Any thoughts on Meta Questions about Metaphilosophy from a grant maker perspective? For example have you seen any promising grant proposals related to metaphilosophy or ensuring philosophical competence of AI / future civilization, that you rejected due to funding constraints or other reasons?
(Speaking for myself) It seems pretty interesting. If I understand your position correctly, I’m also worried about developing and using AGI before we’re a philosophically competent civilization, though my own framing is more like “man it’d be kind of sad if we lost most of the value of the cosmos because we sent von Neumann probes before knowing what to load the probes with.”
I’m confused about how it’s possible to know whether someone is making substantive progress on metaphilosophy; I’d be curious if you have pointers.
As a practical matter, I don’t recall any applications related to metaphilosophy coming across my desk, or voting on metaphilosophy grants that other people investigated. The closest I can think of are applicants for a few different esoteric applications of decision theory. I’ll let others at the fund speak about their experiences.
I’m confused about how it’s possible to know whether someone is making substantive progress on metaphilosophy; I’d be curious if you have pointers.
I guess it’s the same as any other philosophical topic, either use your own philosophical reasoning/judgement to decide how good the person’s ideas/arguments are, and/or defer to other people’s judgements. The fact that there is currently no methodology for doing this that is less subjective and informal is a major reason for me to be interested in metaphilosophy, since if we solve metaphilosophy that will hopefully give us a better methodology for judging all philosophical ideas, assuming the correct solution to metaphilosophy isn’t philosophical anti-realism (i.e., philosophical questions don’t have right or wrong answers), or something like that.
Any thoughts on Meta Questions about Metaphilosophy from a grant maker perspective? For example have you seen any promising grant proposals related to metaphilosophy or ensuring philosophical competence of AI / future civilization, that you rejected due to funding constraints or other reasons?
(Speaking for myself) It seems pretty interesting. If I understand your position correctly, I’m also worried about developing and using AGI before we’re a philosophically competent civilization, though my own framing is more like “man it’d be kind of sad if we lost most of the value of the cosmos because we sent von Neumann probes before knowing what to load the probes with.”
I’m confused about how it’s possible to know whether someone is making substantive progress on metaphilosophy; I’d be curious if you have pointers.
As a practical matter, I don’t recall any applications related to metaphilosophy coming across my desk, or voting on metaphilosophy grants that other people investigated. The closest I can think of are applicants for a few different esoteric applications of decision theory. I’ll let others at the fund speak about their experiences.
I guess it’s the same as any other philosophical topic, either use your own philosophical reasoning/judgement to decide how good the person’s ideas/arguments are, and/or defer to other people’s judgements. The fact that there is currently no methodology for doing this that is less subjective and informal is a major reason for me to be interested in metaphilosophy, since if we solve metaphilosophy that will hopefully give us a better methodology for judging all philosophical ideas, assuming the correct solution to metaphilosophy isn’t philosophical anti-realism (i.e., philosophical questions don’t have right or wrong answers), or something like that.