Don’t have the time to write a long comment just now, but I still wanted to point out that describing either Yudkowsky or Christiano as doing mostly object-level research seems incredibly wrong. So much of what they’re doing and have done focused explicitly on which questions to ask, which question not to ask, which paradigm to work in, how to criticize that kind of work… They rarely published posts that are only about the meta-level (although Arbital does contain a bunch of pages along those lines and Prosaic AI Alignment is also meta) but it pervades their writing and thinking.
More generally, when you’re creating a new field of science of research, you tend to do a lot of philosophy of science type stuff, even if you don’t label it explicitly that way. Galileo, Carnot, Darwin, Boltzmann, Einstein, Turing all did it.
(To be clear, I’m pointing at meta-stuff in the sense of “philosophy of science for alignment” type things, not necessarily the more hardcore stuff discussed in the original post)
That’s true, but if you are doing philosophy it is better to admit to it, and learn from existing philosophy, rather than deriding and dismissing the whole field.
This seems irrelevant to the point, yes? I think adamShimi is challenging Scott’s claim that Paul & Eliezer are mostly focusing on object-level questions. It sounds like you’re challenging whether they’re attending to non-object-level questions in the best way. That’s a different question. Am I missing your point?
Don’t have the time to write a long comment just now, but I still wanted to point out that describing either Yudkowsky or Christiano as doing mostly object-level research seems incredibly wrong. So much of what they’re doing and have done focused explicitly on which questions to ask, which question not to ask, which paradigm to work in, how to criticize that kind of work… They rarely published posts that are only about the meta-level (although Arbital does contain a bunch of pages along those lines and Prosaic AI Alignment is also meta) but it pervades their writing and thinking.
More generally, when you’re creating a new field of science of research, you tend to do a lot of philosophy of science type stuff, even if you don’t label it explicitly that way. Galileo, Carnot, Darwin, Boltzmann, Einstein, Turing all did it.
(To be clear, I’m pointing at meta-stuff in the sense of “philosophy of science for alignment” type things, not necessarily the more hardcore stuff discussed in the original post)
That’s true, but if you are doing philosophy it is better to admit to it, and learn from existing philosophy, rather than deriding and dismissing the whole field.
This seems irrelevant to the point, yes? I think adamShimi is challenging Scott’s claim that Paul & Eliezer are mostly focusing on object-level questions. It sounds like you’re challenging whether they’re attending to non-object-level questions in the best way. That’s a different question. Am I missing your point?