This list includes many people that, despite being well-known as very smart people in the EA/rationalist community, are not really “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses.”
Taylor, Garrabrant and Demski publish articles on topics related to AI primarily, but as far as I could tell, none of them have NeurIPS or ICML papers. In comparison, the number of unique authors with papers featured on NeurIPS is more than 10,000 each year. Taylor and Demski have fewer than 4,000 Twitter followers, and Garrabrant does not seem to use Twitter. The three researchers have a few hundred academic citations each.
I find it hard to justify describing them as “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses” when they seem, at a glance, not much more professionally impressive than great graduate students at top math or CS graduate programs (though such students are very impressive).
A better example of an EA-adjacent publicly-legible intellectual powerhouse in the ML area is Dan Hendrycks, who had a NeurIPS paper published in college and has at least 60 times more citations than those MIRI or former MIRI researchers you mentioned.
My claim is something closer to “experts in the field will correctly recognize them as obviously much smarter than +2 SD”, rather than “they have impressive credentials” (which is missing the critically important part where the person is actually much smarter than +2 SD).
I don’t think reputation has anything to do with titotal’s original claim and wasn’t trying to make any arguments in that direction.
Also… putting that aside, that is one bullet point from my list, and everyone else except Qiaochu has a wikipedia entry, which is not a criteria I was tracking when I wrote the list but think decisively refutes the claim that the list includes many people who are not publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses. (And, sure, I could list Dan Hendryks. I could probably come up with another twenty such names, even though I think they’d be worse at supporting the point I was trying to make.)
This list includes many people that, despite being well-known as very smart people in the EA/rationalist community, are not really “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses.”
Taylor, Garrabrant and Demski publish articles on topics related to AI primarily, but as far as I could tell, none of them have NeurIPS or ICML papers. In comparison, the number of unique authors with papers featured on NeurIPS is more than 10,000 each year. Taylor and Demski have fewer than 4,000 Twitter followers, and Garrabrant does not seem to use Twitter. The three researchers have a few hundred academic citations each.
I find it hard to justify describing them as “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses” when they seem, at a glance, not much more professionally impressive than great graduate students at top math or CS graduate programs (though such students are very impressive).
A better example of an EA-adjacent publicly-legible intellectual powerhouse in the ML area is Dan Hendrycks, who had a NeurIPS paper published in college and has at least 60 times more citations than those MIRI or former MIRI researchers you mentioned.
My claim is something closer to “experts in the field will correctly recognize them as obviously much smarter than +2 SD”, rather than “they have impressive credentials” (which is missing the critically important part where the person is actually much smarter than +2 SD).
I don’t think reputation has anything to do with titotal’s original claim and wasn’t trying to make any arguments in that direction.
Also… putting that aside, that is one bullet point from my list, and everyone else except Qiaochu has a wikipedia entry, which is not a criteria I was tracking when I wrote the list but think decisively refutes the claim that the list includes many people who are not publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses. (And, sure, I could list Dan Hendryks. I could probably come up with another twenty such names, even though I think they’d be worse at supporting the point I was trying to make.)