Sorry but my rough impression from the post is you seem to be at least as confused about where the difficulties are as average of alignment researchers you think are not on the ball—and the style of somewhat strawmanning everyone & strong words is a bit irritating.
In particular I don’t appreciate the epistemic of these moves together
1. Appeal to seeing thinks from close proximity. Then I got to see things more up close. And here’s the thing: nobody’s actually on the friggin’ ball on this one! 2. Straw-manning and weakmaning what almost everyone else thinks and is doing 3. Use of an emotionally compelling words like ‘real science’ for vaguely defined subjects where the content may be the opposite of what people imagine. Is the empirical alchemy-style ML type of research what’s advocated for as the real science? 4. What overall sounds more like the aim is to persuade, rather than explain
I think curating this signals this type of bad epistemics is fine, as long as you are strawmanning and misrepresenting others in a legible way and your writing is persuasive. Also there is no need to actually engage with existing arguments, you can just claim seeing things more up close.
Also to what extent are moderator decisions influenced by status and centrality in the community... … if someone new and non-central to the community came up with this brilliant set of ideas how to solve AI safety: 1. everyone working on it is not on the ball. why? they are all working on wrong things! 2. promising is to do something very close to how empirical ML capabilities research works 3. this is a type of problem where you can just throw money at it and attract better ML talent … I doubt this would have a high chance of becoming curated.
In my view this is a bad decision.
As I wrote on LW
Sorry but my rough impression from the post is you seem to be at least as confused about where the difficulties are as average of alignment researchers you think are not on the ball—and the style of somewhat strawmanning everyone & strong words is a bit irritating.
In particular I don’t appreciate the epistemic of these moves together
1. Appeal to seeing thinks from close proximity. Then I got to see things more up close. And here’s the thing: nobody’s actually on the friggin’ ball on this one!
2. Straw-manning and weakmaning what almost everyone else thinks and is doing
3. Use of an emotionally compelling words like ‘real science’ for vaguely defined subjects where the content may be the opposite of what people imagine. Is the empirical alchemy-style ML type of research what’s advocated for as the real science?
4. What overall sounds more like the aim is to persuade, rather than explain
I think curating this signals this type of bad epistemics is fine, as long as you are strawmanning and misrepresenting others in a legible way and your writing is persuasive. Also there is no need to actually engage with existing arguments, you can just claim seeing things more up close.
Also to what extent are moderator decisions influenced by status and centrality in the community...
… if someone new and non-central to the community came up with this brilliant set of ideas how to solve AI safety:
1. everyone working on it is not on the ball. why? they are all working on wrong things!
2. promising is to do something very close to how empirical ML capabilities research works
3. this is a type of problem where you can just throw money at it and attract better ML talent
… I doubt this would have a high chance of becoming curated.