I just want to share that I’ve updated my view concerning Convincing Capability Research quite a bit since we spoke about it last week.
At the time my view was that you would get the best results (measured in probability of persuasion) from persuasion techniques that exploit peoples biases (e.g. stuff like Cialdini’s Influence). Since then I’ve read Galef’s Scout Mindset and I now think going for mutual understanding as a way of persuasion is more effective (scout mindset and street epistemology both promoting this as the way to actually persuade people).
In particular I am now ranking you much higher in fitness for this task then I did last week.
I’ve recently talked to students at Harvard and about convincing people about alignment (I’m imagining cs/math/physics majors) and how that’s hard because it’s a little inconvenient to be convinced. There were a couple of bottlenecks here:
There’s ~80 people signed up for a “coffee with an x-risk” person talk but only 5 very busy people who are competent enough to give those one-on-ones.
There are many people who have friends/roommates/classmates, but don’t know how to approach the conversation or do it effectively.
For both, training people to do that and creating curriculums/workshops would be useful. I don’t think you can create this without going out and trying it out on real, intelligent people.
This could then be used for capability researchers in general.
I just want to share that I’ve updated my view concerning Convincing Capability Research quite a bit since we spoke about it last week.
At the time my view was that you would get the best results (measured in probability of persuasion) from persuasion techniques that exploit peoples biases (e.g. stuff like Cialdini’s Influence). Since then I’ve read Galef’s Scout Mindset and I now think going for mutual understanding as a way of persuasion is more effective (scout mindset and street epistemology both promoting this as the way to actually persuade people).
In particular I am now ranking you much higher in fitness for this task then I did last week.
Thanks!:)
I’ve recently talked to students at Harvard and about convincing people about alignment (I’m imagining cs/math/physics majors) and how that’s hard because it’s a little inconvenient to be convinced. There were a couple of bottlenecks here:
There’s ~80 people signed up for a “coffee with an x-risk” person talk but only 5 very busy people who are competent enough to give those one-on-ones.
There are many people who have friends/roommates/classmates, but don’t know how to approach the conversation or do it effectively.
For both, training people to do that and creating curriculums/workshops would be useful. I don’t think you can create this without going out and trying it out on real, intelligent people.
This could then be used for capability researchers in general.