MichaelA🔸 comments on AMA: Ajeya Cotra, researcher at Open Phil

[MichaelA🔸]

Thanks!

Yeah, to be clear, I don’t intend to imply that we should expect there to have many been “major insights” after EA’s early years, or that that’s the only thing that’s useful. Tobias Baumann said on Max’s post:

I think there haven’t been any novel major insights since 2015, for your threshold of “novel” and “major”.

Notwithstanding that, I believe that we’ve made significant progress and that work on macrostrategy was and continues to be valuable. Most of that value is in many smaller insights, or in the refinement and diffusion of ideas that aren’t strictly speaking novel.

That’s basically my view too, and it sounds like your view is sort-of similar. Though your comment makes me notice that some things that don’t seem explicitly captured by either Max’s question or Tobias’s response are:

• better framings and disentanglement, to lay the groundwork for future minor/​major insights

  • I.e., things that help make topics more “well-scoped or broken into tractable sub-problems”

• better framings, to help us just think through something or be able to form intuitions more easily/​reliably

• things that are more concrete and practical than what people usually think of as “insights”

  • E.g., better estimates for some parameter

(ETA: I’ve now copied Ajeya’s answer to these questions as an answer to Max’s post.)