Not Buck, but one possibility is that people pursuing different high-level agendas have different intuitions about what’s valuable, and those kind of disagreements are relatively difficult to resolve, and the best way to resolve them is to gather more “object-level” data.
Maybe people have already spent a fair amount of time having in-person discussions trying to resolve their disagreements, and haven’t made progress, and this discourages them from writing up their thoughts because they think it won’t be a good use of time. However, this line of reasoning might be mistaken—it seems plausible to me that people entering the field of AI safety are relatively impartial judges of which intuitions do/don’t seem valid, and the question of where new people in the field of AI safety should focus is an important one, and having more public disagreement would improve human capital allocation.
Not Buck, but one possibility is that people pursuing different high-level agendas have different intuitions about what’s valuable, and those kind of disagreements are relatively difficult to resolve, and the best way to resolve them is to gather more “object-level” data.
Maybe people have already spent a fair amount of time having in-person discussions trying to resolve their disagreements, and haven’t made progress, and this discourages them from writing up their thoughts because they think it won’t be a good use of time. However, this line of reasoning might be mistaken—it seems plausible to me that people entering the field of AI safety are relatively impartial judges of which intuitions do/don’t seem valid, and the question of where new people in the field of AI safety should focus is an important one, and having more public disagreement would improve human capital allocation.