What Duncan said. “MIRI at least temporarily gave up on personally executing on technical research agendas” is false, though a related claim is true: “Nate and Eliezer (who are collectively a major part of MIRI’s research leadership and play a huge role in the org’s strategy-setting) don’t currently see a technical research agenda that’s promising enough for them to want to personally focus on it, or for them to want the organization to make it an overriding priority”.
I do think the “temporarily” and “currently” parts of those statements is quite important: part of why the “MIRI has given up” narrative is silly is that it’s rewriting history to gloss “we don’t know what to do” as “we know what to do, but we don’t want to do it”. We don’t know what to do, but if someone came up with a good idea that we could help with, we’d jump on it!
There are many negative-sounding descriptions of MIRI’s state that I could see an argument for, as stylized narratives (“MIRI doesn’t know what to do”, “MIRI is adrift”, etc.). Somehow, though, people skipped over all those perfectly serviceable pejorative options and went straight for the option that’s definitely just not true?
We don’t know what to do, but if someone came up with a good idea that we could help with, we’d jump on it!
In that case, I think the socially expected behavior is to do some random busywork, to send a clear signal that you not lazy.
(In corporate environment, the usual solution is to organize a few meetings. Not sure what is the equivalent for non-profits… perhaps organizing conferences?)
I don’t see how that would help at all, and pure busywork is silly when you have lots of things to do that are positive-EV but probably low-impact.
MIRI “doesn’t know what to do” in the sense that we don’t see a strategy with macroscopic probability of saving the world, and the most-promising ones with microscopic probability are very diverse and tend to violate or side-step our current models in various ways, such that it’s hard to pick actions that help much with those scenarios as a class.
That’s different from MIRI “not knowing what to do” in the sense of having no ideas for local actions that are worth trying on EV grounds. (Though a lot of these look like encouraging non-MIRI people to try lots of things and build skill and models in ways that might change the strategic situation down the road.)
(Also, I’m mainly trying to describe Nate and Eliezer’s views here. Other MIRI researchers are more optimistic about some of the technical work we’re doing, AFAIK.)
What Duncan said. “MIRI at least temporarily gave up on personally executing on technical research agendas” is false, though a related claim is true: “Nate and Eliezer (who are collectively a major part of MIRI’s research leadership and play a huge role in the org’s strategy-setting) don’t currently see a technical research agenda that’s promising enough for them to want to personally focus on it, or for them to want the organization to make it an overriding priority”.
I do think the “temporarily” and “currently” parts of those statements is quite important: part of why the “MIRI has given up” narrative is silly is that it’s rewriting history to gloss “we don’t know what to do” as “we know what to do, but we don’t want to do it”. We don’t know what to do, but if someone came up with a good idea that we could help with, we’d jump on it!
There are many negative-sounding descriptions of MIRI’s state that I could see an argument for, as stylized narratives (“MIRI doesn’t know what to do”, “MIRI is adrift”, etc.). Somehow, though, people skipped over all those perfectly serviceable pejorative options and went straight for the option that’s definitely just not true?
In that case, I think the socially expected behavior is to do some random busywork, to send a clear signal that you not lazy.
(In corporate environment, the usual solution is to organize a few meetings. Not sure what is the equivalent for non-profits… perhaps organizing conferences?)
I don’t see how that would help at all, and pure busywork is silly when you have lots of things to do that are positive-EV but probably low-impact.
MIRI “doesn’t know what to do” in the sense that we don’t see a strategy with macroscopic probability of saving the world, and the most-promising ones with microscopic probability are very diverse and tend to violate or side-step our current models in various ways, such that it’s hard to pick actions that help much with those scenarios as a class.
That’s different from MIRI “not knowing what to do” in the sense of having no ideas for local actions that are worth trying on EV grounds. (Though a lot of these look like encouraging non-MIRI people to try lots of things and build skill and models in ways that might change the strategic situation down the road.)
(Also, I’m mainly trying to describe Nate and Eliezer’s views here. Other MIRI researchers are more optimistic about some of the technical work we’re doing, AFAIK.)