It seems like the plan is to have one Eliezer-type (philosophy oriented) person in the team with the rest being math focused. I don’t understand why it isn’t more like half and half, or aiming for a balance of skills in all recruits. If there is only one philosophy oriented person in the team, how will the others catch his mistakes? If the reason is that you don’t expect to be able to recruit more than one Eliezer-type (of sufficient skill), then I think that’s enough reason to not build an FAI team.
From what I understand from past utterances, core SingInst folks tend to extend their “elite math” obsession to very nearly equating it with capability for philosophy.
One somewhat close quote that popped to mind (from lukeprog’s article on philosophy):
Second, if you want to contribute to cutting-edge problems, even ones that seem philosophical, it’s far more productive to study math and science than it is to study philosophy. You’ll learn more in math and science, and your learning will be of a higher quality.
My view is that if you take someone with philosophical talents and interests (presumably inherited or caused by the environment in a hard-to-control manner) , you can make a better philosopher out of them by having them study more math and science than the typical education for a philosopher. But if you take someone with little philosophical talent and interest and do the same, they’ll just become mathematicians and scientists.
I think this is probably similar to the views of SIAI people, and your quote doesn’t contradict my understanding.
Do you have ideas about how to find philosophical talent, especially the kind relevant for Friendliness philosophy? I don’t think SingInst folk have worked very thoroughly on the problem, but someone might have. Geoff Anders has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem and he runs summer programs teaching philosophy. Dunno how much progress he’s made. (Um, for whatever it’s worth, he seems to think I have philosophical aptitude—modus ponens or modus tollens, take your pick.)
Unfortunately none of core singinst guys seem to have any interesting accomplishments in math or have actually studied that math in depth; it is a very insightful remark by Luke but it’d be great if they have applied it to themselves; otherwise it just looks like Dunning-Kruger effect. I don’t see any reason to think that the elite math references are anything but lame signaling that is usually done by those whom don’t know math enough to properly signal the knowledge (by actually doing something new in math). Sadly it works: if you use jargon and you say something like what Luke said, then some of the people whom can’t independently evaluate your math skills, will assume it must be very high. Meanwhile I will assume it to be rather low because those with genuinely high skill will signal such skill in different way.
The most recent example is hard to give—it was in person from Anna. Other examples I would have to search through Eliezer’s comments from years back to find.
From what I understand from past utterances, core SingInst folks tend to extend their “elite math” obsession to very nearly equating it with capability for philosophy.
Can you give some examples of such utterances?
One somewhat close quote that popped to mind (from lukeprog’s article on philosophy):
My view is that if you take someone with philosophical talents and interests (presumably inherited or caused by the environment in a hard-to-control manner) , you can make a better philosopher out of them by having them study more math and science than the typical education for a philosopher. But if you take someone with little philosophical talent and interest and do the same, they’ll just become mathematicians and scientists.
I think this is probably similar to the views of SIAI people, and your quote doesn’t contradict my understanding.
Do you have ideas about how to find philosophical talent, especially the kind relevant for Friendliness philosophy? I don’t think SingInst folk have worked very thoroughly on the problem, but someone might have. Geoff Anders has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem and he runs summer programs teaching philosophy. Dunno how much progress he’s made. (Um, for whatever it’s worth, he seems to think I have philosophical aptitude—modus ponens or modus tollens, take your pick.)
Unfortunately none of core singinst guys seem to have any interesting accomplishments in math or have actually studied that math in depth; it is a very insightful remark by Luke but it’d be great if they have applied it to themselves; otherwise it just looks like Dunning-Kruger effect. I don’t see any reason to think that the elite math references are anything but lame signaling that is usually done by those whom don’t know math enough to properly signal the knowledge (by actually doing something new in math). Sadly it works: if you use jargon and you say something like what Luke said, then some of the people whom can’t independently evaluate your math skills, will assume it must be very high. Meanwhile I will assume it to be rather low because those with genuinely high skill will signal such skill in different way.
The most recent example is hard to give—it was in person from Anna. Other examples I would have to search through Eliezer’s comments from years back to find.