Re: the wording about airstrikes in TIME: yeah, we did not anticipate how that was going to be received and it’s likely we would have wordsmithed it a bit more to make the meaning more clear had we realized. I’m comfortable calling that a mistake. (I was not yet employed at MIRI at the time but I was involved in editing the draft of the op-ed so it’s at least as much on me as anybody else who was involved.)
Re: policy division: we are limited by our 501(c)3 status as to how much of our budget we can spend on policy work, and here ‘budget’ includes the time of salaried employees. Malo and Eliezer both spend some fraction of their time on policy but I view it as unlikely that we’ll spin up a whole ‘division’ about that. Instead, yes, we partner with/provide technical advice to CAIP and other allied organizations. I don’t view failure-to-start-a-policy-division as a mistake and in fact I think we’re using our resources fairly well here.
Re: critiquing existing policy proposals: there is undoubtedly more we could do here, though I lean more in the direction of ‘let’s say what we think would be almost good enough’ rather than simply critiquing what’s wrong with other proposals.
Thanks for this; seems reasonable to me. One quick note is that my impression is that it’s fairly easy to set up a 501(c)4. So even if [the formal institution known as MIRI] has limits, I think MIRI would be able to start a “sister org” that de facto serves as the policy arm. (I believe this is accepted practice & lots of orgs have sister policy orgs.)
(This doesn’t matter right now, insofar as you don’t think it would be an efficient allocation of resources to spin up a whole policy division. Just pointing it out in case your belief changes and the 501(c)3 thing felt like the limiting factor).
Re: the wording about airstrikes in TIME: yeah, we did not anticipate how that was going to be received and it’s likely we would have wordsmithed it a bit more to make the meaning more clear had we realized. I’m comfortable calling that a mistake. (I was not yet employed at MIRI at the time but I was involved in editing the draft of the op-ed so it’s at least as much on me as anybody else who was involved.)
Re: policy division: we are limited by our 501(c)3 status as to how much of our budget we can spend on policy work, and here ‘budget’ includes the time of salaried employees. Malo and Eliezer both spend some fraction of their time on policy but I view it as unlikely that we’ll spin up a whole ‘division’ about that. Instead, yes, we partner with/provide technical advice to CAIP and other allied organizations. I don’t view failure-to-start-a-policy-division as a mistake and in fact I think we’re using our resources fairly well here.
Re: critiquing existing policy proposals: there is undoubtedly more we could do here, though I lean more in the direction of ‘let’s say what we think would be almost good enough’ rather than simply critiquing what’s wrong with other proposals.
Thanks for this; seems reasonable to me. One quick note is that my impression is that it’s fairly easy to set up a 501(c)4. So even if [the formal institution known as MIRI] has limits, I think MIRI would be able to start a “sister org” that de facto serves as the policy arm. (I believe this is accepted practice & lots of orgs have sister policy orgs.)
(This doesn’t matter right now, insofar as you don’t think it would be an efficient allocation of resources to spin up a whole policy division. Just pointing it out in case your belief changes and the 501(c)3 thing felt like the limiting factor).