My sense of what happened was that in April, Eliezer posted MIRI announces new “Death With Dignity” strategy, and a little while later AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities. At the same time, PaLM and DALL-E 2 came out. My impression is that this threw a brick through the overton window and got a lot of people going “holy christ AGI ruin is real and scary”. Everyone started thinking a lot about it, and writing up their thoughts as they oriented.
Around the same time, a lot of alignment research recruitment projects (such as SERI MATS or Refine) started paying dividends, and resulting in a new wave of people working fulltime on AGI safety.
It seems that the latter explains the former?
i.e. the more potential money, prestige, status, etc., there is associated with a topic, the more people will be willing to write. Averaged over a large group the results seem to follow expectations.
( It does feel a bit worrying in that the higher the proportion of empty signalling, zero-sum status competition, etc., within a community, the less valuable the community will be as a whole.
What exact percentage of the recent posts and comments fall into that category is difficult to say but it’s clearly more noticeable then a year prior.
I’m quite lenient towards giving weirdly worded comments and posts the benefit of the doubt, so I would give a 1% to 30% range. Compared to a year prior where it might have been 0.5% to 20%.
In fact I’ve personally only experienced one blatant trolling attempt from a high karma user over my few dozen posts and comments, so it might be a distant concern.
On the other hand, even those with possibly untoward intentions may still inadvertently end up contributing something positive, via drawing attention to a general area, or overlooked point.
And those genuinely interested in the topic may find more diamonds in the rough due to the increase.)
It seems that the latter explains the former?
i.e. the more potential money, prestige, status, etc., there is associated with a topic, the more people will be willing to write. Averaged over a large group the results seem to follow expectations.
( It does feel a bit worrying in that the higher the proportion of empty signalling, zero-sum status competition, etc., within a community, the less valuable the community will be as a whole.
What exact percentage of the recent posts and comments fall into that category is difficult to say but it’s clearly more noticeable then a year prior.
I’m quite lenient towards giving weirdly worded comments and posts the benefit of the doubt, so I would give a 1% to 30% range. Compared to a year prior where it might have been 0.5% to 20%.
In fact I’ve personally only experienced one blatant trolling attempt from a high karma user over my few dozen posts and comments, so it might be a distant concern.
On the other hand, even those with possibly untoward intentions may still inadvertently end up contributing something positive, via drawing attention to a general area, or overlooked point.
And those genuinely interested in the topic may find more diamonds in the rough due to the increase.)