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”.
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.