Summaries are relevant to epistemics because they make it 10x easier for others to 1) see all your claims, and 2) inspect your logic. This is even better if you post your summary in the form of a philosophy-style argument as I did here
The argument:
EA safety is small, even relative to a single academic subfield.
There is overlap between capabilities and short-term safety work.
There is overlap between short-term safety work and long-term safety work.
So AI safety is less neglected than the opening quotes imply.
Also, on present trends, there’s a good chance that academia [EDIT: and industry] will do more safety over time, eventually dwarfing the contribution of EA.
Having a summary as an opener also means that people who swing past your post in 30 seconds (i.e., the majority of your audience) will nevertheless get the gist.
(This is a marginal comment that doesn’t need a reply, it is running into gadfly territory).
Obviously, writing a good summary is costly and the proposed philosophical/axiom like writing is further harder.
One guess of what you’re getting at, is that (somehow making) the rewarding of such summaries a strong norm would improve the forum and this would filter out bad thinking and the very act of such writing would improve discourse and even thought, a la sort of the point of philosophy in the first place.
I guess one issue is that I am skeptical this could be inculturated easily or at all.
Your response to my other comment (“my shorter UI suggestions (epistemic status and summary) could be required by the server. Behaviour change solved”) doesn’t address the quality thing—so I guess everything in that comment, especially fluency and seating, applies again.
I mean, one way to see this whole issue is basically EA’s worry about “Eternal September”, right? It seems unlikely that would be such meme/fear if you could just tell people to get good.
Another issue is that runs into the teeth of the major, needed effort to reduce frictions around posting, this seems sort of like the opposite direction.
It’s very easy to write code that relaxes these constraints for new users, which should serve the friction reduction goal, if that’s a goal we should have.
I have no illusions about the easiness of norm setting, hence code first. This post is a nudge in the direction I want; this is all I wish to do at the mo.
Good summaries are very hard, but a bad summary is better than no summary. These small changes do not need to solve the whole problem to be worthwhile.
Spelling some things out:
Summaries are relevant to epistemics because they make it 10x easier for others to 1) see all your claims, and 2) inspect your logic. This is even better if you post your summary in the form of a philosophy-style argument as I did here
Having a summary as an opener also means that people who swing past your post in 30 seconds (i.e., the majority of your audience) will nevertheless get the gist.
(This is a marginal comment that doesn’t need a reply, it is running into gadfly territory).
Obviously, writing a good summary is costly and the proposed philosophical/axiom like writing is further harder.
One guess of what you’re getting at, is that (somehow making) the rewarding of such summaries a strong norm would improve the forum and this would filter out bad thinking and the very act of such writing would improve discourse and even thought, a la sort of the point of philosophy in the first place.
I guess one issue is that I am skeptical this could be inculturated easily or at all.
Your response to my other comment (“my shorter UI suggestions (epistemic status and summary) could be required by the server. Behaviour change solved”) doesn’t address the quality thing—so I guess everything in that comment, especially fluency and seating, applies again.
I mean, one way to see this whole issue is basically EA’s worry about “Eternal September”, right? It seems unlikely that would be such meme/fear if you could just tell people to get good.
Another issue is that runs into the teeth of the major, needed effort to reduce frictions around posting, this seems sort of like the opposite direction.
It’s very easy to write code that relaxes these constraints for new users, which should serve the friction reduction goal, if that’s a goal we should have.
I have no illusions about the easiness of norm setting, hence code first. This post is a nudge in the direction I want; this is all I wish to do at the mo.
Good summaries are very hard, but a bad summary is better than no summary. These small changes do not need to solve the whole problem to be worthwhile.