Thanks, Benito. With regards to the second half of this question, I suspect that either you’ve misunderstood some of the arguments I’ve made about why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic journals and conferences, or (alternatively) someone has given arguments for why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic venues that I personally disagree with. My view is that our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard journals etc. because (a) we deliberately focus on research that we think academia and industry are unlikely to work on for one reason or another, and (b) we approach problems from a very different angle than the research communities that are closest to those problems.
One example of (b) is that we often approach decision theory not by following the standard philosophical approach of thinking about what decision sounds intuitively reasonable in the first person, but instead by asking “how could a deterministic robot actually be programmed to reliably solve these problems”, which doesn’t fit super well into the surrounding literature on causal vs. evidential decision theory. For a few other examples, see my response to (8) in my comments on the Open Philanthropy Project’s internal and external reviews of some recent MIRI papers.
Thanks, Benito. With regards to the second half of this question, I suspect that either you’ve misunderstood some of the arguments I’ve made about why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic journals and conferences, or (alternatively) someone has given arguments for why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic venues that I personally disagree with. My view is that our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard journals etc. because (a) we deliberately focus on research that we think academia and industry are unlikely to work on for one reason or another, and (b) we approach problems from a very different angle than the research communities that are closest to those problems.
One example of (b) is that we often approach decision theory not by following the standard philosophical approach of thinking about what decision sounds intuitively reasonable in the first person, but instead by asking “how could a deterministic robot actually be programmed to reliably solve these problems”, which doesn’t fit super well into the surrounding literature on causal vs. evidential decision theory. For a few other examples, see my response to (8) in my comments on the Open Philanthropy Project’s internal and external reviews of some recent MIRI papers.