Thanks for writing this! This is an idea that I think is pretty valuable and one that comes up fairly frequently when discussing different AI safety research agendas.
I think that there’s a possibly useful analogue of this which is useful from the perspective of being deep inside a cluster of AI safety research and wondering whether it’s good. Specifically, I think we should ask “does the value of my current line of research hinge on us basically being right about a bunch of things or does much of the research value come from discovering all the places we are wrong?”.
One reason this feels like an important variant to me is that when I speak to people skeptical about the area of research I’ve been working in, they often seem surprised that I’m very much in agreement with them about a number of issues. Still, I disagree with them that the solution is to shift focus, so much as to try to work how the one paradigm might need to shift into another.
Thanks for writing this! This is an idea that I think is pretty valuable and one that comes up fairly frequently when discussing different AI safety research agendas.
I think that there’s a possibly useful analogue of this which is useful from the perspective of being deep inside a cluster of AI safety research and wondering whether it’s good. Specifically, I think we should ask “does the value of my current line of research hinge on us basically being right about a bunch of things or does much of the research value come from discovering all the places we are wrong?”.
One reason this feels like an important variant to me is that when I speak to people skeptical about the area of research I’ve been working in, they often seem surprised that I’m very much in agreement with them about a number of issues. Still, I disagree with them that the solution is to shift focus, so much as to try to work how the one paradigm might need to shift into another.