From that perspective it’s easy to see why the massively popular HPMOR didn’t attract many new researchers to AI risk, but attracted people to HPMOR speculation and rational fic writing.
I think this is a nice insight that hadn’t occurred to me before.
Participating in a forum like LW when it’s “hot” and frequented by high status folks is another way, but unfortunately we don’t have that anymore.
From looking around on the LW 2.0 closed beta, it will have some features specifically designed to attract some of the people that left, like trusted authors can have their own areas where they exercise greater moderation power. This will also hopefully prevent new high status folks from leaving later.
I want to echo Dr_Manhattan and suggest that you take a look at LW2 beta and see what more can be done there to support your ideas. They are planning to launch on November 1 with an open beta a few weeks before, so major new features are probably out (at least until later), but things like changes to the karma or moderation system are probably still possible. The people behind LW2 are planning to write a post soon about the karma changes and ask for review/suggestions so you can hold off your ideas until then as well.
Academic credibility (including peer review) could be a key part of that funnel for us
How do you envision this? Like if we get results published in academia, that will draw more people into this community? This makes me a bit worried that if being published in academia is the ultimate marker of status in this community, that’ll discourage people who have a distaste for academia (like me when I first joined). May still be a good idea though...
We also need to figure out how to avoid the bad incentives of academia. For example, to avoid the problem of publishing papers for the sake of publishing or for the sake of gaining citation counts, we should only reward someone with status if the act of academic publishing leads to positive consequences, for example productive academic research that otherwise wouldn’t likely to have occurred (and not just additional citations), or practical deployment of the idea that otherwise wouldn’t likely to have occurred. But this will be hard to do in practice, whereas counting papers / citations will be easy.
We have to keep in mind that the people who created the status / monetary economy in academia surely didn’t intend to cause the incentive problems that now exist within it, and many people both in academia and out (e.g., policy makers, funders) have probably since noticed those problems and would love to have ways to fix them, but the bad incentives still exist. In some sense, inefficiencies are simply inevitable due to the multi-player nature of the game. The best we can do is perhaps to have a different set of inefficiencies / bad incentives, which allow us to reach a different (and not necessarily larger) set of low-hanging fruit.
I think this suggests that we should be ruthless about avoiding becoming just like academia, and throw out the baby with the bathwater if necessary to avoid it. For example, if we can’t figure out a foolproof way of rewarding academic publishing only when it leads to positive consequences, we should assume that trying to reward academic publishing will lead to inefficiencies / bad incentives similar to ones existing in academia, and therefore not try to reward academic publishing at all. Or, alternatively, we need to create the kind of culture where we can say, “oops, rewarding people for academic publishing is making us too much like academia in terms of sharing the same set of inefficiencies / bad incentives, so we shouldn’t be rewarding people for academic publishing anymore” but that seems significantly harder to accomplish. Academia is very likely a basin of attraction in the space of culture and institutional design, and we risk irreversibly falling into it just by getting close.
I can see a couple different ways that it could happen. Funders might have trouble judging actual progress in the absence of academic peer-reviewed publications and citations. Especially as more academics join the AI risk field and produce more papers and citations, funders might be tempted to think that they should re-direct resources towards academia (in part for subconscious status reasons). MIRI may have to switch to more academic norms in order to compete, which would then rub off on LW. (This seems to already be happening to some extent.) Or LW moves towards a more academic culture for internal status-economics reasons, and MIRI leaders may not have much control over that. (In that world, maybe LWers will eventually look down upon MIRI for not being sufficiently academic.)
You know what I will say, yall should stay in your lane, re: incentives.
Yudkowsky’s incentives caused him to write HPMOR (which has precisely zero (0) academic value), and publish basically nothing. So as far as the mainstream is concerned his footprint does not exist. He’s collecting a salary at MIRI, presumably. What is that salary buying?
Mainstream academics who collect a salary will say they teach undergraduates, and publish stuff to make grant agencies happy. Some of that stuff is useless, a lot of it is very useful indeed.
Reform attempts for “non-aligned” ecosystems like academia will almost certainly not work because (as you all are well aware) “aligning” is hard.
MIRI has the same problem everyone else has: if it grows it will become a non-aligned ecosystem, if it doesn’t grow it will not have any impact.
You know what I will say, yall should stay in your lane, re: incentives.
I don’t understand this. Please clarify? (Urban dictionary says “stay in your lane” means mind your own business, which is exactly what we’re doing, namely trying to figure out what direction to push our own culture.)
and publish basically nothing
He’s publishing mostly on Arbital these days. See this and this for examples. I’m not sure why he doesn’t at least post links elsewhere to draw people’s attention though. Hopefully that will change after LW 2.0 goes live.
So as far as the mainstream is concerned his footprint does not exist.
I’m not sure what you mean by this either. Certainly the people who work on AI safety at Berkeley, OpenAI, and DeepMind all know about Eliezer and MIRI’s approach to AI alignment, even if they don’t agree that it’s the most promising one. Are you saying that if Eliezer had published in academia, they’d be more inclined to follow that approach, as opposed to the more ML-based approaches that they’re currently following?
MIRI has the same problem everyone else has: if it grows it will become a non-aligned ecosystem
I think having “aligned” human institutions is too much to hope for. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, perhaps the best we can do is to have different bad incentives / inefficiencies in different institutions so that they’re able to reach different sets of low hanging fruit, and not all suffer from the same collective blind spots.
I get super annoyed by criticisms of mainstream academia out of the rationality-sphere, I suppose (mostly because it falls into either stuff that every academic already knows about that’s very hard to fix, or just vastly misinformed stuff). Roko the other day on facebook: “academia produces nothing of value.”
I’m not sure what you mean by this either.
I suppose what I mean by this is that academia functions on a dual currency/kudos system. “Academic kudos” is acquired by playing certain formal games within mainstream academia (publications in fancy journals and so on). So, for example, if Tegmark published Life 3.0, and it reached the best-seller list that would not award him a ton of “academic kudos” (well, at least in my opinion, Hanson might disagree). Instead, that would be called “being good with the media.”
“Academic kudos” is a bit different from “I have heard of you.”
I think having “aligned” human institutions is too much to hope for.
I agree with this entire paragraph. I am a big fan of letting a thousand flowers bloom.
I think this is a nice insight that hadn’t occurred to me before.
From looking around on the LW 2.0 closed beta, it will have some features specifically designed to attract some of the people that left, like trusted authors can have their own areas where they exercise greater moderation power. This will also hopefully prevent new high status folks from leaving later.
I want to echo Dr_Manhattan and suggest that you take a look at LW2 beta and see what more can be done there to support your ideas. They are planning to launch on November 1 with an open beta a few weeks before, so major new features are probably out (at least until later), but things like changes to the karma or moderation system are probably still possible. The people behind LW2 are planning to write a post soon about the karma changes and ask for review/suggestions so you can hold off your ideas until then as well.
How do you envision this? Like if we get results published in academia, that will draw more people into this community? This makes me a bit worried that if being published in academia is the ultimate marker of status in this community, that’ll discourage people who have a distaste for academia (like me when I first joined). May still be a good idea though...
Yeah, I agree that the connection to academia shouldn’t be the end goal, but it could be one of several factors that help.
We also need to figure out how to avoid the bad incentives of academia. For example, to avoid the problem of publishing papers for the sake of publishing or for the sake of gaining citation counts, we should only reward someone with status if the act of academic publishing leads to positive consequences, for example productive academic research that otherwise wouldn’t likely to have occurred (and not just additional citations), or practical deployment of the idea that otherwise wouldn’t likely to have occurred. But this will be hard to do in practice, whereas counting papers / citations will be easy.
We have to keep in mind that the people who created the status / monetary economy in academia surely didn’t intend to cause the incentive problems that now exist within it, and many people both in academia and out (e.g., policy makers, funders) have probably since noticed those problems and would love to have ways to fix them, but the bad incentives still exist. In some sense, inefficiencies are simply inevitable due to the multi-player nature of the game. The best we can do is perhaps to have a different set of inefficiencies / bad incentives, which allow us to reach a different (and not necessarily larger) set of low-hanging fruit.
I think this suggests that we should be ruthless about avoiding becoming just like academia, and throw out the baby with the bathwater if necessary to avoid it. For example, if we can’t figure out a foolproof way of rewarding academic publishing only when it leads to positive consequences, we should assume that trying to reward academic publishing will lead to inefficiencies / bad incentives similar to ones existing in academia, and therefore not try to reward academic publishing at all. Or, alternatively, we need to create the kind of culture where we can say, “oops, rewarding people for academic publishing is making us too much like academia in terms of sharing the same set of inefficiencies / bad incentives, so we shouldn’t be rewarding people for academic publishing anymore” but that seems significantly harder to accomplish. Academia is very likely a basin of attraction in the space of culture and institutional design, and we risk irreversibly falling into it just by getting close.
As long as MIRI is led and funded by people who care about the actual goal rather than citations, I don’t see why we would go astray.
I can see a couple different ways that it could happen. Funders might have trouble judging actual progress in the absence of academic peer-reviewed publications and citations. Especially as more academics join the AI risk field and produce more papers and citations, funders might be tempted to think that they should re-direct resources towards academia (in part for subconscious status reasons). MIRI may have to switch to more academic norms in order to compete, which would then rub off on LW. (This seems to already be happening to some extent.) Or LW moves towards a more academic culture for internal status-economics reasons, and MIRI leaders may not have much control over that. (In that world, maybe LWers will eventually look down upon MIRI for not being sufficiently academic.)
You know what I will say, yall should stay in your lane, re: incentives.
Yudkowsky’s incentives caused him to write HPMOR (which has precisely zero (0) academic value), and publish basically nothing. So as far as the mainstream is concerned his footprint does not exist. He’s collecting a salary at MIRI, presumably. What is that salary buying?
Mainstream academics who collect a salary will say they teach undergraduates, and publish stuff to make grant agencies happy. Some of that stuff is useless, a lot of it is very useful indeed.
Reform attempts for “non-aligned” ecosystems like academia will almost certainly not work because (as you all are well aware) “aligning” is hard.
MIRI has the same problem everyone else has: if it grows it will become a non-aligned ecosystem, if it doesn’t grow it will not have any impact.
I don’t understand this. Please clarify? (Urban dictionary says “stay in your lane” means mind your own business, which is exactly what we’re doing, namely trying to figure out what direction to push our own culture.)
He’s publishing mostly on Arbital these days. See this and this for examples. I’m not sure why he doesn’t at least post links elsewhere to draw people’s attention though. Hopefully that will change after LW 2.0 goes live.
I’m not sure what you mean by this either. Certainly the people who work on AI safety at Berkeley, OpenAI, and DeepMind all know about Eliezer and MIRI’s approach to AI alignment, even if they don’t agree that it’s the most promising one. Are you saying that if Eliezer had published in academia, they’d be more inclined to follow that approach, as opposed to the more ML-based approaches that they’re currently following?
I think having “aligned” human institutions is too much to hope for. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, perhaps the best we can do is to have different bad incentives / inefficiencies in different institutions so that they’re able to reach different sets of low hanging fruit, and not all suffer from the same collective blind spots.
I get super annoyed by criticisms of mainstream academia out of the rationality-sphere, I suppose (mostly because it falls into either stuff that every academic already knows about that’s very hard to fix, or just vastly misinformed stuff). Roko the other day on facebook: “academia produces nothing of value.”
I suppose what I mean by this is that academia functions on a dual currency/kudos system. “Academic kudos” is acquired by playing certain formal games within mainstream academia (publications in fancy journals and so on). So, for example, if Tegmark published Life 3.0, and it reached the best-seller list that would not award him a ton of “academic kudos” (well, at least in my opinion, Hanson might disagree). Instead, that would be called “being good with the media.”
“Academic kudos” is a bit different from “I have heard of you.”
I agree with this entire paragraph. I am a big fan of letting a thousand flowers bloom.