PEAR Mailer for April

April 2023 What we’ve been up to Winter is almost over, but PEAR has not been hibernating! We’ve had great discussions on authentic relating, akrasia, the psychology behind Beeminder and how to address criticisms of EA. We held an optimised book auction and tried out ideological turing tests . PEAR socials are still on every

Mailer for January

December Recap PEAR’s Secular Solstice was held on 12/18, which featured Nathan’s original speech and Isabelle’s midnight speech. We would like to thank all of the volunteers, including Amaryllis, Conor, Chase, Jeremy, Lukas, Lex, Trevor, Roman, and Steven, for making the event a success. Whether you attended or did not attend the Solstice, please take a

Secular Solstice on 12/18

The PEAR Solstice is 12/18. Here’s the deets:  When: 5pm doors open, 10pm doors closeWhere: 1548 NE 15th Ave, Portland, Oregon 97225 What: The Secular Solstice was created around 2011 in the New York rationality community as a way to celebrate the light of humanity’s progress throughout the ages on the darkest day of the year. Since then it has spread to

Mailer for December

November Recap November had PEAR’s first field trip where we went to the coast, collected mussels, and discussed the sentience of bivalves. This was a super memorable and beautiful trip, also Joel and his dog have some model potential. Thanks to Amaryllis for coordinating and making this trip possible!  We also had a Double Cruxxing

Mailer for October

September Recap  September was a big month for PEAR events with the ACX meetup and the Petrov Day discussion, but it seems to have flown by so quickly at the same time. The Petrov Day discussion was focused on looking at heroes of humanity (and we spontaneously discussed villains), abstracting virtues from those examples, and

Mailer for September

August Recap  We did Karaoke, Pool Parties, Socials, and had Discord discussions on inflation, student loan forgiveness, and how fast the world is improving. The AI Safety group focused on Attention 😉 and Curve Circuits and is really having lively discussions. If you are interested in AI Safety and have a semi-technical ML background, then

Mailer for August

July Recap This month we had two AI alignment meetings. The topic for the first was Circuits, but we spent most of the time discussing adversarial examples and how interpretability tools deal with them. As a complement to that discussion, at the second alignment meeting we covered the paper Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They

Monthly Mailer for June

April and May Recap In April and May we had a number of events ranging from board game nights, goal factoring, to discussions about the Carrick campaign, and a very large ACX meetup. If you are interested in tangibly helping with a large problem that humanity has, Joel has begun leading a series on AI

Mailer and Survey for July

June Recap and Survey If you are interested in PEAR, especially in person events, please take our Feedback Survey. At the biweekly discussion groups this month, we’ve been discussing the finalists in the Astral Codex Ten book review contest. We’re planning on bringing back the PEAR book group soon, and we might choose one of the

Monthly Mailer for April

March Recap In March, we had events including biweekly dinner socials at Cartopia and a one-day-early board game night for Pi Day. Alex Turner also gave a talk about instrumental goal convergence as a topic in AI alignment research. The PEAR-affiliated group Solutions has continued hosting article discussions every Monday night on the Solutions Discord