The following is probably moot because I think it’s best for AI research organizations (hopefully ones with some prestige) to be the ones who pursue this, but in skimming through the paper, I don’t get the sense that it is applicable here.
From the abstract (emphasis mine):
In some situations a number of agents each have the ability to undertake an initiative that would have significant effects on the others. Suppose that each of these agents is purely motivated by an altruistic concern for the common good. We show that if each agent acts on her own personal judgment as to whether the initiative should be undertaken, then the initiative will be undertaken more often than is optimal.
Toy example from the introduction:
A sports team is planning a surprise birthday party for its coach. One of the players decides that it would be more fun to tell the coach in advance about the planned event. Although the other players think it would be better to keep it a surprise, the unilateralist lets word slip about the preparations
underway.
With Terry, I sense that it isn’t a situation where the action of one would have a significant affect on others (well, on Terry). For example, suppose Alice, a reader of LessWrong, saw my comment and emailed Terry. The most likely outcome here, I think, is that it just gets filtered out by some secretary and it never reaches Terry. But even if it did reach Terry, my model of him/people like him is that, if he in fact is unconvinced by the importance of AI safety, it would only be a mild annoyance and he’d probably forget it ever happened.
On the other hand, my model is also that if dozens and dozens of these emails reach him to the point where it starts to be an inconvenience to deal with them, at that point I think it would make him more notably annoyed, and I expect that this would make him less willing to join the cause. However, I expect that it would move him from thinking like a scout/weak sports fan to thinking like a weak/moderate sports fan. In other words, I expect the annoyance to make him a little bit biased, but still open to the idea and still maintaining solid epistemics. That’s just my model though.
I think the model clearly applies, though almost certainly the effect is less strictly binary than in the surprise party example.
I expect the annoyance to make him a little bit biased, but still open to the idea and still maintaining solid epistemics.
This is roughly a crux for me, yeah. I think dozens of people emailing him would cause him to (fairly reasonably, actually!) infer that something weird is going on (e.g., people are in a crazy echo chamber) and that he’s being targeted for unwanted attention (which he would be!). And it seems important, in a unilateralist’s curse way, that this effect is probably unrelated to the overall size of the group of people who have these beliefs about AI. Like, if you multiply the number of AI-riskers by 10, you also multiply by 10 the number of people who, by some context-unaware individual judgement, think they should cold-email Tao. Some of these people will be correct that they should do something like that, but it seems likely that many of such people will be incorrect.
Yeah, random internet forum users emailing eminent mathematician en masse would be strange enough to be non-productive. I for one wasn’t thinking anyone would to, I don’t think it was what OP suggested. To anyone contemplating sending one, the task is best delegated to someone who not only can write coherent research proposals that sound relevant to the person approached, but can write the best one.
Mathematicians receive occasional crank emails about solutions to P ?= NP, so anyone doing the reaching needs to be reputable to get past their crank filters.
The following is probably moot because I think it’s best for AI research organizations (hopefully ones with some prestige) to be the ones who pursue this, but in skimming through the paper, I don’t get the sense that it is applicable here.
From the abstract (emphasis mine):
Toy example from the introduction:
With Terry, I sense that it isn’t a situation where the action of one would have a significant affect on others (well, on Terry). For example, suppose Alice, a reader of LessWrong, saw my comment and emailed Terry. The most likely outcome here, I think, is that it just gets filtered out by some secretary and it never reaches Terry. But even if it did reach Terry, my model of him/people like him is that, if he in fact is unconvinced by the importance of AI safety, it would only be a mild annoyance and he’d probably forget it ever happened.
On the other hand, my model is also that if dozens and dozens of these emails reach him to the point where it starts to be an inconvenience to deal with them, at that point I think it would make him more notably annoyed, and I expect that this would make him less willing to join the cause. However, I expect that it would move him from thinking like a scout/weak sports fan to thinking like a weak/moderate sports fan. In other words, I expect the annoyance to make him a little bit biased, but still open to the idea and still maintaining solid epistemics. That’s just my model though.
I think the model clearly applies, though almost certainly the effect is less strictly binary than in the surprise party example.
This is roughly a crux for me, yeah. I think dozens of people emailing him would cause him to (fairly reasonably, actually!) infer that something weird is going on (e.g., people are in a crazy echo chamber) and that he’s being targeted for unwanted attention (which he would be!). And it seems important, in a unilateralist’s curse way, that this effect is probably unrelated to the overall size of the group of people who have these beliefs about AI. Like, if you multiply the number of AI-riskers by 10, you also multiply by 10 the number of people who, by some context-unaware individual judgement, think they should cold-email Tao. Some of these people will be correct that they should do something like that, but it seems likely that many of such people will be incorrect.
Yeah, random internet forum users emailing eminent mathematician en masse would be strange enough to be non-productive. I for one wasn’t thinking anyone would to, I don’t think it was what OP suggested. To anyone contemplating sending one, the task is best delegated to someone who not only can write coherent research proposals that sound relevant to the person approached, but can write the best one.
Mathematicians receive occasional crank emails about solutions to P ?= NP, so anyone doing the reaching needs to be reputable to get past their crank filters.
I think the people cold emailing Terry in this scenario should at least make sure they have the $10M ready!