Man, the topics you mention feel too boring (i.e. too far removed from the important questions). Quoting from Richard Ngo’s AGI safety career advice for another flavor of question:
Here are some topics where I wish we had a world expert on applying it to AGI safety. . . . :
What regulatory apparatus within the US government would be most effective at regulating large training runs?
What tools and methods does the US government have for auditing tech companies?
What are the biggest gaps in the US export controls to China, and how might they be closed?
What AI applications or demonstrations will society react to most strongly?
What interfaces will humans use to interact with AIs in the future?
How will AI most likely be deployed for sensitive tasks (e.g. advising world leaders) given concerns about privacy?
How might political discourse around AI polarize, and what could mitigate that?
What would it take to automate crucial infrastructure (factories, weapons, etc)?
(I know you weren’t just writing about AI safety. Even given that, these questions are substantially more relevant to stuff that matters than yours, and I think that’s good.)
1-3 seem good for generating more research questions like ASB’s, but the narrower research questions are ultimately necessary to get to impact. 4-8 seem like things EA is over-invested in relative to what ASB lays out here, not that more couldn’t be done there.
4 and 7 are not really questions that one can meaningfully develop expertise on. Even politicians, whose jobs depend on understanding public opinion, are worse at this than just running a poll, and depend heavily on polling to assess public opinion when they have the money to run adequate polls. They do bring a useful amount of additional judgment to that process and can give you a sense of when a poll result is likely to not hold up in an adversarial environment, but I don’t think you can develop an equivalent skill without actually spending a lot of time talking to the public. I also don’t think that would allow you to do much prediction of where public opinion is headed. Hillary Clinton would probably have been elected President in 2008 if she had been able to predict how Dem primary voters’ opinions on her Iraq vote would change, and she never lacked access to world-class experts at the time she was making her decision.
You could spend 30k to run a poll and get a better sense of current public sentiment and specific ways opinions can be pushed given information currently available. A world-expert level pollster could perhaps help you write better questions, and you could review the history of pubic opinion on topics you find to be analogous. I think with all that you’d outperform most unelected policymakers in understanding current public opinion, but only because their condescension toward the average person makes them especially bad at it (see, e.g. their obvious bungling of covid). I’d be extremely skeptical that you’d do any better at predicting what shifts public and elite opinion better than an average swing-district member of Congress who took 10 min to review your poll.
Mostly disagree. “What AI applications or demonstrations will society react to most strongly?” depends a lot on what AI applications will be powerful in the future, not just what people say in polls today.
And polls today leave lots of uncertainty about “How might political discourse around AI polarize”—that depends not just on what people say in polls today but also what the future of AI looks like and especially how polarization works.
Man, the topics you mention feel too boring (i.e. too far removed from the important questions). Quoting from Richard Ngo’s AGI safety career advice for another flavor of question:
(I know you weren’t just writing about AI safety. Even given that, these questions are substantially more relevant to stuff that matters than yours, and I think that’s good.)
1-3 seem good for generating more research questions like ASB’s, but the narrower research questions are ultimately necessary to get to impact. 4-8 seem like things EA is over-invested in relative to what ASB lays out here, not that more couldn’t be done there.
4 and 7 are not really questions that one can meaningfully develop expertise on. Even politicians, whose jobs depend on understanding public opinion, are worse at this than just running a poll, and depend heavily on polling to assess public opinion when they have the money to run adequate polls. They do bring a useful amount of additional judgment to that process and can give you a sense of when a poll result is likely to not hold up in an adversarial environment, but I don’t think you can develop an equivalent skill without actually spending a lot of time talking to the public. I also don’t think that would allow you to do much prediction of where public opinion is headed. Hillary Clinton would probably have been elected President in 2008 if she had been able to predict how Dem primary voters’ opinions on her Iraq vote would change, and she never lacked access to world-class experts at the time she was making her decision.
You could spend 30k to run a poll and get a better sense of current public sentiment and specific ways opinions can be pushed given information currently available. A world-expert level pollster could perhaps help you write better questions, and you could review the history of pubic opinion on topics you find to be analogous. I think with all that you’d outperform most unelected policymakers in understanding current public opinion, but only because their condescension toward the average person makes them especially bad at it (see, e.g. their obvious bungling of covid). I’d be extremely skeptical that you’d do any better at predicting what shifts public and elite opinion better than an average swing-district member of Congress who took 10 min to review your poll.
Mostly disagree. “What AI applications or demonstrations will society react to most strongly?” depends a lot on what AI applications will be powerful in the future, not just what people say in polls today.
And polls today leave lots of uncertainty about “How might political discourse around AI polarize”—that depends not just on what people say in polls today but also what the future of AI looks like and especially how polarization works.