Stag Lynn

To spend the next year leveling up various technical skills with the goal of becoming more impactful in AI safety

Stag’s current intention is to spend the next year improving his skills in a variety of areas (e.g. programming, theoretical neuroscience, and game theory) with the goal of contributing to AI safety research, meeting relevant people in the x-risk community, and helping out in EA/rationality related contexts wherever he can (eg, at rationality summer camps like SPARC and ESPR).

Two projects he may pursue during the year:

• Working to implement certificates of impact in the EA/X-risk community, in the hope of encouraging coordination between funders with different values and increasing transparency around the contributions of different people to impactful projects.
• Working as an unpaid personal assistant to someone in EA who is sufficiently busy for this form of assistance to be useful, and sufficiently productive for the assistance to be valuable.

I recommended funding Stag because I think he is smart, productive, and altruistic, has a track record of doing useful work, and will contribute more usefully to reducing existential risk by directly developing his capabilities and embedding himself in the EA community than he would by finishing his undergraduate degree or working a full-time job. While I’m not yet clear on what projects he will pursue, I think it’s likely that the end result will be very valuable — projects like impact certificates require substantial work from someone with technical and executional skills, and Stag seems to me to fit the bill.

More on Stag’s background: In high school, Stag had top finishes in various Latvian and European Olympiads, including a gold medal in the 2015 Latvian Olympiad in Mathematics. Stag has also previously taken the initiative to work on EA causes -- for example, he joined two other people in Latvia in attempting to create the Latvian chapter of Effective Altruism (which reached the point of creating a Latvian-language website), and he has volunteered to take on major responsibilities in future iterations of the European Summer Program in Rationality (which introduces promising high-school students to effective altruism).

Potential conflict of interest: at the time of making the grant, Stag was living with me and helping me with various odd jobs, as part of his plan to meet people in the EA community and help out where he could. This arrangement lasted for about 1.5 months. To compensate for this potential issue, I’ve included notes on Stag from Oliver Habryka, another fund manager.

Oliver Habryka’s comments on Stag Lynn

I’ve interacted with Stag in the past and have broadly positive impressions of him, in particular his capacity for independent strategic thinking

Stag has achieved a high level of success in Latvian and Galois Mathematical Olympiads. I generally think that success in these competitions is one of the best predictors we have of a person’s future performance on making intellectual progress on core issues in AI safety. See also my comments and discussion on the grant to Misha Yagudin last round.

Stag has also contributed significantly to improving both ESPR and SPARC , both of which introduce talented pre-college students to core ideas in EA and AI safety. In particular, he’s helped the programs find and select strong participants, while suggesting curriculum changes that gave them more opportunities to think independently about important issues. This gives me a positive impression of Stag’s ability to contribute to other projects in the space. (I also consider ESPR and SPARC to be among the most cost-effective ways to get more excellent people interested in working on topics of relevance to the long-term future, and take this as another signal of Stag’s talent at selecting and/or improving projects.)