Rob, are you able to disclose why people at Open Phil are interested in learning more decision theory? It seems a little far away from the AI strategy reports they’ve been publishing in recent years, and it also seemed like they were happy to keep funding MIRI (via their Committee for Effective Altruism Support) despite disagreements about the value of HRAD research, so the sudden interest in decision theory is intriguing.
I was in the chat and don’t have anything especially to “disclose”. Joe and Nick are both academic philosophers who’ve studied at Oxford and been at FHI, with a wide range of interests. And Abram and Scott are naturally great people to chat about decision theory with when they’re available.
My (uninformed) (non-)explanation: NB and JC are both philosophers by training, and it’s not surprising for philosophers to be interested in decision theory.
Rob, are you able to disclose why people at Open Phil are interested in learning more decision theory? It seems a little far away from the AI strategy reports they’ve been publishing in recent years, and it also seemed like they were happy to keep funding MIRI (via their Committee for Effective Altruism Support) despite disagreements about the value of HRAD research, so the sudden interest in decision theory is intriguing.
Mostly personal interest on my part (I was working on a blog post on the topic, now up), though I do think that the topic has broader relevance.
I was in the chat and don’t have anything especially to “disclose”. Joe and Nick are both academic philosophers who’ve studied at Oxford and been at FHI, with a wide range of interests. And Abram and Scott are naturally great people to chat about decision theory with when they’re available.
My (uninformed) (non-)explanation: NB and JC are both philosophers by training, and it’s not surprising for philosophers to be interested in decision theory.