Does anyone actually believe and/or want to defend this?
I believe this. For example, one of my benign beliefs in ~2014 was “songs in frequency space are basically just images; you can probably do interesting things in the music space by just taking off-the-shelf image stuff (like style transfer) and doing it on songs.”
The first paper doing something similar that I know of came out in 2018. If I had posted about it in 2014, would it have happened sooner? Maybe—I think there’s a sort of weird thing going on in the music space where all the people with giant libraries of music want to maintain their relationships with the producers of music, and so there’s not much value for them in doing research like this, and so there might be unusually little searching for fruit in that corner of the orchard. But also maybe my idea was bad, or wouldn’t really help all of that much, or no one would have done it just because they read it. (I don’t think that paper worked in wavelet space, but didn’t look too closely.)
I’m much less certain that the net effect is “you shouldn’t talk about such things.” The more important the consequences of sharing a belief seem to you (“oh, if you just put together X and Y you can build unsafe AGI”), the more important for your models that you’re right (“oh, if that doesn’t work I think we have five more years”).
I believe this. For example, one of my benign beliefs in ~2014 was “songs in frequency space are basically just images; you can probably do interesting things in the music space by just taking off-the-shelf image stuff (like style transfer) and doing it on songs.”
The first paper doing something similar that I know of came out in 2018. If I had posted about it in 2014, would it have happened sooner? Maybe—I think there’s a sort of weird thing going on in the music space where all the people with giant libraries of music want to maintain their relationships with the producers of music, and so there’s not much value for them in doing research like this, and so there might be unusually little searching for fruit in that corner of the orchard. But also maybe my idea was bad, or wouldn’t really help all of that much, or no one would have done it just because they read it. (I don’t think that paper worked in wavelet space, but didn’t look too closely.)
I’m much less certain that the net effect is “you shouldn’t talk about such things.” The more important the consequences of sharing a belief seem to you (“oh, if you just put together X and Y you can build unsafe AGI”), the more important for your models that you’re right (“oh, if that doesn’t work I think we have five more years”).