Brief summary of my SERI Mats experience

• John Wentworth is a thousand-year old vampire, and dresses like a combo of V and neo.
• I need to tryhard his study guide, it's better than what I could come up with
• I need to apply to SERI Mats until I get in! It seems extremely good
• SERI Mats doesn't optimize for final presentations, so I'm unsure how good the scholars are. Some intimidate me, some don't. I thought most of the scholar's directions were dead ends, but some were good.
• When I told Alex about my baby-elk-shard-theory research his mind went along a similar path to mine, that was satisfying :)
• Alex (At afterparty): "Outer alignment and Goodharting aren't in my ontology after internalizing reward not being the optimization target." I like this pov, I haven't fully internalized shard theory yet.
• If you owe someone 5$ and paying is annoying, offer to pay them 500$ with 1% probability (Jonas did this to Sammy, Sammy got nothing.)
• SERI MATS mentors agree that the scholars have a nontrivial chance at solving a critical part of the alignment problem. John said he's learning useful patterns of thought from observing the scholars.