also a lot of people who are just trying to figure out whether to work on it/how to get into the field, including in less technical roles (policy, ops, community building), where I also have often seen a strong push for inside views.
Oh wild. I assumed this must be directed at researchers since obviously they’re the ones who most need to form inside views. Might be worth adding a note at the top saying who your audience is.
For that audience I’d endorse something like “they should understand the arguments well enough that they can respond sensibly to novel questions”.
One proxy that I’ve considered previously is “can they describe an experiment (in enough detail that a programmer could go implement it today) that would mechanistically demonstrate a goal-directed agent pursuing some convergent instrumental subgoal”.
I think people often call this level of understanding an “inside view”, and so I feel like I still endorse what-people-actually-mean, even though it’s quantitatively much less understanding than you’d want to actively do research.
(Though it also wouldn’t shock me if people were saying “everyone in the less technical roles needs to have a detailed take on exactly which agendas are most promising and why and this take should be robust to criticism from senior AI safety people”. I would disagree with that.)
This feels like an instance where I understand why they hold their view fairly well, and maybe feel comfortable deferring to them, but don’t feel like I can really evaluate their view?
I would have said you don’t understand an aspect of their view, and that’s exactly the aspect you can’t evaluate. (And then if you try to make a decision, the uncertainty from that aspect propagates into uncertainty about the decision.) But this is mostly semantics.
I’d guess maybe 40%? I expect framing matters a lot, and that eg pointing people to my posts may help?
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
I’ve found that spending time in the field resulted in me being exposed to a lot of different perspectives and research agendas, forming clearer views on how to do research, flaws in different approaches, etc.
Tbc I did all of this too—by reading a lot of papers and blog posts and thinking about them.
(The main exception is “how to do research”, that I think I learned from just practicing doing research + advice from my advisors.)
Oh wild. I assumed this must be directed at researchers since obviously they’re the ones who most need to form inside views. Might be worth adding a note at the top saying who your audience is.
For that audience I’d endorse something like “they should understand the arguments well enough that they can respond sensibly to novel questions”.
One proxy that I’ve considered previously is “can they describe an experiment (in enough detail that a programmer could go implement it today) that would mechanistically demonstrate a goal-directed agent pursuing some convergent instrumental subgoal”.
I think people often call this level of understanding an “inside view”, and so I feel like I still endorse what-people-actually-mean, even though it’s quantitatively much less understanding than you’d want to actively do research.
(Though it also wouldn’t shock me if people were saying “everyone in the less technical roles needs to have a detailed take on exactly which agendas are most promising and why and this take should be robust to criticism from senior AI safety people”. I would disagree with that.)
I would have said you don’t understand an aspect of their view, and that’s exactly the aspect you can’t evaluate. (And then if you try to make a decision, the uncertainty from that aspect propagates into uncertainty about the decision.) But this is mostly semantics.
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
Tbc I did all of this too—by reading a lot of papers and blog posts and thinking about them.
(The main exception is “how to do research”, that I think I learned from just practicing doing research + advice from my advisors.)