(This is not my main response, go read my other comment first.)
I ask this partially because I think some people are kinda like “well, in order to do alignment research that ends up being relevant, I need to work at one of the big scaling labs in order to understand the frames/ontologies of people at the labs, the constraints/restrictions that would come up if trying to implement certain ideas, get better models of the cultures of labs to see what ideas will simply be dismissed immediately, identify cruxes, figure out who actually makes decisions about what kinds of alignment ideas will end up being used for GPT-N, etc etc.”
I have… an intuitive response here which I’m struggling to express, and struggling even more to express kindly.
I’ll start with the most intuitive gut-level response, then try to unpack the underlying intuitions (and hopefully manage to make it more kind in the process). My intuitive gut-level response to that whole thing is roughly… “man, sounds like what such people actually need is some cojones”.
Like, my other comment said that in worlds where the work David and I are doing goes really well, “we will not be trying to convince the major labs to adopt our ideas, the major labs will be offering us money to let them”. And when I ask myself “what is the gap between a mindset which generates my answer, vs a mindset which generates the thing Akash was quoting other people as saying”… it feels like the main difference is some combination of bravery and ambition?
Probably from the perspective of someone on the other side, it seems like I’m cocky and massively overconfident and need a strong dose of humility. From my perspective, it seems like the other side just doesn’t have an ambitious vision and/or the bravery to seriously invest in it.
There’s this quote from Richard Hamming: “if you do not work on important problems, then you will not do important work”. And I think I’d invoke some kind of generalization or analogue of that: “if you do not pursue an ambitious vision, something important which the rest of the world would not do in your absence, then you will not have large counterfactual impact”. (Maybe with an “except by accident” tacked on the end.)
(This is not my main response, go read my other comment first.)
I have… an intuitive response here which I’m struggling to express, and struggling even more to express kindly.
I’ll start with the most intuitive gut-level response, then try to unpack the underlying intuitions (and hopefully manage to make it more kind in the process). My intuitive gut-level response to that whole thing is roughly… “man, sounds like what such people actually need is some cojones”.
Like, my other comment said that in worlds where the work David and I are doing goes really well, “we will not be trying to convince the major labs to adopt our ideas, the major labs will be offering us money to let them”. And when I ask myself “what is the gap between a mindset which generates my answer, vs a mindset which generates the thing Akash was quoting other people as saying”… it feels like the main difference is some combination of bravery and ambition?
Probably from the perspective of someone on the other side, it seems like I’m cocky and massively overconfident and need a strong dose of humility. From my perspective, it seems like the other side just doesn’t have an ambitious vision and/or the bravery to seriously invest in it.
There’s this quote from Richard Hamming: “if you do not work on important problems, then you will not do important work”. And I think I’d invoke some kind of generalization or analogue of that: “if you do not pursue an ambitious vision, something important which the rest of the world would not do in your absence, then you will not have large counterfactual impact”. (Maybe with an “except by accident” tacked on the end.)