If you really had no idea… fine, can’t do much better than trying to operant conditioning a person towards the end goal. In my world, getting a deep understanding of how to change is the biggest goal/point of rationality (I’ve given myself away, I care about AI Alignment less than you do ;).
So trying to skip to the rousing debate and clash of ideas while just hoping everyone figures out how to handle it feels like leaving most of the work undone.
Meta note: Me upvoting the comment above could make things go out of order.
operant conditioning
It could also be seen as selection—get rid of the people who aren’t X. This risks getting rid of people who might learn, which could be an issue if the goal of that place (whether it’s LW, SSC, or etc.) includes learning.
An organization, consisting only of people who have a PhD might be an interesting place, perhaps enabling collaboration and cutting edge work that couldn’t be done anywhere else. But without a place where people can get a Phd, eventually there will be no such organizations.
(Meta: the order wasn’t important, thanks for thinking about that though)
The selection part is something else I was thinking about. One of my thoughts was your “If there’s no way to train PhDs, they die out.” And the other was me being a bit skeptical of how big the pool would be right this second if we adopted a really thick skin policy. Reflecting on that second point, I realize I’m drawing from my day to day distribution, and don’t have thoughts about how thick skinned most LW people are or aren’t.
If you really had no idea… fine, can’t do much better than trying to operant conditioning a person towards the end goal. In my world, getting a deep understanding of how to change is the biggest goal/point of rationality (I’ve given myself away, I care about AI Alignment less than you do ;).
So trying to skip to the rousing debate and clash of ideas while just hoping everyone figures out how to handle it feels like leaving most of the work undone.
Meta note: Me upvoting the comment above could make things go out of order.
It could also be seen as selection—get rid of the people who aren’t X. This risks getting rid of people who might learn, which could be an issue if the goal of that place (whether it’s LW, SSC, or etc.) includes learning.
An organization, consisting only of people who have a PhD might be an interesting place, perhaps enabling collaboration and cutting edge work that couldn’t be done anywhere else. But without a place where people can get a Phd, eventually there will be no such organizations.
(Meta: the order wasn’t important, thanks for thinking about that though)
The selection part is something else I was thinking about. One of my thoughts was your “If there’s no way to train PhDs, they die out.” And the other was me being a bit skeptical of how big the pool would be right this second if we adopted a really thick skin policy. Reflecting on that second point, I realize I’m drawing from my day to day distribution, and don’t have thoughts about how thick skinned most LW people are or aren’t.