Second, I understand that LW fulfilled the crowdsourcing role here naturally at the inception of the AF. I think it’s worth revisiting whether it best fulfills this role going forward. It seems like we both have PR concerns, for instance. Ignoring engineering and UI considerations for a second, why not split the AF into two channels: a channel for current members and a channel for new posters (where content from the New channel kept distinct from the main channel)? This way content promotion for AF is managed by AF members visiting AF and not by AF members visiting LW. This seems like it would create more value/culture alignment for primary AF content. Or maybe you want the larger, tangentially aligned LW community to help with crowdsourcing, due to the advantage of size in crowdsourcing. But then why not grow the AF ranks to solve that problem?
I do think it’s worth reconsidering this from time to time. Here are some thoughts.
I am still worried that the AIAF would lose its critical mass if it were to become a completely separate website.
I also think the LW culture is a healthy context in which to do AI Alignment research, though it of course has many flaws, and I am wary of cutting that connection.
But the biggest obstacle is probably just operational capacity. Because of the way the AIAF and LW share code and data, it drastically reduces the engineering and moderation complexity, and the AIAF/LW team is currently already kind of swamped with all the different things we want to do. I have been trying to expand the team and hire more people, but it’s hard and I’ve already been struggling to manage a team of the current size. I am really putting a lot of my effort into figuring out how to gain more operational capacity for the organization, but we are definitely somewhat bottlenecked on my ability to manage a larger organization and finding good people that I would trust to handle this job.
I would love a small dedicated team that could do much more ambitious things with the AI Alignment Forum, and am working towards that, at which point I think changing the relationship between LW and the AIAF is much more on the table. But before that happens, I think it’s unlikely we should make a big push to change this relationship drastically.
I do think it’s worth reconsidering this from time to time. Here are some thoughts.
I am still worried that the AIAF would lose its critical mass if it were to become a completely separate website.
I also think the LW culture is a healthy context in which to do AI Alignment research, though it of course has many flaws, and I am wary of cutting that connection.
But the biggest obstacle is probably just operational capacity. Because of the way the AIAF and LW share code and data, it drastically reduces the engineering and moderation complexity, and the AIAF/LW team is currently already kind of swamped with all the different things we want to do. I have been trying to expand the team and hire more people, but it’s hard and I’ve already been struggling to manage a team of the current size. I am really putting a lot of my effort into figuring out how to gain more operational capacity for the organization, but we are definitely somewhat bottlenecked on my ability to manage a larger organization and finding good people that I would trust to handle this job.
I would love a small dedicated team that could do much more ambitious things with the AI Alignment Forum, and am working towards that, at which point I think changing the relationship between LW and the AIAF is much more on the table. But before that happens, I think it’s unlikely we should make a big push to change this relationship drastically.