#Recruiter team

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

green oriole
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From the MIRI 2024 priorities and other observations, It sounds like a lot of what the x-risk movement needs is to expand beyond tech, EA, tech journalist circles to the general public (who are receptive!).

What about a "recruiting" team using standard job recruiter tactics to try to engage people across new communities?

Recruiters (like those who contact you about tech jobs) cold-email tons of people a day with very carefully-worded, often somewhat personalized reach-out messages, trying to get people interested in the company or role. We could have a team doing this for the x-risk awareness and Pause AI cause, approaching ppl with carefully-chosen messages and data/resources, with daily goals for # of messages.

Maybe this is already a team or could overlap with teams?

Each of us has different backgrounds and different communities that would be easier for us to reach out to. We could also target influential people (professors in other fields, columnists, writers, podcasters, influencers, etc).

potential benefits:
*take tips from actual job recruiters, who are very skilled at cold messaging-- length of message, tone, subject, how to personalize
*get moral support for the hard work of cold-messaging
*dream big - it's not uncommon for recruiters to send personalized messages to dozens or hundreds of people a day
*reach new communities where few people have heard of this topic
*recruiting people to the cause is compounding

Would anyone want to collaborate on this?

Tasks: Come up with campaigns to reach out to a particular type of person you want to target and learn how to find their contact info. Craft targeted messages about AI x-risk with some resources, personalize them, and send. Try to make it a part of your day to send a certain number of messages. Prioritize communities you are familiar with or part of yourself.
Mostly writing. could call too, if applicable.

green coral
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I think this is a great idea! I know it was discussed in the onboarding team some time ago, and I know that @quasi jewel had some ambitions about this, too.

<@&1231945140734787615> What do you think?

proven sand
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Yes, I've also been pushing for this

green coral
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I've created the team and given you the role @green oriole! I'll also set it up in Airtable and Google Drive, keep you posted.

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I'd like to join this team btw 🙂 sending emails is really effective

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Do note that this overlaps at least a little with the <@&1234843570721259560>, which is tasked with finding aligned orgs and finding mutual benefits.

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Perhaps a way to frame the difference:

  • partnership focuses on organizations and people that will not likely be members of PauseAI.
  • recruiter focuses on potential members, people who are likely to join

One responsibility that is currently kind of not in any team that seems highy important, and could be part of recruiter team:

  • Optimize the path to joining PauseAI. Get people interested in joining. Make sure the website is appealing. Make sure the socials are helping to get people to join. Take ownership of the member customer journey (currently spread out over teams).
supple lynx
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yep, this seems good

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Although, it could be good to specified well what kind of people we would be reaching out to, because maybe it could be part of the social-media team, idk. right now I feel we have a bunch of teams and not enough activity on some of them. maybe teams should be more defined in terms of input, abilities and knowledge, and projects more in terms of outputs, idk

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I'm interested on helping but not sure if I have the time for it

green oriole
# green coral Perhaps a way to frame the difference: - partnership focuses on _organizations_...

Sounds good about recruiter team being about contacting potential members, whereas partnership is organizations.

These are different approaches and should be pretty distinct. Partnerships are a more delicate process of aligning the orgs as a whole and takes a more high-touch approach, whereas just putting this on an individual's radar can be a lot more casual, can be done more in bulk, and can rest on some individual connection you have with the person (friend, a field you work in, someone whose work you follow, etc.).

green oriole
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@jagged hawk has already been doing a lot of individual outreach and had the good idea that we should have some sort of easy call-to-action when we contact people.

Over time we might be able to optimize things like:
*which kinds of people give us a good reception
*engaging subject line or first line of messages
*good call-to-action (even something as simple as "search for AI extinction risk" or "sign up for our email list")
*balancing our ask with compliments for the person being contacted, the reason we are contacting them and not just anyone, and personalizing the message to their interests

green oriole
# supple lynx I'm interested on helping but not sure if I have the time for it

Thank you for the interest! I'm hoping it can be fun and something people can just do casually as part of their days.

Like instead of just watching or reading stuff passively, make a point to contact the authors/creators and send off a little personalized message asking them to look into x-risk. Train ourselves to default to sharing this information.

green oriole
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I've been trying this the past two days (contacted 15 regular people so far), and it has some nice side benefits:
*it lets you think about other topics some while researching the people, get some mental variety
*it also helps you to get comfortable talking to people about AI x-risk, like it's a normal topic.

Maybe we'll get the strategy down over time and find the best ROI ways to contact people where we get good responses, but pretty much anyone in a public role enough to have contact info/method available to the public is theoretically someone who should get contacted about AI x-risk (not just politicians)

green coral
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Maybe this is more like "Influencer outreach" than "recruitment"? It depends on the goal. If the goal is to get influencers to talk about AI risks, that's a bit different goal from getting people to join PauseAI. Although the overlap is pretty high: reach out with tailored messages, inform them about risks and potentially PauseAI.

What are your thoughts on the scope @green oriole

green oriole
# green coral Maybe this is more like "Influencer outreach" than "recruitment"? It depends on ...

The reason I mentioned "recruiter" was for the mentality of trying to cold-approach a lot of people, like recruiters do, and using tactics from that profession to boost morale, use good messaging, improve our cold approaches over time, etc.

My idea for the scope is that it's a team of people who want to set goals for themselves for how many people they reach out to per day/week/month, so that there's a machine going where lots and lots of people who might have never heard about it are hearing about this every day, and the goal of getting the rest of the public and people in other fields to hear about AI x-risk is being worked on.

Some people might prefer to focus more on getting people to join PauseAI (I've heard some current members have brought in new members) and some people might prefer to deal more with influencers, but the tactics are similar -- maximum politeness and empathy and connecting AI x-risk to things they already talk about or that are important to them, and giving them ideas for ways to learn more and get involved.

Does that sound ok?

jagged hawk
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I do think a key is to indeed see how we can reach out to people daily. Its frustrating, it can seem, to have to always be looking to hand out flyers, etc but every time we meet someone is an opportunity. Obviously, don't be annoying but realize a lot of people want to be able to be empowered.

green coral
jagged hawk
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I "warm-approached" a woman who felt frustrated with deepfakes and AI, and she will likely be joining PauseAI.

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She's a small concert musician, might be able to reach out to others

fervent veldt
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Also, closely related to what brought me here in the first place. I'll expand on that in a bit. Need to drive for a bit now.

fervent veldt
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Eh, got sidetracked elsewhere...

fervent veldt
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Meta: There are several projects and discussions that have some overlap, because they all depend on, or would significantly depend on some aspects of what I would call optimizing communications, which does include a bunch of related things, into which I will go in a moment. A project management system of a kind proposed here https://discord.com/channels/1100491867675709580/1245761712829894728 would help a lot in coordinating and sharing the work and results across different projects while avoiding duplication of work. It can be done with simpler project management tools, for example by creating a "parent" project, in which certain tasks are assigned to the "child" projects, but it's not as smooth. In any case, it would be a good idea to set up sooner rather than later some shared channel for all of these projects to improve cooperation across them.

jagged hawk
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I want to engage with each individually:

Firstly, poor framing of the problem is kind of dangerous, because it carries the risk of you, and the whole concept as being written off as overblown panicking over something trivial or mostly irrelevant, or as an apocalypse cult at worst, and that can be hard to change later.

Yes, this is extremely important, and especially as you see that the "doomer" insult applied as well as the recent efforts to portray safety as a cult. Of course, we shouldn't have PauseAI stop being able existential risk, but we can address other risks at the same time and in some approaches, discuss that prominently. I've always felt that showing that "AI is hurting you now" is a good example of how "AI will hurt you more in the future."

This makes talking about the risk of unaligned superintelligence especially hard, as there are often very long inferential distances to be crossed in order to even being able to start talking about the same thing, and I think fears related to these kinds of failure modes have seriously limited people's willingness to even try explaining existential risks more widely.

It strongly comes off to many as "religious preaching of doom" I find, and you see people hooking onto it in twitter here. The problem is that the asteroid is coming, and most of the time, asteroids don't come. So its hard to explain existential risks, and increasingly it feels like leading on with more casual failure modes is what can get people onboard.

So, a framing and messaging guide, or rather a set of them for various target audiences should be created, and also variations focusing on different risks.

I've thought of artists, and religiously inclined for two. Among the more educated, incidentally, existential risk seems like it really does hit awareness. The more people use AI(including dentists and so on), the more it seems they don't underestimate it.

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@radiant pier I think you'll be excellent for this team.

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@limpid pagoda what you said also applies here I think

fervent veldt
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Moved here: #1247528017220079757 message

limpid pagoda
# jagged hawk <@391085874248679434> what you said also applies here I think

Yes, I think @fervent veldt does a great job breaking down important updates to communication that we need. I think one additional area we need to focus on is who/what people think of when they think of AI safety. Getting a bit abstract, many people, when you ask them what they think of a particular movement, will have some imagined person that is the spokesperson for that movement. Right now, I fear that the wall of propaganda and e/acc "doom cult" language is setting that default image of us in people's minds as disconnected techbro's holding up "the end is near" cardboard signs. This is made worse by people who post overly emotional responses to AI leaders (I'm thinking of this one person who responded to Altman on Twitter with full caps saying he's "actually the most evil person" or something along those lines.) I fully believe that the stakes are truly all or nothing, but we need to court the public with rational calm discussions about the serious nature of AI risk.

limpid pagoda
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I think we might also benefit from exploring new approaches to having the safety conversation, maybe even run some experiments if we have the time/resources to figure out which approaches are best for people in different categories. I personally approach things differently if I'm talking to someone with no engagement in tech versus someone who has played around with neural networks already and has broadly heard the high-level AI safety points but still leans e/acc

limpid pagoda
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I think there are a broad range of people who support Pausing or at least slowing down for a number of reasons. I fear we often alienate people who would be fighting alongside us by focusing too heavily on the ASI takeover scenarios rather than the potentially catastrophic harm that mass job loss, misinformation, and bias may have.

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All great points!

fervent veldt
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Sorry about hijacking the channel so thoroughly, I will move this elsewhere in a bit.

jagged hawk
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@rough pulsar

fervent veldt
rough pulsar
jagged hawk
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How do you feel about being in the recruiting team? I think that you're well suited since you're aware of the many short-term and long-term threats.

green oriole
# limpid pagoda I think there are a broad range of people who support Pausing or at least slowin...

It could be true. we could try talking about other sides, too. one good thing about sending lots of messages a day is you can experiment and see what works. Reading the message over and making it tailored to the person seems to go a long way, plus mentioning any credentials you have that make you credible.
I think people do deserve to know that there's a risk of an ASI takeover because 1) a lot of very respected AI experts are concerned about this, it's really not a fringe belief, 2) it's been discussed seriously on many mainstream news outlets, and 3) it has a much higher urgency and severity level than the other concerns and can motivate some people to get involved. Not everyone wants to be active on every issue facing the world, but this is a particularly urgent and serious issue.

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I'm experimenting with this myself, and hopefully we can get a team going after the retreat is over and execs are back online.

It's powerful to be able to send someone a well-crafted message and know that if they just see it or give it a bit of consideration, having them aware of AI risks could make a difference. I think Justin's team is planning on doing something similar with outreach by phone to anyone with available contact info who might have an interest in our cause. Maybe we could even merge the teams.

green oriole
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Ah I finally see the link for our team drive. I will start adding some documents to it. hoping this can be a fun project team!

near rock
green oriole
# proven sand Yes, I've also been pushing for this

this team has launched, where we use tactics to reach out to the public or target groups therein. here is the help-wanted "ad" for it. would you be interested? recruiter team: #help-wanted-and-questions🤝 message

proven sand
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@green coral Can you write an announcement about it? I think we should have a formal strategy for announcements when systemic changes happen in our organisation (for example, a new team has been created and is recruiting)

green coral
jagged hawk
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@umbral rampart since you're writing to people anyway, want to join us?

supple lynx
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Recruiter team

jagged hawk
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https://substack.com/@luizajarovsky/note/c-58947863?r=2alqtk

Substack
Luiza Jarovsky on Substack

🚨 Fascinating AI paper alert: Luciano Floridi publishes "Hypersuasion - On AI’s Persuasive Power and How to Deal With It," and it's a must-read for everyone in AI. Quotes:

"The relentless nature of AI’s hypersuasion, the magnitude of its scope, its availability, affordability, and degree of efficiency based on machine-generated content accurate...

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We should use this for good imo

green oriole
jagged hawk
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Yes, automate some of it so we can hit more people.

limpid pagoda
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I might caution a bit about using AI to automate email writing...I think it's probably ok given what we're trying to prevent, but I could see it being a net negative if the fact we're using AI can be turned into bad headlines or coverage

jagged hawk
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I'd say to automate some of it, not all of it. Like, for example, using it to do some research on people to find how to communicate to them better.

limpid pagoda
jagged hawk
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Maybe we just need the most powerful automation tool yet discovered to coordinate ourselves better: the Spreadsheet

green oriole
radiant pier
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I’d say automate none of it. As soon as my eyes noticed GPT-written text blocks on Reddit, I just started glossing over entire paragraphs. If we can’t write or don’t care enough to our own content, then what message does that send about our commitment? It’s just too ironic and I vote for full human-created everything as a matter of principle. Cheers.

hollow python
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I get the reasons to take a hard line and oversimplify.

But these technologies enable brand new ways of improving the public messaging of an activist group. And because we're adjacent, we are very well positioned to pioneer and use them.

It isn't much less simple to express that we are not against mundane utility. We are concerned about extreme risks at the frontier.

limpid pagoda
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I would just say that if I were someone unaffiliated and I got an email from "PauseAI" and knew that the email was partly AI-generated, I would probably discount the group immediately. I think a big part of our movement needs to be emphasizing human connection and value and if our first point of contact with people is already being automated, I don't think that's a good look

hollow python
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I just ask that we explore the tension rather than bailing.

Don't throw the truth-seeking baby out with the branding bathwater.

jagged hawk
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We should avoid chatgpt style emails, imo, but find ways to leverage it to help us. It could be as simple as using Claude or something, not chatgpt.

radiant pier
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Anywho, I worked an event at the Center for Architecture and Design in San Francisco tonight where I’m very familiar with the owners and they would be open to hosting a meet up sometime soon. It’s a rad venue.

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Hope everyone is doing gravy.

jagged hawk
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I did some cold contacts today with flyering. Does that count?

radiant pier
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Yeah. What’s your logic with QR codes these days? I’m trying to avoid them because they seem lightweight scammy.

jagged hawk
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I mean, they are easy to use and small

jagged hawk
green oriole
jagged hawk
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@radiant pier do you know religious individuals who might be concerned? I have reached out to local churches and a Christian writer.

radiant pier
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I’m atheist and don’t have a ton of very religious friends, but if anything they seem to be eating this stuff up.

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My friend just posted an AI-generated bible quote image to her story this morning though.

jagged hawk
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There are people who object to it, we just need to find them.

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Most of Mind Matters focuses on trying to downplay AI, for example.

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The Pope as you noted has expressed concern

radiant pier
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That’s the biggest distinction I see between this current technology and say, anything from the DotCom bubble. People weren’t anthropomorphizing websites and saying things like “so I asked him,” the same way they refer to chatbots.