Meta: this comment is decidedly negative feedback, so needs the standard disclaimers. I don’t know Ethan well, but I don’t harbor any particular ill-will towards him. This comment is negative feedback about Ethan’s skill in choosing projects in particular, I do not think others should mimic him in that department, but that does not mean that I think he’s a bad person/researcher in general. I leave the comment mainly for the benefit of people who are not Ethan, so for Ethan: I am sorry for being not-nice to you here.
When I read the title, my first thought was “man, Ethan Perez sure is not someone I’d point to as an examplar of choosing good projects”.
On reading the relevant section of the post, it sounds like Ethan’s project-selection method is basically “forward-chain from what seems quick and easy, and also pay attention to whatever other people talk about”. Which indeed sounds like a recipe for very mediocre projects: it’s the sort of thing you’d expect a priori to reliably produce publications and be talked about, but have basically-zero counterfactual impact. These are the sorts of projects where someone else would likely have done something similar regardless, and it’s not likely to change how people are thinking about things or building things; it’s just generally going to add marginal effort to the prevailing milieu, whatever that might be.
Yeah, some caveats I should’ve added in the interview:
Don’t listen to my project selection advice if you don’t like my research
The forward-chaining -style approach I’m advocating for is controversial among the alignment forum community (and less controversial in the ML/LLM research community and to some extent among LLM alignment groups)
Part of why I like this approach is that I (personally) think there are at least some somewhat promising agendas out there, that aren’t getting executed on enough (or much at all), and it’s doable to e.g. double the amount of good work happening on some agenda by executing quickly/well
If you don’t think existing agendas are that promising (or think they have more work done on them than they deserve), then this is the wrong approach
The back-chaining approach I’m advocating for is pretty standard in the alignment community, I think most alignment forum community researchers would probably endorse it. I’m also excited about this approach to research as well, and have done some work in this way as well (e.g., sleepers agents and model organisms of misalignment)
I’m guessing part of the disagreement here is coming from disagreement on how much alignment progress is idea/agenda bottlenecked vs. execution bottlenecked. I really like Tim Dettmer’s blog post on credit assignment in research, which has a good framework for thinking about when you’ll have more counterfactual impact working on ideas vs. working on execution.
Meta: this comment is decidedly negative feedback, so needs the standard disclaimers. I don’t know Ethan well, but I don’t harbor any particular ill-will towards him. This comment is negative feedback about Ethan’s skill in choosing projects in particular, I do not think others should mimic him in that department, but that does not mean that I think he’s a bad person/researcher in general. I leave the comment mainly for the benefit of people who are not Ethan, so for Ethan: I am sorry for being not-nice to you here.
When I read the title, my first thought was “man, Ethan Perez sure is not someone I’d point to as an examplar of choosing good projects”.
On reading the relevant section of the post, it sounds like Ethan’s project-selection method is basically “forward-chain from what seems quick and easy, and also pay attention to whatever other people talk about”. Which indeed sounds like a recipe for very mediocre projects: it’s the sort of thing you’d expect a priori to reliably produce publications and be talked about, but have basically-zero counterfactual impact. These are the sorts of projects where someone else would likely have done something similar regardless, and it’s not likely to change how people are thinking about things or building things; it’s just generally going to add marginal effort to the prevailing milieu, whatever that might be.
Yeah, some caveats I should’ve added in the interview:
Don’t listen to my project selection advice if you don’t like my research
The forward-chaining -style approach I’m advocating for is controversial among the alignment forum community (and less controversial in the ML/LLM research community and to some extent among LLM alignment groups)
Part of why I like this approach is that I (personally) think there are at least some somewhat promising agendas out there, that aren’t getting executed on enough (or much at all), and it’s doable to e.g. double the amount of good work happening on some agenda by executing quickly/well
If you don’t think existing agendas are that promising (or think they have more work done on them than they deserve), then this is the wrong approach
The back-chaining approach I’m advocating for is pretty standard in the alignment community, I think most alignment forum community researchers would probably endorse it. I’m also excited about this approach to research as well, and have done some work in this way as well (e.g., sleepers agents and model organisms of misalignment)
I’m guessing part of the disagreement here is coming from disagreement on how much alignment progress is idea/agenda bottlenecked vs. execution bottlenecked. I really like Tim Dettmer’s blog post on credit assignment in research, which has a good framework for thinking about when you’ll have more counterfactual impact working on ideas vs. working on execution.