I love this work, especially because you investigated something I have been curious about for a while—the impact that diversity might have on AI safety. I have a few reactions so I thought I would provide them in separate comments (not sure what the forum norm is).
I am curious if you think there are dimensions of diversity you have not captured, that might be important? One thought that came to my mind when reading this post is geographic/cultural diversity. I am not 100% sure if it is important, but reasons it might be include both:
1 - That different cultures might have different views on what it is important to focus on (a bit like women might focus more on coexistence and less on control)
2 - That it is a global problem and international policy initiatives might be more successful if one can anticipate how various stakeholders react to such initiatives.
Thanks for your comment! Agree that there are additional relevant axes to consider than just those we present here. We actually did probe geography to some extent in the survey, though we don’t meaningfully include this in the write-up. Here’s one interesting statistically significant difference between alignment researchers who live in urban or semi-urban environments (blue) vs. those who live everywhere else (suburban, …, remote; red):
Agree that this only scratches the surface of these sorts of questions and that there are other important sources of intellectual/psychological diversity that we are not probing for here.
I love this work, especially because you investigated something I have been curious about for a while—the impact that diversity might have on AI safety. I have a few reactions so I thought I would provide them in separate comments (not sure what the forum norm is).
I am curious if you think there are dimensions of diversity you have not captured, that might be important? One thought that came to my mind when reading this post is geographic/cultural diversity. I am not 100% sure if it is important, but reasons it might be include both:
1 - That different cultures might have different views on what it is important to focus on (a bit like women might focus more on coexistence and less on control)
2 - That it is a global problem and international policy initiatives might be more successful if one can anticipate how various stakeholders react to such initiatives.
Thanks for your comment! Agree that there are additional relevant axes to consider than just those we present here. We actually did probe geography to some extent in the survey, though we don’t meaningfully include this in the write-up. Here’s one interesting statistically significant difference between alignment researchers who live in urban or semi-urban environments (blue) vs. those who live everywhere else (suburban, …, remote; red):
Agree that this only scratches the surface of these sorts of questions and that there are other important sources of intellectual/psychological diversity that we are not probing for here.