My mind comes back to points like this very often:
We cannot help but be reminded of Frank H. Westheimer’s advice to his research students: “Why
spend a day in the library when you can learn the same thing by working in the laboratory for a
month?”
It’s an—or perhaps yet another—example of how sometimes the Bay Area/SE/entrepreneurial mindset is almost diametrically opposed to certain mindsets coming from academia and how this community is trying to balance them or get the best of both worlds (which isn’t a stupid thing to try to do per se, it just seems like sometimes it’s very tricky). In the spirit of the former you kinda want to move fast (and break things), but the latter wants you to remember the virtues of deliberately taking the time to demonstrate how thorough and methodical you are being (and partly so that you don’t, say, squander your resources by running a foreseeably dud experiment)
I feel like it was only a year or so ago that the standard critique of the AI safety community was that they were too abstract, too theoretical, that they lacked hands-on experience, lacked contact with empirical reality, etc...
My mind comes back to points like this very often:
It’s an—or perhaps yet another—example of how sometimes the Bay Area/SE/entrepreneurial mindset is almost diametrically opposed to certain mindsets coming from academia and how this community is trying to balance them or get the best of both worlds (which isn’t a stupid thing to try to do per se, it just seems like sometimes it’s very tricky). In the spirit of the former you kinda want to move fast (and break things), but the latter wants you to remember the virtues of deliberately taking the time to demonstrate how thorough and methodical you are being (and partly so that you don’t, say, squander your resources by running a foreseeably dud experiment)
I feel like it was only a year or so ago that the standard critique of the AI safety community was that they were too abstract, too theoretical, that they lacked hands-on experience, lacked contact with empirical reality, etc...