Good post. I’ve mostly figured that I’m not smart enough to contribute anything useful to Friendliness research, but this gives me hope that I might be of some use after all. :-)
I’m not going to have the insight that solves reflective decision theory, either. But there is so much plausibly relevant stuff lying on the ground waiting to be picked up right now it’s killing me. I could spend the next year doing just the useful ‘hacking away at the edges’ research that I happen to see lying on the ground right from where I’m standing now.
You write good book summaries, among other things. Wanna summarize the most useful parts of this book for the rest of us? :)
there is so much plausibly relevant stuff lying on the ground waiting to be picked up right now it’s killing me.
Another useful technique is pointing out this low-hanging fruit to your fellow researchers (or to the community at large), in a hope that someone else (also) might have the skill set suitable for picking it up. A post with a detailed list of stuff that is “killing you” might be a good idea. Let us hack together :)
I would like to write up that list, but I’ve mentioned some of it already. If somebody wants to summarize the literature on choice modelling or AI preference elicitation/learning from the point of view of what’s most likely to be useful for CEV, that would be awesome. But I am very, very skeptical that anybody will actually do that. If somebody else does that before I do, they will jump onto my very short list of uber-special super-people who actually complete useful projects out of their own motivation. Of course, many people have pretty decent reasons for not doing that kind of thing—they decided a while back to have a spouse and kids that now depend on them, or they work in their comparative advantage and donate to save the world, or whatever. But some people won’t do things like that because they have decided they have a disease called “akrasia” and that they are helpless to defeat it.
Is that as math-heavy as it looks like? :) I can summarize those books too, presuming that I understand the math involved, but it’s slooow and requires special motivation… (and I still haven’t even written up the rest of Kurzban’s book)
Yeah, it’s math heavy. There are definitely things that would be useful to summarize that would require less motivation to achieve. How ‘bout Braitenberg’s ‘Vehicles’? People loved Yvain’s Blue-Minimizing Robot, which is basically a robot version of the original ‘Vehicles’ article and book.
Or hire someone to discourage Friendliness researchers from consuming lemonade or anything else that promotes negative health outcomes. Come to think of it that is quite close to something I’ve heard seriously proposed!
Good post. I’ve mostly figured that I’m not smart enough to contribute anything useful to Friendliness research, but this gives me hope that I might be of some use after all. :-)
I’m not going to have the insight that solves reflective decision theory, either. But there is so much plausibly relevant stuff lying on the ground waiting to be picked up right now it’s killing me. I could spend the next year doing just the useful ‘hacking away at the edges’ research that I happen to see lying on the ground right from where I’m standing now.
You write good book summaries, among other things. Wanna summarize the most useful parts of this book for the rest of us? :)
Another useful technique is pointing out this low-hanging fruit to your fellow researchers (or to the community at large), in a hope that someone else (also) might have the skill set suitable for picking it up. A post with a detailed list of stuff that is “killing you” might be a good idea. Let us hack together :)
I would like to write up that list, but I’ve mentioned some of it already. If somebody wants to summarize the literature on choice modelling or AI preference elicitation/learning from the point of view of what’s most likely to be useful for CEV, that would be awesome. But I am very, very skeptical that anybody will actually do that. If somebody else does that before I do, they will jump onto my very short list of uber-special super-people who actually complete useful projects out of their own motivation. Of course, many people have pretty decent reasons for not doing that kind of thing—they decided a while back to have a spouse and kids that now depend on them, or they work in their comparative advantage and donate to save the world, or whatever. But some people won’t do things like that because they have decided they have a disease called “akrasia” and that they are helpless to defeat it.
Thanks!
Is that as math-heavy as it looks like? :) I can summarize those books too, presuming that I understand the math involved, but it’s slooow and requires special motivation… (and I still haven’t even written up the rest of Kurzban’s book)
Yeah, it’s math heavy. There are definitely things that would be useful to summarize that would require less motivation to achieve. How ‘bout Braitenberg’s ‘Vehicles’? People loved Yvain’s Blue-Minimizing Robot, which is basically a robot version of the original ‘Vehicles’ article and book.
Ooh, Vehicles seems awesome. I’ll see if I get around it. (Might take a while.)
At worst, you could get a cerebral job and use the proceeds to hire someone to serve lemonade to Friendliness researchers.
Or hire someone to discourage Friendliness researchers from consuming lemonade or anything else that promotes negative health outcomes. Come to think of it that is quite close to something I’ve heard seriously proposed!