while in the slow takeoff world your choices about research projects are closely related to your sociological predictions about what things will be obvious to whom when.
I’m not that excited for projects along the lines of “let’s figure out how to make human feedback more sample efficient”, because I expect that non-takeover-risk-motivated people will eventually be motivated to work on that problem, and will probably succeed quickly given motivation. (Also I guess because I expect capabilities work to largely solve this problem on its own, so maybe this isn’t actually a great example?) I’m fairly excited about projects that try to apply human oversight to problems that the humans find harder to oversee, because I think that this is important for avoiding takeover risk but that the ML research community as a whole will procrastinate on it.
Example?
I’m not that excited for projects along the lines of “let’s figure out how to make human feedback more sample efficient”, because I expect that non-takeover-risk-motivated people will eventually be motivated to work on that problem, and will probably succeed quickly given motivation. (Also I guess because I expect capabilities work to largely solve this problem on its own, so maybe this isn’t actually a great example?) I’m fairly excited about projects that try to apply human oversight to problems that the humans find harder to oversee, because I think that this is important for avoiding takeover risk but that the ML research community as a whole will procrastinate on it.