I think people in this thread vastly overestimate how much money MIRI has, and underestimate how much would top people cost.
This implies that MIRI is very much funding-constrained, and unless you have elite talent then you should earn to give to organizations that will recruit those with elite talent. This applies to me and most people reading this, who are only around 2-4 sigmas above the mean.
I highly doubt most people reading this are “around 2-4 sigmas above the mean”, if that’s even a meaningful concept.
The choice between earning to give and direct work is definitely nontrivial though: there are many precedents of useful work done by “average” individuals, even in mathematics.
But I do get the feeling that MIRI thinks the relative value of hiring random expensive people would be <0, which seems consistent with how other groups trying to solve hard problems approach things. E.g. I don’t see Tesla paying billions to famous mathematicians/smart people to “solve self-driving”.
This implies that MIRI is very much funding-constrained, and unless you have elite talent then you should earn to give to organizations that will recruit those with elite talent. This applies to me and most people reading this, who are only around 2-4 sigmas above the mean.
I highly doubt most people reading this are “around 2-4 sigmas above the mean”, if that’s even a meaningful concept.
The choice between earning to give and direct work is definitely nontrivial though: there are many precedents of useful work done by “average” individuals, even in mathematics.
But I do get the feeling that MIRI thinks the relative value of hiring random expensive people would be <0, which seems consistent with how other groups trying to solve hard problems approach things.
E.g. I don’t see Tesla paying billions to famous mathematicians/smart people to “solve self-driving”.
Edit: Yudkowsky answered https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Gkqus9vusXRevR8/late-2021-miri-conversations-ama-discussion?commentId=9K2ioAJGDRfRuDDCs , apparently I was wrong and it’s because you can’t just pay top people to work on problems that don’t interest them.