Task X for which the claim seems most true for me is “coming up with novel and important ideas”. This seems to be very heavy-tailed, and not very teachable.
I would also expect that, if I poked a bit at these claims, it would usually turn out that X is something like “contribute to this software project at the pace and quality level of our best engineers, w/o requiring any management time” or “convince some investors to give us much more money, but w/o anyone spending any time transferring relevant knowledge”.
Neither of these feel like central examples of the type of thing EA needs most. Most of the variance of the impact of the software project will be in how good the idea is; same for most of the variance of the impact of getting funding.
Robin Hanson is someone who’s good at generating novel and important ideas. Idk how he got that way, but I suspect it’d be very hard to design a curriculum to recreate that. Do you disagree?
Task X for which the claim seems most true for me is “coming up with novel and important ideas”. This seems to be very heavy-tailed, and not very teachable.
I agree that the impact from new ideas will be heavy tailed—i.e. a large share of the total value from new ideas will be from the few best ideas, and few people. I’d also guess that this kind of creativity is not that teachable. (Though not super certain about both.)
I feel less sure that ‘new ideas’ is among the things most needed in EA, when discounted by the difficulty of generating them. (I do think there probably are a number of undiscovered and highly important ideas out there, partly based on EA’s track record and partly based on a sense that there are a lot of things we don’t know or understand about how to make the long-term future go well.) If I had to guess where to optimally invest flexible resources at the margin, I feel highly uncertain whether it would be in “find people who’re good at generating new ideas” versus things like “advance known research directions” or “accumulate AI-weighted influence/power”.
People tend to underestimate the importance of ideas, because it’s hard to imagine what impact they will have without doing the work of coming up with them.
I’m also uncertain how impactful it is to find people who’re good at generating ideas, because the best ones will probably become prominent regardless. But regardless of that, it seems to me like you’ve now agreed with the three points that the influential EA made. Those weren’t comparative claims about where to invest marginal resources, but rather the absolute claim that it’d be very beneficial to have more talented people.
Then the additional claim I’d make is: some types of influence are very valuable and can only be gained by people who are sufficiently good at generating ideas. It’d be amazing to have another Stuart Russell, or someone in Stephen Pinker’s position but more onboard with EA. But they both got there by making pioneering contributions in their respective fields. So when you talk about “accumulating AI-weighted influence”, e.g. by persuading leading AI researchers to be EAs, that therefore involves gaining more talented members of EA.
Task X for which the claim seems most true for me is “coming up with novel and important ideas”. This seems to be very heavy-tailed, and not very teachable.
Neither of these feel like central examples of the type of thing EA needs most. Most of the variance of the impact of the software project will be in how good the idea is; same for most of the variance of the impact of getting funding.
Robin Hanson is someone who’s good at generating novel and important ideas. Idk how he got that way, but I suspect it’d be very hard to design a curriculum to recreate that. Do you disagree?
I agree that the impact from new ideas will be heavy tailed—i.e. a large share of the total value from new ideas will be from the few best ideas, and few people. I’d also guess that this kind of creativity is not that teachable. (Though not super certain about both.)
I feel less sure that ‘new ideas’ is among the things most needed in EA, when discounted by the difficulty of generating them. (I do think there probably are a number of undiscovered and highly important ideas out there, partly based on EA’s track record and partly based on a sense that there are a lot of things we don’t know or understand about how to make the long-term future go well.) If I had to guess where to optimally invest flexible resources at the margin, I feel highly uncertain whether it would be in “find people who’re good at generating new ideas” versus things like “advance known research directions” or “accumulate AI-weighted influence/power”.
People tend to underestimate the importance of ideas, because it’s hard to imagine what impact they will have without doing the work of coming up with them.
I’m also uncertain how impactful it is to find people who’re good at generating ideas, because the best ones will probably become prominent regardless. But regardless of that, it seems to me like you’ve now agreed with the three points that the influential EA made. Those weren’t comparative claims about where to invest marginal resources, but rather the absolute claim that it’d be very beneficial to have more talented people.
Then the additional claim I’d make is: some types of influence are very valuable and can only be gained by people who are sufficiently good at generating ideas. It’d be amazing to have another Stuart Russell, or someone in Stephen Pinker’s position but more onboard with EA. But they both got there by making pioneering contributions in their respective fields. So when you talk about “accumulating AI-weighted influence”, e.g. by persuading leading AI researchers to be EAs, that therefore involves gaining more talented members of EA.