Note that this wouldn’t actually make a big change for AI alignment, since we don’t know how to use more funding.
Funding isn’t the only resource:
You’d change how you introduce people to alignment (since I’d guess that has a pretty strong causal impact on what worldviews they end up acting on). E.g. if you previously flipped a 10%-weighted coin to decide whether to send them down the Eliezer track or the other track, now you’d flip a 20%-weighted coin, and this straightforwardly leads to different numbers of people working on particular research agendas that the worldviews disagree about. Or if you imagine the community as a whole acting as an agent, you send 20% of the people to MIRI fellowships and the remainder to other fellowships (whereas previously it would be 10%).
(More broadly I think there’s a ton of stuff you do differently in community building, e.g. do you target people who know ML or people who are good at math?)
You’d change what you used political power for. I don’t particularly understand what policies Eliezer would advocate for but they seem different, e.g. I think I’m more keen on making sure particular alignment schemes for building AI systems get used and less keen on stopping everyone from doing stuff besides one secrecy-oriented lab that can become a leader.
Experts are coherent within the bounds of conventional study.
Funding isn’t the only resource:
You’d change how you introduce people to alignment (since I’d guess that has a pretty strong causal impact on what worldviews they end up acting on). E.g. if you previously flipped a 10%-weighted coin to decide whether to send them down the Eliezer track or the other track, now you’d flip a 20%-weighted coin, and this straightforwardly leads to different numbers of people working on particular research agendas that the worldviews disagree about. Or if you imagine the community as a whole acting as an agent, you send 20% of the people to MIRI fellowships and the remainder to other fellowships (whereas previously it would be 10%).
(More broadly I think there’s a ton of stuff you do differently in community building, e.g. do you target people who know ML or people who are good at math?)
You’d change what you used political power for. I don’t particularly understand what policies Eliezer would advocate for but they seem different, e.g. I think I’m more keen on making sure particular alignment schemes for building AI systems get used and less keen on stopping everyone from doing stuff besides one secrecy-oriented lab that can become a leader.
Yeah, that’s what I mean.