From here, the plan is for Aysajan to spend the next few months working on the sorts of projects I worked on before focusing on alignment full time—the sorts of projects which I expect to build skills for solving problems-we-don’t-understand.
What kind of projects/problems are you thinking about? This might become a very valuable community resource, even for those of us without your guidance.
Specializing in Problems We Don’t Understand largely talks about what-and-how-to-study, and the “formal study” parts of the apprenticeship should generally follow that. Aysajan’s recent post is an example of that: it’s taking chapter 2 of Jaynes’ Logic of Science and applying it in other contexts.
So far, other than those, we’ve mostly been kicking around smaller problems. For instance, the last couple days we were talking about general approaches for gearsy modelling in the context of a research problem Aysajan’s been working on (specifically, modelling a change in India’s farm subsidy policy). We also spent a few days on writing exercises—approximately everyone benefits from more practice in that department.
We’ve also done a few exercises to come up with Hard Problems to focus on. (“What sci-fi technologies or magic powers would you like to have?” was a particularly good one, and the lists of unsolved problems are also intended to generate ideas.) Once Aysajan has settled on ~10-20 Hard Problems to focus on (initially), those will drive the projects. You should see posts on whatever he’s working on fairly frequently.
What kind of projects/problems are you thinking about? This might become a very valuable community resource, even for those of us without your guidance.
Some of this I’ve written about before:
Specializing in Problems We Don’t Understand largely talks about what-and-how-to-study, and the “formal study” parts of the apprenticeship should generally follow that. Aysajan’s recent post is an example of that: it’s taking chapter 2 of Jaynes’ Logic of Science and applying it in other contexts.
Comprehensive Information Gathering exercises. Aysajan’s first non-formal-study project is to read through lists of unsolved problems on wikipedia, as well as all of the course descriptions in a course catalogue from either MIT or Caltech.
Those definitely don’t cover all of it, though.
So far, other than those, we’ve mostly been kicking around smaller problems. For instance, the last couple days we were talking about general approaches for gearsy modelling in the context of a research problem Aysajan’s been working on (specifically, modelling a change in India’s farm subsidy policy). We also spent a few days on writing exercises—approximately everyone benefits from more practice in that department.
We’ve also done a few exercises to come up with Hard Problems to focus on. (“What sci-fi technologies or magic powers would you like to have?” was a particularly good one, and the lists of unsolved problems are also intended to generate ideas.) Once Aysajan has settled on ~10-20 Hard Problems to focus on (initially), those will drive the projects. You should see posts on whatever he’s working on fairly frequently.
Awesome! Thanks for keeping us up-to-date!
johnswentworth published a lot of post about individual projects like for example human longevity. Just look into his post history.