I think the social commitment device can be useful to get started, but I think you should very rapidly try to evolve such that you don’t need it
I agree. At uni, the idea is that it gets people into a framework where they’re able to get started, even if they aren’t self-starters. Here, one of the main benefits would be that people at various stages of the pipeline could share what worked and what didn’t. For example, knowing that understanding one textbook is way easier if you’ve already learned a prereq is valuable information, and that doesn’t seem to always be trivially-knowable ex ante. The onus is less on the social commitment and more on the “team of people working to learn AI Safety fundamentals”.
I think x-risk really desperately needs people who already have the “I can self-start on my own” and “I can think usefully for myself” properties.
Agreed. I’m not looking to make the filter way easier to pass, but rather to encourage people to keep working. “I can self-start” is necessary, but I don’t think we can expect everyone to be able to self-motivate indefinitely in the face of a large corpus of unfamiliar technical material. Sure, a good self-starter will reboot eventually, but it’s better to have lightweight support structures that maintain a smooth rate of progress.
Additionally, my system 1 intuition is that there are people close to the self-starter threshold who are willing to work on safe AI, and that these people can be transformed into grittier, harder workers with the right structure. Maybe that’s not even worth our time, but it’s important to keep in mind the multiplicative benefits possible from actually getting more people involved. I could also be falling prey to the typical mind fallacy, as I only got serious when my worry overcame my doubts of being able to do anything.
And if it then turns out that the person they’re basically mentoring doesn’t have the “I can self start, self motivate, and think for myself” properties, then the mentor hasn’t gained an ally—they’ve gained a new obligation to take care of, or spend energy checking in on, or they just wasted their time.
Perhaps a more beneficial structure than “one experienced person receives lots of obligations” could be “three pairs of people (all working on learning different areas of the syllabus at any given time) share insights they picked up in previous iterations”. Working in pairs could spike efficiency relative to working alone due to each person making separate mistakes; together, they smooth over rough spots in their learning. I remember this problem being discussed in a post a few years back about how most of the poster’s autodidact problems were due to trivial errors that weren’t easily fixable by someone not familiar with that specific material.
I agree. At uni, the idea is that it gets people into a framework where they’re able to get started, even if they aren’t self-starters. Here, one of the main benefits would be that people at various stages of the pipeline could share what worked and what didn’t. For example, knowing that understanding one textbook is way easier if you’ve already learned a prereq is valuable information, and that doesn’t seem to always be trivially-knowable ex ante. The onus is less on the social commitment and more on the “team of people working to learn AI Safety fundamentals”.
Agreed. I’m not looking to make the filter way easier to pass, but rather to encourage people to keep working. “I can self-start” is necessary, but I don’t think we can expect everyone to be able to self-motivate indefinitely in the face of a large corpus of unfamiliar technical material. Sure, a good self-starter will reboot eventually, but it’s better to have lightweight support structures that maintain a smooth rate of progress.
Additionally, my system 1 intuition is that there are people close to the self-starter threshold who are willing to work on safe AI, and that these people can be transformed into grittier, harder workers with the right structure. Maybe that’s not even worth our time, but it’s important to keep in mind the multiplicative benefits possible from actually getting more people involved. I could also be falling prey to the typical mind fallacy, as I only got serious when my worry overcame my doubts of being able to do anything.
Perhaps a more beneficial structure than “one experienced person receives lots of obligations” could be “three pairs of people (all working on learning different areas of the syllabus at any given time) share insights they picked up in previous iterations”. Working in pairs could spike efficiency relative to working alone due to each person making separate mistakes; together, they smooth over rough spots in their learning. I remember this problem being discussed in a post a few years back about how most of the poster’s autodidact problems were due to trivial errors that weren’t easily fixable by someone not familiar with that specific material.
FWIW, relatedly on the object-level, there’s already a weekly AI safety reading group which people can join.
Maybe this post by Nate Soares?