Thanks for sharing your thoughts so transparently! :)
I’m particularly interested in this point:
Sometimes, our team supports projects that are directly aimed at [making object level progress], often because we think their value from a movement-building perspective is sufficiently high that it justifies supporting them (i.e. in those cases we might have different motives for supporting a project than the people who work on it have for working on it.)
a) I have the impression that we urgently need more smart people working on longtermist issues, particularly AI safety, governance and strategy
b) What do you think about the idea of encouraging longtermist researchers in general, and AI researchers in particular, to see their impact more than currently in terms of growing a field vs. making direct object-level progress?
as you say, both direct progress and getting more people on board are far from mutually exclusive, but I’d be surprised if it wouldn’t change what people are working on if we’d deliberatively prioritize the latter more
concrete examples: we might encourage them to do more things like contributing to course curricula, networking with and outreach to top CS departments, organize workshops, develop prizes and benchmarks
Thanks for sharing your thoughts so transparently! :)
I’m particularly interested in this point:
a) I have the impression that we urgently need more smart people working on longtermist issues, particularly AI safety, governance and strategy
b) What do you think about the idea of encouraging longtermist researchers in general, and AI researchers in particular, to see their impact more than currently in terms of growing a field vs. making direct object-level progress?
as you say, both direct progress and getting more people on board are far from mutually exclusive, but I’d be surprised if it wouldn’t change what people are working on if we’d deliberatively prioritize the latter more
concrete examples: we might encourage them to do more things like contributing to course curricula, networking with and outreach to top CS departments, organize workshops, develop prizes and benchmarks