Luke has just told me (personal conversation) that what he got from my comment was, “SIAI’s difficulties were just due to lack of funding” which was not what I was trying to say at all. What I was trying to convey was more like, “I didn’t have the ability to run this organization, and knew this—people who I hoped would be able to run the organization, while I tried to produce in other areas (e.g. turning my back on everything else to get a year of FAI work done with Marcello or writing the Sequences) didn’t succeed in doing so either—and the only reason we could hang on long enough to hire Luke was that the funding was available nonetheless and in sufficient quantity that we could afford to take risks like paying Luke to stay on for a while, well before we knew he would become Executive Director”.
Update: I came out of a recent conversation with Eliezer with a higher opinion of Eliezer’s general rationality, because several things that had previously looked to me like unforced, forseeable mistakes by Eliezer now look to me more like non-mistakes or not-so-forseeable mistakes.
Luke has just told me (personal conversation) that what he got from my comment was, “SIAI’s difficulties were just due to lack of funding” which was not what I was trying to say at all. What I was trying to convey was more like, “I didn’t have the ability to run this organization, and knew this—people who I hoped would be able to run the organization, while I tried to produce in other areas (e.g. turning my back on everything else to get a year of FAI work done with Marcello or writing the Sequences) didn’t succeed in doing so either—and the only reason we could hang on long enough to hire Luke was that the funding was available nonetheless and in sufficient quantity that we could afford to take risks like paying Luke to stay on for a while, well before we knew he would become Executive Director”.
Does Luke disagree with this clarified point? I do not find a clear indicator in this conversation.
Update: I came out of a recent conversation with Eliezer with a higher opinion of Eliezer’s general rationality, because several things that had previously looked to me like unforced, forseeable mistakes by Eliezer now look to me more like non-mistakes or not-so-forseeable mistakes.