I have a broad sense that AI safety thinking has evolved a bunch over the years, and I think it would be cool to have a retrospective of “here are some concrete things that used to be pretty central that we now think are either incorrect or at least incorrectly focused”
Of course it’s hard enough to get a broad overview of what everyone thinks now, let alone what they used to think but discarded.
(this is probably also useful outside of AI safety, but I think it would be most useful there)
I like this. I’ve occasionally thought previously about what value there would be in having a ‘historian.’ There are many things that I took a while to figure out (such as the history/lineage of various ideas and organizations, or why there was a strategy shift from one thing to another thing), as well as the many things which I’ve simply never encountered. I imagine that there are plenty of lessons that can be learned from those.
EA as a community tends to do a better-than-normal job when it comes to writing and sharing retrospectives, but there are lots of things that I don’t understand and that (I think) aren’t easily available. (simplistic example: was asking for randomized control trials (or other methods) to demonstrate effectiveness really shockingly revolutionary in development work?)
was asking for randomized control trials (or other methods) to demonstrate effectiveness really shockingly revolutionary
EA didn’t invent RCTs, or even popularize them within the social sciences, but their introduction was indeed a major change in thinking. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the Nobel prize in economics largely for demonstrating the experimental approach to the study of development.
I have a broad sense that AI safety thinking has evolved a bunch over the years, and I think it would be cool to have a retrospective of “here are some concrete things that used to be pretty central that we now think are either incorrect or at least incorrectly focused”
Of course it’s hard enough to get a broad overview of what everyone thinks now, let alone what they used to think but discarded.
(this is probably also useful outside of AI safety, but I think it would be most useful there)
I like this. I’ve occasionally thought previously about what value there would be in having a ‘historian.’ There are many things that I took a while to figure out (such as the history/lineage of various ideas and organizations, or why there was a strategy shift from one thing to another thing), as well as the many things which I’ve simply never encountered. I imagine that there are plenty of lessons that can be learned from those.
EA as a community tends to do a better-than-normal job when it comes to writing and sharing retrospectives, but there are lots of things that I don’t understand and that (I think) aren’t easily available. (simplistic example: was asking for randomized control trials (or other methods) to demonstrate effectiveness really shockingly revolutionary in development work?)
EA didn’t invent RCTs, or even popularize them within the social sciences, but their introduction was indeed a major change in thinking. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the Nobel prize in economics largely for demonstrating the experimental approach to the study of development.