There is an analogy with speculative investing here I think—for something to be widely regarded as worthwhile investing in (i.e. research funded by mainstream academia) it has to already have evidence of success (e.g. Bitcoin now). By which point it is no longer new and highly promising in terms of expected value (like Bitcoin was in, say, 2011) i.e. it is necesssarily the case that all things very high in (relative) expected value are outside the mainstream.
AGI alignment is gaining more credibility, but it still doesn’t seem like it’s that accepted in mainstream academia.
Anyway, I think we are probably on a bit of a tangent to what AISC is trying to achieve—namely help new researchers level up (/get a foot in the door in academic research).
Oh I agree that for many ideas to be attractive, they have to gain a promising character. I wouldn’t reduce the measure of pursuit worthiness of scientific hypotheses to the evidence of their success though: this measure is rather a matter of prospective values, which have to do with a feasible methodology (how many research paths we have despite current problems and anomalies?). But indeed, sometimes research may proceed simply as tapping in the dark, in spite all the good methodological proposals (as e.g. it might have been the case in the research on protein synthesis in the mid 20th c.).
However, my point was simply the question: does such an investment in future proposals outweigh the investment in other topics, so that it should be funded from an EA budget rather than from existing public funds? Again: I very much encourage such camps. Just not on the account of spending the cash meant for effectively reducing suffering (due to these projects being highly risky and due to the fact that they are already heavily funded by say OpPhil).
There is an analogy with speculative investing here I think—for something to be widely regarded as worthwhile investing in (i.e. research funded by mainstream academia) it has to already have evidence of success (e.g. Bitcoin now). By which point it is no longer new and highly promising in terms of expected value (like Bitcoin was in, say, 2011) i.e. it is necesssarily the case that all things very high in (relative) expected value are outside the mainstream.
AGI alignment is gaining more credibility, but it still doesn’t seem like it’s that accepted in mainstream academia.
Anyway, I think we are probably on a bit of a tangent to what AISC is trying to achieve—namely help new researchers level up (/get a foot in the door in academic research).
Oh I agree that for many ideas to be attractive, they have to gain a promising character. I wouldn’t reduce the measure of pursuit worthiness of scientific hypotheses to the evidence of their success though: this measure is rather a matter of prospective values, which have to do with a feasible methodology (how many research paths we have despite current problems and anomalies?). But indeed, sometimes research may proceed simply as tapping in the dark, in spite all the good methodological proposals (as e.g. it might have been the case in the research on protein synthesis in the mid 20th c.).
However, my point was simply the question: does such an investment in future proposals outweigh the investment in other topics, so that it should be funded from an EA budget rather than from existing public funds? Again: I very much encourage such camps. Just not on the account of spending the cash meant for effectively reducing suffering (due to these projects being highly risky and due to the fact that they are already heavily funded by say OpPhil).
My point (and remmelt’s) was that public funds would be harder/more time (and resource) consuming to get.
There is currently a gap at the low end (OpenPhil is too big to spend time on funding such small projects).
And Good Ventures/OpenPhil also already fill a lot of the gap in funding programs with track records of effectively reducing suffering.