRrj6W_Wuw6hY4ICE/edit
[^3]: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/23/my-highly-personal-skepticism-braindump-on-existential-risk/
[^4]: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/11/07/hurdles-forecasting-ai/
Austin Chen
12 months ago
Approving this project! I was excited by the original launch of ALERT (and applied as a reservist, I think). I think the idea is good, but as they say in startupland "execution is everything" - best wishes on the execution, and let us know if we can help
donated $5,000
Gavin Leech
12 months ago
The predecessor was my most important project last year. I've personally verified that there's a great deal of demand for some version of this ("customer" orgs and institutions and "supplier" volunteers). Nuno has some rare and essential qualities (honesty, clarity, infovorism) while lacking some others. But the shoestring version still excites me and I vote with my feet.
donated $5,000
Isaak Freeman
12 months ago
Matching Joel in reasoning and donation. Great idea; only possible through charity ecosystems; I was sad to see the previous one fade.
donated $8,000
Joel Becker
12 months ago
I've made a $5k offer to this project. I might end up offering more later. Below written hastily.
Main points in favor of this grant
I agree that emergency response teams are promising in the abstract, broadly for reasons given in the linked post.
Nuno's plan seems reasonable. I think it has Gavin's backing.
As Nuno has written elsewhere, AI feels like "a domain in which we are likely to not have the correct hypothesis in our prior set of hypotheses." I feel more excited about "a bet on variance" in this setting.
ALERT needs someone to take responsibility for it, and Nuno is standing in front of us willing to take responsibility.
Donor's main reservations
I have thought ~0 about who might be the right person to lead this project and don't feel pulled towards taking this more seriously. Meanwhile, my rough and probably-somewhat-misremembered understanding is that Open Philanthropy have been hesitant to throw their weight behind ALERT-style projects because they want the person running it to clear a very high bar. Something about this pattern-matches nicely to my take that the OP cluster is too distrusting of people outside the cluster, which makes me feel more comfortable ignoring the importance of careful selection of the person leading ALERT. But neither my understanding nor my take is well thought-through. So the chance I'm mistaken in thinking that I shouldn't take this concern seriously seems decently high. (And perhaps if I did put thought to the concern, I'd discover that I think Nuno is not the right person to lead this effort. Right now my position is that I haven't even thought about what that would mean, let alone evaluated Nuno in particular.)
"Improve alarm raising so that it catches more emergencies in time, and throws up fewer false positives." This step feels potentially hard to me. At the very least I think it should read "and/or throws up fewer false positives."
Something I really, really like about Dendritic is that it plans to put monitoring, alarm-raising, and emergency response under one roof (but for bio only). I like this because it follows a model that I gather has already been successful elsewhere (Security Operations Centers). It makes sense to me that this model would be less likely to come up against problems like "we've raised the alarm but no-one is responding." I am seriously concerned that ALERT might run into problems like this.
Process for deciding amount
I would prefer to offer a larger amount, but my Manifund budget is pretty constrained. Any amount I offer to this project will be based on some vague notion of 'fair share' between the remaining projects I want to fund before Dec 31.
Conflicts of interest
First, Nuno is my friend. Second, one of my projects (Dendritic) is taking up a part of the ALERT mantle in a different way (monitoring + emergency response for bio in particular). There's no immediate conflict with Dendritic, but it doesn't seem implausible to me that there could be some Nuno-Dendritic collaboration in future given the overlap.