Hm. Good points. I guess what I really mean with the academia points is that it seems like academia has many blockers and inefficiencies that I think are made in such a way so that capabilities progress is vastly easier than alignment progress to jump through, and extra-so for capabilities labs. Like, right now it seems like a lot of alignment work is just playing with a bunch of different reframings of the problems to see what sticks or makes problems easier.
You have more experience here, but my impression of a lot of academia was that it was very focused on publishing lots of papers with very legible results (and also a meaningless theory section). In such a world, playing around with different framings of problems doesn’t succeed, and you end up pushed towards framings which are better on the currently used metrics. Most currently used metrics for AI stuff are capabilities oriented, so that means doing capabilities work, or work that helps push capabilities.
I think it’s true that the easiest thing to do is legibly improve on currently used metrics. I guess my take is that in academia you want to write a short paper that people can see is valuable, which biases towards “I did thing X and now the number is bigger”. But, for example, if you reframe the alignment problem and show some interesting thing about your reframing, that can work pretty well as a paper (see The Off-Switch Game, Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power). My guess is that the bigger deal is that there’s some social pressure to publish frequently (in part because that’s a sign that you’ve done something, and a thing that closes a feedback loop).
This seems wrong to me about academia—I’d say it’s driven by “learning cool things you can summarize in a talk”.
Also in general I feel like this logic would also work for why we shouldn’t work inside buildings, or with computers.
Hm. Good points. I guess what I really mean with the academia points is that it seems like academia has many blockers and inefficiencies that I think are made in such a way so that capabilities progress is vastly easier than alignment progress to jump through, and extra-so for capabilities labs. Like, right now it seems like a lot of alignment work is just playing with a bunch of different reframings of the problems to see what sticks or makes problems easier.
You have more experience here, but my impression of a lot of academia was that it was very focused on publishing lots of papers with very legible results (and also a meaningless theory section). In such a world, playing around with different framings of problems doesn’t succeed, and you end up pushed towards framings which are better on the currently used metrics. Most currently used metrics for AI stuff are capabilities oriented, so that means doing capabilities work, or work that helps push capabilities.
I think it’s true that the easiest thing to do is legibly improve on currently used metrics. I guess my take is that in academia you want to write a short paper that people can see is valuable, which biases towards “I did thing X and now the number is bigger”. But, for example, if you reframe the alignment problem and show some interesting thing about your reframing, that can work pretty well as a paper (see The Off-Switch Game, Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power). My guess is that the bigger deal is that there’s some social pressure to publish frequently (in part because that’s a sign that you’ve done something, and a thing that closes a feedback loop).
Maybe a bigger deal is that by the nature of a paper, you can’t get too many inferential steps away from the field.