Yeah, so… I find myself feeling like I have some things in common with the post author’s situation.
I don’t think “work for free at an alignment org” is really an option? I don’t know about any alignment orgs offering unpaid internships. An unpaid worker isn’t free for an org, you still need to coordinate them, assess their output, etc. The issues with team bloat and how much to try to integrate a volunteer are substantial.
I wish I had someone I could work with on my personal alignment agenda, but it’s not necessarily easy to find someone interested enough in the same topic and trustworthy enough to want to commit to working with them.
Which brings up another issue. Research which has potential capabilities side-effects is always going to be a temptation to some degree. How can potential collaborators or grant makers trust that researchers will resist the temptation to cash in on powerful advances and also prevent the ideas from leaking? If the ideas are unsafe to publish then the ideas can’t contribute piecemeal to the field of alignment research, they have to be valuable alone. That places a much higher bar for success. Which makes it seem like a riskier bet from the perspective of funders.
One way to partially ameliorate this issue of trust is having Orgs/Companies. They can thoroughly investigate a person’s competence and trustworthiness. Then the person can potentially contribute to a variety of different projects once onboarded. Management can supervise and ensure that individual contributors are acting in alignment with the company’s values and rules. That’s a hard thing for a grant-making institution to do. They can’t afford that level of initial evaluation, much less the ongoing supervision and technical guidance. So… Yeah. Tougher problem than it seems on first glance.
Yeah, so… I find myself feeling like I have some things in common with the post author’s situation. I don’t think “work for free at an alignment org” is really an option? I don’t know about any alignment orgs offering unpaid internships. An unpaid worker isn’t free for an org, you still need to coordinate them, assess their output, etc. The issues with team bloat and how much to try to integrate a volunteer are substantial.
I wish I had someone I could work with on my personal alignment agenda, but it’s not necessarily easy to find someone interested enough in the same topic and trustworthy enough to want to commit to working with them.
Which brings up another issue. Research which has potential capabilities side-effects is always going to be a temptation to some degree. How can potential collaborators or grant makers trust that researchers will resist the temptation to cash in on powerful advances and also prevent the ideas from leaking? If the ideas are unsafe to publish then the ideas can’t contribute piecemeal to the field of alignment research, they have to be valuable alone. That places a much higher bar for success. Which makes it seem like a riskier bet from the perspective of funders. One way to partially ameliorate this issue of trust is having Orgs/Companies. They can thoroughly investigate a person’s competence and trustworthiness. Then the person can potentially contribute to a variety of different projects once onboarded. Management can supervise and ensure that individual contributors are acting in alignment with the company’s values and rules. That’s a hard thing for a grant-making institution to do. They can’t afford that level of initial evaluation, much less the ongoing supervision and technical guidance. So… Yeah. Tougher problem than it seems on first glance.