I think that closed-by-default is a very bad strategy from the perspective of outreach, and the perspective of building a field of AI alignment. But I realise that MIRI is explicitly and wholly focusing on making research progress, for at least the coming few years, and I think overall the whole post and decisions make a lot of sense from this perspective.
Our impression is indeed that well-targeted outreach efforts can be highly valuable. However, attempts at outreach/influence/field-building seem to us to currently constitute a large majority of worldwide research activity that’s motivated by AGI safety concerns,[10] such that MIRI’s time is better spent on taking a straight shot at the core research problems. Further, we think our own comparative advantage lies here, and not in outreach work.[11]
And here’s the footnotes:
[10] In other words, many people are explicitly focusing only on outreach, and many others are selecting technical problems to work on with a stated goal of strengthening the field and drawing others into it.
[11] This isn’t meant to suggest that nobody else is taking a straight shot at the core problems. For example, OpenAI’s Paul Christiano is a top-tier researcher who is doing exactly that. But we nonetheless want more of this on the present margin.
I think that closed-by-default is a very bad strategy from the perspective of outreach, and the perspective of building a field of AI alignment. But I realise that MIRI is explicitly and wholly focusing on making research progress, for at least the coming few years, and I think overall the whole post and decisions make a lot of sense from this perspective.
And here’s the footnotes: