EA - Reflections on the PIBBSS Fellowship 2022 by nora

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Reflections on the PIBBSS Fellowship 2022, published by nora on December 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Cross-posted from LessWrong and the Alignment ForumLast summer, we ran the first iteration of the PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship. In this post, we share some reflections on how the program went.Note that this post deals mostly with high-level reflections and isn’t maximally comprehensive. It primarily focusses on information we think might be relevant for other people and initiatives in this space. We also do not go into specific research outputs produced by fellows within the scope of this post. Further, there are some details that we may not cover in this post for privacy reasons.How to navigate this post:If you know what PIBBSS is and want to directly jump to our reflections, go to sections "Overview of main updates" and "Main successes and failures".If you want a bit more context first, check out "About PIBBSS" for a brief description of PIBBSS’s overall mission; and "Some key facts about the fellowship", if you want a quick overview of the program design.The appendix contains a more detailed discussion of the portfolio of research projects hosted by the fellowship program (appendix 1), and a summary of the research retreats (appendix 2).About PIBBSSPIBBSS (Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems) aims to facilitate research studying parallels between intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems, and to leverage these insights towards the goal of building safe and aligned AI.To this purpose, we organized a 3-month Summer Research Fellowship bringing together scholars with graduate-level research experience (or equivalent) from a wide range of relevant disciplines to work on research projects under the mentorship of experienced AI alignment researchers. The disciplines of interest included fields as diverse as the brain sciences; evolutionary biology, systems biology and ecology; statistical mechanics and complex systems studies; economic, legal and political theory; philosophy of science; and more.This approach broadly -- the PIBBSS bet -- is something we think is a valuable frontier for expanding the scientific and philosophical enquiry on AI risk and the alignment problem. In particular, this aspires to bring in more empirical and conceptual grounding to thinking about advanced AI systems. It can do so by drawing on understanding that different disciplines already possess about intelligent and complex behavior, while also remaining vigilant about the disanalogies that might exist between natural systems and candidate AI designs.Furthermore, bringing diverse epistemic competencies to bear upon the problem also puts us in a better position to identify neglected challenges and opportunities in alignment research. While we certainly recognize that familiarity with ML research is an important part of being able to make significant progress in the field, we also think that familiarity with a large variety of intelligent systems and models of intelligent behavior constitutes an underserved epistemic resource. It can provide novel research surface area, help assess current research frontiers, de- (and re-)construct the AI risk problem, help conceive of novel alternatives in the design space, etc.This makes interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research endeavors valuable, especially given how they otherwise are likely to be neglected due to inferential and disciplinary distances. That said, we are skeptical of “interdisciplinary for the sake of it”, but consider it exciting insofar it explores specific research bets or has specific generative motivations for why X is interesting.For more information on PIBBSS, see this introduction post, this discussion of the epistemic bet, our research map (currentl...