To clarify, basically anyone who actually wants to try to work on alignment full time who is at all promising and willing to learn is already getting funded to upskill and investigate for at least a few months. The question here is “why not fund them to do X, if they suggest it,” and my answer is that if they only thing they are interested in is X, and X is one of the things John listed above, they aren’t going to get funded unless they have a really great argument. And most don’t, and either they take feedback and come up with another idea. I suggest they upskill and learn more, or they decide to do something else.
To clarify, basically anyone who actually wants to try to work on alignment full time who is at all promising and willing to learn is already getting funded to upskill and investigate for at least a few months. The question here is “why not fund them to do X, if they suggest it,” and my answer is that if they only thing they are interested in is X, and X is one of the things John listed above, they aren’t going to get funded unless they have a really great argument. And most don’t, and either they take feedback and come up with another idea. I suggest they upskill and learn more, or they decide to do something else.
How do you define whether or not someone is “at all promising”?