I think your sense is correct. I think that plenty of people have short docs on why their approach is good; I think basically no-one has long docs engaging thoroughly with the criticisms of their paths (I don’t think Paul’s published arguments defending his perspective count as complete; Paul has arguments that I hear him make in person that I haven’t seen written up.)
My guess is that it’s developed because various groups decided that it was pretty unlikely that they were going to be able to convince other groups of their work, and so they decided to just go their own ways. This is exacerbated by the fact that several AI safety groups have beliefs which are based on arguments which they’re reluctant to share with each other.
(I was having a conversation with an AI safety researcher at a different org recently, and they couldn’t tell me about some things that they knew from their job, and I couldn’t tell them about things from my job. We were reflecting on the situation, and then one of us proposed the metaphor that we’re like two people who were sliding on ice next to each other and then pushed away and have now chosen our paths and can’t interact anymore to course correct.)
Should we be concerned? Idk, seems kind of concerning. I kind of agree with MIRI that it’s not clearly worth it for MIRI leadership to spend time talking to people like Paul who disagree with them a lot.
Also, sometimes fields should fracture a bit while they work on their own stuff; maybe we’ll develop our own separate ideas for the next five years, and then come talk to each other more when we have clearer ideas.
I suspect that things like the Alignment Newsletter are causing AI safety researchers to understand and engage with each other’s work more; this seems good.
FWIW, it’s not clear to me that AI alignment folks with different agendas have put less effort into (or have made less progress on) understanding the motivations for other agendas than is typical in other somewhat-analogous fields. Like, MIRI leadership and Paul have put >25 (and maybe >100, over the years?) hours into arguing about merits of their differing agendas (in person, on the web, in GDocs comments), and my impression is that central participants to those conversations (e.g. Paul, Eliezer, Nate) can pass the others’ ideological Turing tests reasonably well on a fair number of sub-questions and down 1-3 levels of “depth” (depending on the sub-question), and that might be more effort and better ITT performance than is typical for “research agenda motivation disagreements” in small niche fields that are comparable on some other dimensions.
I suspect that things like the Alignment Newsletter are causing AI safety researchers to understand and engage with each other’s work more; this seems good.
This is the goal, but it’s unclear that it’s having much of an effect. I feel like I relatively often have conversations with AI safety researchers where I mention something I highlighted in the newsletter, and the other person hasn’t heard of it, or has a very superficial / wrong understanding of it (one that I think would be corrected by reading just the summary in the newsletter).
This is very anecdotal; even if there are times when I talk to people and they do know the paper that I’m talking about because of the newsletter, I probably wouldn’t notice / learn that fact.
(In contrast, junior researchers are often more informed than I would expect, at least about the landscape, even if not the underlying reasons / arguments.)
I think your sense is correct. I think that plenty of people have short docs on why their approach is good; I think basically no-one has long docs engaging thoroughly with the criticisms of their paths (I don’t think Paul’s published arguments defending his perspective count as complete; Paul has arguments that I hear him make in person that I haven’t seen written up.)
My guess is that it’s developed because various groups decided that it was pretty unlikely that they were going to be able to convince other groups of their work, and so they decided to just go their own ways. This is exacerbated by the fact that several AI safety groups have beliefs which are based on arguments which they’re reluctant to share with each other.
(I was having a conversation with an AI safety researcher at a different org recently, and they couldn’t tell me about some things that they knew from their job, and I couldn’t tell them about things from my job. We were reflecting on the situation, and then one of us proposed the metaphor that we’re like two people who were sliding on ice next to each other and then pushed away and have now chosen our paths and can’t interact anymore to course correct.)
Should we be concerned? Idk, seems kind of concerning. I kind of agree with MIRI that it’s not clearly worth it for MIRI leadership to spend time talking to people like Paul who disagree with them a lot.
Also, sometimes fields should fracture a bit while they work on their own stuff; maybe we’ll develop our own separate ideas for the next five years, and then come talk to each other more when we have clearer ideas.
I suspect that things like the Alignment Newsletter are causing AI safety researchers to understand and engage with each other’s work more; this seems good.
FWIW, it’s not clear to me that AI alignment folks with different agendas have put less effort into (or have made less progress on) understanding the motivations for other agendas than is typical in other somewhat-analogous fields. Like, MIRI leadership and Paul have put >25 (and maybe >100, over the years?) hours into arguing about merits of their differing agendas (in person, on the web, in GDocs comments), and my impression is that central participants to those conversations (e.g. Paul, Eliezer, Nate) can pass the others’ ideological Turing tests reasonably well on a fair number of sub-questions and down 1-3 levels of “depth” (depending on the sub-question), and that might be more effort and better ITT performance than is typical for “research agenda motivation disagreements” in small niche fields that are comparable on some other dimensions.
This is the goal, but it’s unclear that it’s having much of an effect. I feel like I relatively often have conversations with AI safety researchers where I mention something I highlighted in the newsletter, and the other person hasn’t heard of it, or has a very superficial / wrong understanding of it (one that I think would be corrected by reading just the summary in the newsletter).
This is very anecdotal; even if there are times when I talk to people and they do know the paper that I’m talking about because of the newsletter, I probably wouldn’t notice / learn that fact.
(In contrast, junior researchers are often more informed than I would expect, at least about the landscape, even if not the underlying reasons / arguments.)