Ah, but I think you have assumed slightly too much in what I meant. I simply meant to say that if someone wants Eliezer’s help in their goal to “work out the foundations” to “a field of (MIRI-style) Agent Foundations” the better way to understand Eliezer’s perspective on these difficult questions is to read the high-effort and thoughtful blog posts and papers he produced that’s intended to communicate his perspective on these questions, rather than ask him for some quick guesses on how one could in-principle solve the problems. I did not mean to imply that (either) way would necessarily work, as the goal itself is hard to achieve, I simply meant that one approach is clearly much more likely than the other to achieve that goal.
(That said, again to answer your question, my current guess is that Nate Soares is an example of a person who read those works and then came to share a lot of Eliezer’s approach to solving the problems. Though I’m honestly not sure how much he would put down to the factors of (a) reading the writing (b) working directly with Eliezer (c) trying to solve the problem himself and coming up with similar approaches. I also think that Wei Dai at least understood enough to make substantial progress on an open research question in decision theory, and similar things can be said of Scott Garrabrant re: logical uncertainty and others at MIRI.)
Ah, but I think you have assumed slightly too much in what I meant. I simply meant to say that if someone wants Eliezer’s help in their goal to “work out the foundations” to “a field of (MIRI-style) Agent Foundations” the better way to understand Eliezer’s perspective on these difficult questions is to read the high-effort and thoughtful blog posts and papers he produced that’s intended to communicate his perspective on these questions, rather than ask him for some quick guesses on how one could in-principle solve the problems. I did not mean to imply that (either) way would necessarily work, as the goal itself is hard to achieve, I simply meant that one approach is clearly much more likely than the other to achieve that goal.
(That said, again to answer your question, my current guess is that Nate Soares is an example of a person who read those works and then came to share a lot of Eliezer’s approach to solving the problems. Though I’m honestly not sure how much he would put down to the factors of (a) reading the writing (b) working directly with Eliezer (c) trying to solve the problem himself and coming up with similar approaches. I also think that Wei Dai at least understood enough to make substantial progress on an open research question in decision theory, and similar things can be said of Scott Garrabrant re: logical uncertainty and others at MIRI.)