The object-level claims here seem straightforwardly true, but I think “challenges with breaking into MIRI-style research” is a misleading way to characterize it. The post makes it sound like these are problems with the pipeline for new researchers, but really these problems are all driven by challenges of the kind of research involved.
There’s definitely some truth to this, but I guess I’m skeptical that there isn’t anything that we can do about some of these challenges. Actually, rereading I can see that you’ve conceded this towards the end of your post. I agree that there might be a limit to how much progress we can make on these issues, but I think we shouldn’t rule out making progress too quickly.
Figuring out new paths, new frames, applying new skills and knowledge, explaining your own ways of evaluating outputs… these are all central pieces of doing this kind of research. If the pipeline did not force people to figure this sort of stuff out, then it would not select for researchers well-suited to this kind of work.
Some of these aspects don’t really select for people with the ability to figure this kind of stuff out, but rather strongly select for people who have either saved up money to fund themselves or who happen to be located in the Bay Area, ect.
We don’t know the right frames to apply (and if we just picked some, they’d probably be wrong)
Philosophy often has this problem and they address this by covering a wide range of perspectives with the hope that you’re inspired by the readings even if none of them are correct.
We don’t have clear shared standards for evaluating work. Most people doing MIRI-style research think most other people doing MIRI-style research are going about it all wrong. Whatever perception of credibility might be generated by something paper-like would likely be fake.
This is a hugely difficult problem, but maybe it’s better to try rather than not try at all?
There’s definitely some truth to this, but I guess I’m skeptical that there isn’t anything that we can do about some of these challenges. Actually, rereading I can see that you’ve conceded this towards the end of your post. I agree that there might be a limit to how much progress we can make on these issues, but I think we shouldn’t rule out making progress too quickly.
To be clear, I don’t intend to argue that the problem is too hard or not worthwhile or whatever. Rather, my main point is that solutions need to grapple with the problems of teaching people to create new paradigms, and working with people who don’t share standard frames. I expect that attempts to mimic the traditional pipelines of paradigmatic fields will not solve those problems. That’s not an argument against working on it, it’s just an argument that we need fundamentally different strategies than the standard education and career paths in other fields.
There’s definitely some truth to this, but I guess I’m skeptical that there isn’t anything that we can do about some of these challenges. Actually, rereading I can see that you’ve conceded this towards the end of your post. I agree that there might be a limit to how much progress we can make on these issues, but I think we shouldn’t rule out making progress too quickly.
Some of these aspects don’t really select for people with the ability to figure this kind of stuff out, but rather strongly select for people who have either saved up money to fund themselves or who happen to be located in the Bay Area, ect.
Philosophy often has this problem and they address this by covering a wide range of perspectives with the hope that you’re inspired by the readings even if none of them are correct.
This is a hugely difficult problem, but maybe it’s better to try rather than not try at all?
To be clear, I don’t intend to argue that the problem is too hard or not worthwhile or whatever. Rather, my main point is that solutions need to grapple with the problems of teaching people to create new paradigms, and working with people who don’t share standard frames. I expect that attempts to mimic the traditional pipelines of paradigmatic fields will not solve those problems. That’s not an argument against working on it, it’s just an argument that we need fundamentally different strategies than the standard education and career paths in other fields.