Basically, people will reason, if this guy was about to knock a baseball into outer space, wouldn’t we already know his name and have his rookie card?
This is the crux for me. I think a person capable of making a significant contribution to alignment would probably also be capable of making some sort of smaller but more legible/uncontroversial contribution to show their competence. To go with the Einstein example, he got a PhD in physics before producing his groundbreaking results, and then was able to present those results in a format that was accepted by the physics establishment.
I have a PhD in Computer Science (2013, University of Chicago). My dissertation was entitled “Grammatical Methods in Computer Vision”. My masters thesis was in complexity theory and was entitled “Locally Expanding Hypergraphs and the Unique Games Conjecture”. I also have one publication in ACM Transactions on Computation Theory on proving lower bounds in a toy model of computation.
I am an Engineering Fellow at [redacted] AI. My company went to Series A while I was leading its machine learning team. (I have since transitioned to being an individual contributor, because management sucks and is boring and I’m no good at it.) My company has twice received the most prestigious award handed out in its industry. I hold multiple patents related to my contributions at [redacted] AI.
I hold a patent for my work at Vicarious, where I was a senior researcher.
At one point, I quit my job and started a generative AI startup dedicated to providing psychotherapy. This model is online, and I can share a link to it in a DM if you are interested.
The state-sponsored German physics establishment famously sneered at Einstein’s work. The Nazi regime derided it as degenerate, “Jewish” physics. Sure, everyone who we actually respect now could recognize the value of his work after he started predicting novel astronomical phenomena. But it’s not like he ever could have gotten a job at a German university while the Nazis were in charge.
Maybe the problem is with my poor writing and sloppy craftsmanship, but maybe it is also partially a matter of LessWrong expecting the solution to the alignment problem to come with a lot less emotionally charged language and politically charged content than it logically would have to come with?
This is the crux for me. I think a person capable of making a significant contribution to alignment would probably also be capable of making some sort of smaller but more legible/uncontroversial contribution to show their competence. To go with the Einstein example, he got a PhD in physics before producing his groundbreaking results, and then was able to present those results in a format that was accepted by the physics establishment.
I have a PhD in Computer Science (2013, University of Chicago). My dissertation was entitled “Grammatical Methods in Computer Vision”. My masters thesis was in complexity theory and was entitled “Locally Expanding Hypergraphs and the Unique Games Conjecture”. I also have one publication in ACM Transactions on Computation Theory on proving lower bounds in a toy model of computation.
I am an Engineering Fellow at [redacted] AI. My company went to Series A while I was leading its machine learning team. (I have since transitioned to being an individual contributor, because management sucks and is boring and I’m no good at it.) My company has twice received the most prestigious award handed out in its industry. I hold multiple patents related to my contributions at [redacted] AI.
I hold a patent for my work at Vicarious, where I was a senior researcher.
At one point, I quit my job and started a generative AI startup dedicated to providing psychotherapy. This model is online, and I can share a link to it in a DM if you are interested.
The state-sponsored German physics establishment famously sneered at Einstein’s work. The Nazi regime derided it as degenerate, “Jewish” physics. Sure, everyone who we actually respect now could recognize the value of his work after he started predicting novel astronomical phenomena. But it’s not like he ever could have gotten a job at a German university while the Nazis were in charge.
Maybe the problem is with my poor writing and sloppy craftsmanship, but maybe it is also partially a matter of LessWrong expecting the solution to the alignment problem to come with a lot less emotionally charged language and politically charged content than it logically would have to come with?
Interesting, this is more competence-requiring stuff than I expected.