Our annual fundraiser is live. Discussed in the fundraiser post:

• News  — What MIRI’s researchers have been working on lately, and more.
• Goals — We plan to grow our research team 2x in 2018–2019. If we raise $850k this month, we think we can do that without dipping below a 1.5-year runway.
• Actual goals — A bigger-picture outline of what we think is the likeliest sequence of events that could lead to good global outcomes.

Our funding drive will be running until December 31st.

Research updates

• New at IAFF: Reward Learning Summary; Reflective Oracles as a Solution to the Converse Lawvere Problem; Policy Selection Solves Most Problems
• We ran a workshop on Paul Christiano’s research agenda.
• We’ve hired the first members of our new engineering team, including math PhD Jesse Liptrap and former Quixey lead architect Nick Tarleton! If you’d like to join the team, apply here!
• I’m also happy to announce that Blake Borgeson has come on in an advisory role to help establish our engineering program. Blake is a Nature-published computational biologist who co-founded Recursion Pharmaceuticals, where he leads the biotech company’s machine learning work.

General updates

• “Security Mindset and Ordinary Paranoia”: a new dialogue from Eliezer Yudkowsky. See also part 2.
• The Open Philanthropy Project has awarded MIRI a three-year, $3.75 million grant!
• We received $48,132 in donations during Facebook’s Giving Tuesday event, of which $11,371 — from speedy donors who made the event’s 85-second cutoff! — will be matched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
• MIRI Staff Writer Matthew Graves has published an article in Skeptic magazine: “Why We Should Be Concerned About Artificial Superintelligence.”
• Yudkowsky’s new book Inadequate Equilibria is out! See other recent discussion of modest epistemology and inadequacy analysis by Scott Aaronson, Robin Hanson, Abram Demski, Gregory Lewis, and Scott Alexander.