This is a huge practical issue that seems to not get enough thought, and I’m glad you’re thinking about it. I agree with your summary of one way forward. I think there’s another PR front; many educated people outside of the relevant fields are becoming concerned.
It sounds like the ML researchers at that conference are mostly familiar with MIRI style work. And they actually agree with Yudkowsky that it’s a dead end. There’s a newer tradition of safety work focused on deep networks. That’s what you mostly see in the Alignment Forum. And it’s what you see in the safety teams at Deepmind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And those companies appear to be making more progress than all the academic ML researchers put together.
Agreed on the paragraph size comment. My eyes and brain shy away. Paragraphs I think are supposed to contain roughly one idea, so a one-sentence paragraph is a nice change of pace if it’s an important idea. Your TLDR was great; I think those are better at the top to function as an abstract and tell the reader why they might want to read the whole piece and how to mentally organize it. ADHD is a reason your brain wants to write stream of consciousness, and attention to paragraph structure is a great check on communicating to others in a way that won’t overwhelm their slower brains :)
This is a huge practical issue that seems to not get enough thought, and I’m glad you’re thinking about it. I agree with your summary of one way forward. I think there’s another PR front; many educated people outside of the relevant fields are becoming concerned.
It sounds like the ML researchers at that conference are mostly familiar with MIRI style work. And they actually agree with Yudkowsky that it’s a dead end. There’s a newer tradition of safety work focused on deep networks. That’s what you mostly see in the Alignment Forum. And it’s what you see in the safety teams at Deepmind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And those companies appear to be making more progress than all the academic ML researchers put together.
Agreed on the paragraph size comment. My eyes and brain shy away. Paragraphs I think are supposed to contain roughly one idea, so a one-sentence paragraph is a nice change of pace if it’s an important idea. Your TLDR was great; I think those are better at the top to function as an abstract and tell the reader why they might want to read the whole piece and how to mentally organize it. ADHD is a reason your brain wants to write stream of consciousness, and attention to paragraph structure is a great check on communicating to others in a way that won’t overwhelm their slower brains :)