I think that much of the disconnect comes down to focusing on goals over methods. I think it is better to think of goals as orienting us in the problem-space, while most of the benefits accrue along the way. By the time you make it a substantial fraction of the way to a goal, you’ll likely be in a much better position to realize the original goal was slightly off and adjust course. So ‘eliminating all infectious disease’ could easily be criticized as unrealistic for endless reasons, yet it is very useful for orienting us to be scope sensitive, think in terms of hits-based reasoning and so on. Similarly, even having an ‘N problems of aging’ list to argue about is because someone did the work of trying to figure out what it would take at a multi-year research level. If we want to talk about neglected areas of funding, I think a great place to start is neglect for funding promising methods or directions that might plausibly generate new methods with less focus on what the particular outcomes might be. Or, to sort of paraphrase Hanson and Bostrom a bit: new considerations generally trump fine tuning of existing considerations.
What could we measure that would make seemingly intractable problems trivial? Can we take moonshots at those? And I’m not talking about actually funding the moonshot once the opportunity has been identified. I’m talking about the seed research to identify plausibility, funding small numbers of people at the 1 year level to do deep dives in much weirder areas than in house researchers have been doing.
I think that much of the disconnect comes down to focusing on goals over methods. I think it is better to think of goals as orienting us in the problem-space, while most of the benefits accrue along the way. By the time you make it a substantial fraction of the way to a goal, you’ll likely be in a much better position to realize the original goal was slightly off and adjust course. So ‘eliminating all infectious disease’ could easily be criticized as unrealistic for endless reasons, yet it is very useful for orienting us to be scope sensitive, think in terms of hits-based reasoning and so on. Similarly, even having an ‘N problems of aging’ list to argue about is because someone did the work of trying to figure out what it would take at a multi-year research level. If we want to talk about neglected areas of funding, I think a great place to start is neglect for funding promising methods or directions that might plausibly generate new methods with less focus on what the particular outcomes might be. Or, to sort of paraphrase Hanson and Bostrom a bit: new considerations generally trump fine tuning of existing considerations.
What could we measure that would make seemingly intractable problems trivial? Can we take moonshots at those? And I’m not talking about actually funding the moonshot once the opportunity has been identified. I’m talking about the seed research to identify plausibility, funding small numbers of people at the 1 year level to do deep dives in much weirder areas than in house researchers have been doing.