I do agree net positive is too soft, but I don’t think this is what anyone is seriously advocating for here.
The main implicit theory of impact for event venues is venues → events → {ideas / intellectual progress / new people engaging with the ideas / sharing of ideas}
I think in domains like “thinking about future with powerful AI” or “how to improve humanity’s epistemics” or “what are some implications of digital minds existing” it seems the case that noticeable amount of thinking and discussion is happening at various in-person gatherings.
If you overall make the bet these domains are important (which seems softmax-reasonable), you are faced with a range of bets which differ on criteria such as how good the bet is, what’s the variance, and how scalable it is. To showcase some extremes - e.g., I think it’s an obviously great idea to pay Paul Christiano, allowing him to work on alignment. while this is way more effective than buying events venue, it’s not really scalable—if you send twice as much money to Paul, you won’t get twice the output. - it’s less clear what’s the sign and impact of ‘pay a lot of AI safety community builders’ : plausibly good, but high variance - I think venues are plausibly good softmax type of bet, with a lot of positive uncertainty, and not that much direct downside
I do agree net positive is too soft, but I don’t think this is what anyone is seriously advocating for here.
The main implicit theory of impact for event venues is
venues → events → {ideas / intellectual progress / new people engaging with the ideas / sharing of ideas}
I think in domains like “thinking about future with powerful AI” or “how to improve humanity’s epistemics” or “what are some implications of digital minds existing” it seems the case that noticeable amount of thinking and discussion is happening at various in-person gatherings.
If you overall make the bet these domains are important (which seems softmax-reasonable), you are faced with a range of bets which differ on criteria such as how good the bet is, what’s the variance, and how scalable it is. To showcase some extremes
- e.g., I think it’s an obviously great idea to pay Paul Christiano, allowing him to work on alignment. while this is way more effective than buying events venue, it’s not really scalable—if you send twice as much money to Paul, you won’t get twice the output.
- it’s less clear what’s the sign and impact of ‘pay a lot of AI safety community builders’ : plausibly good, but high variance
- I think venues are plausibly good softmax type of bet, with a lot of positive uncertainty, and not that much direct downside
It would be helpful to see your thoughts on community building fleshed out more in a post or longer comment.