Thanks for pointing that out! I’ve been conflating your comments with other conversations I’ve had with people about MIRI, and have removed my sentence. I just read through the OpenPhil report carefully again.
I think that I disagree with OpenPhil’s stated conclusions, but due to having looked at different papers (I had forgotten that the ‘unsupervised grad student’ comment referred just to the three papers submitted, and I’d mis-remembered exactly which papers they were). After conversations with a few early-stage researchers in other fields, I think that some of the other papers might be notably more impressive (e.g. the Grain-of-Truth paper accepted to UAI).
I understand the key example of MIRI’s theory-building approach to be the extensive Logical Inductors paper, but haven’t heard much feedback on the usefulness/impressiveness from non-MIRI researchers yet. I’d be quite interested to know if you have read it and updated up/down about MIRI as a result (as I’m considering donating to MIRI this year partly based on this).
After conversations with researchers whose opinions I respect, I’ve been lead to believe certain other papers are very impressive (e.g. the Grain-of-Truth paper accepted to UAI).
Could you say more about the credibility of these researchers’ opinions? E.g. what fields are they in, how successful in their fields, how independent of MIRI?
Pretty independant of MIRI, early-stage researchers, other areas of theoretical CS (formal logic, game theory). I didn’t mean for this to be strong evidence, have changed the wording.
Thanks for pointing that out! I’ve been conflating your comments with other conversations I’ve had with people about MIRI, and have removed my sentence. I just read through the OpenPhil report carefully again.
I think that I disagree with OpenPhil’s stated conclusions, but due to having looked at different papers (I had forgotten that the ‘unsupervised grad student’ comment referred just to the three papers submitted, and I’d mis-remembered exactly which papers they were). After conversations with a few early-stage researchers in other fields, I think that some of the other papers might be notably more impressive (e.g. the Grain-of-Truth paper accepted to UAI).
I understand the key example of MIRI’s theory-building approach to be the extensive Logical Inductors paper, but haven’t heard much feedback on the usefulness/impressiveness from non-MIRI researchers yet. I’d be quite interested to know if you have read it and updated up/down about MIRI as a result (as I’m considering donating to MIRI this year partly based on this).
Could you say more about the credibility of these researchers’ opinions? E.g. what fields are they in, how successful in their fields, how independent of MIRI?
Pretty independant of MIRI, early-stage researchers, other areas of theoretical CS (formal logic, game theory). I didn’t mean for this to be strong evidence, have changed the wording.