In the half-formed thoughts stage, I’d expect to see a lot of literature reviews, agendas laying out problems, and attempts to identify and question fundamental assumptions. I expect that (not blog-post-sized speculation) to be the hard part of the early stages of intellectual progress, and I don’t see it right now.
Perhaps we can split this into technical AI safety and everything else. Above I’m mostly speaking about “everything else” that Less Wrong wants to solve. Since AI safety is now a substantial enough field that its problems need to be solved in more systemic ways.
In the half-formed thoughts stage, I’d expect to see a lot of literature reviews, agendas laying out problems, and attempts to identify and question fundamental assumptions. I expect that (not blog-post-sized speculation) to be the hard part of the early stages of intellectual progress, and I don’t see it right now.
I would expect that later in the process. Agendas laying out problems and fundamental assumptions don’t spring from nowhere (at least for me), they come from conversations where I’m trying to articulate some intuition, and I recognize some underlying pattern. The pattern and structure doesn’t emerge spontaneously, it comes from trying to pick around the edges of a thing, get thoughts across, explain my intuitions and see where they break.
I think it’s fair to say that crystallizing these patterns into a formal theory is a “hard part”, but the foundation for making it easy is laid out in the floundering and flailing that came before.
In the half-formed thoughts stage, I’d expect to see a lot of literature reviews, agendas laying out problems, and attempts to identify and question fundamental assumptions. I expect that (not blog-post-sized speculation) to be the hard part of the early stages of intellectual progress, and I don’t see it right now.
Perhaps we can split this into technical AI safety and everything else. Above I’m mostly speaking about “everything else” that Less Wrong wants to solve. Since AI safety is now a substantial enough field that its problems need to be solved in more systemic ways.
I would expect that later in the process. Agendas laying out problems and fundamental assumptions don’t spring from nowhere (at least for me), they come from conversations where I’m trying to articulate some intuition, and I recognize some underlying pattern. The pattern and structure doesn’t emerge spontaneously, it comes from trying to pick around the edges of a thing, get thoughts across, explain my intuitions and see where they break.
I think it’s fair to say that crystallizing these patterns into a formal theory is a “hard part”, but the foundation for making it easy is laid out in the floundering and flailing that came before.