I’m also a little skeptical of your “low-quality work dilutes the quality of those fields and attracts other low-quality work” fear—since high citation count is often thought of as an ipso facto measure of quality in academia, it would seem that if work attracts additional related work, it is probably not low quality.
The difference here is that most academic fields are pretty well-established, whereas AI safety, longtermism, and longtermist subparts of most academic fields are very new. The mechanism for attracting low-quality work I’m imagining is that smart people look at existing work and think “these people seem amateurish, and I’m not interested in engaging with them”. Luke Muelhauser’s report on case studies in early field growth gives the case of cryonics, which “failed to grow [...] is not part of normal medical practice, it is regarded with great skepticism by the mainstream scientific community, and it has not been graced with much funding or scientific attention.” I doubt most low-quality work we could fund would cripple the surrounding fields this way, but I do think it would have an effect on the kind of people who were interested in doing longtermist work.
I will also say that I think somewhat different perspectives do get funded through the LTFF, partially because we’ve intentionally selected fund managers with different views, and we weigh it strongly if one fund manager is really excited about something. We’ve made many grants that didn’t cross the funding bar for one or more fund managers.
Sure. I guess I don’t have a lot of faith in your team’s ability to do this, since you/people you are funding are already saying things that seem amateurish to me. But I’m not sure that is a big deal.
The difference here is that most academic fields are pretty well-established, whereas AI safety, longtermism, and longtermist subparts of most academic fields are very new. The mechanism for attracting low-quality work I’m imagining is that smart people look at existing work and think “these people seem amateurish, and I’m not interested in engaging with them”. Luke Muelhauser’s report on case studies in early field growth gives the case of cryonics, which “failed to grow [...] is not part of normal medical practice, it is regarded with great skepticism by the mainstream scientific community, and it has not been graced with much funding or scientific attention.” I doubt most low-quality work we could fund would cripple the surrounding fields this way, but I do think it would have an effect on the kind of people who were interested in doing longtermist work.
I will also say that I think somewhat different perspectives do get funded through the LTFF, partially because we’ve intentionally selected fund managers with different views, and we weigh it strongly if one fund manager is really excited about something. We’ve made many grants that didn’t cross the funding bar for one or more fund managers.
Sure. I guess I don’t have a lot of faith in your team’s ability to do this, since you/people you are funding are already saying things that seem amateurish to me. But I’m not sure that is a big deal.