Your comment is an instance of the “forcing fallacy” which really deserves a post of its own: claiming that we should spend resources on a problem because a lot of utility depends, or could depend, on the answer. There are many examples of this on LW, but to choose an uncontroversial one from elsewhere: why aren’t more physicists working on teleportation? The general counter to the pattern is noting that problems may be difficult, and may or may not have viable attacks right now, so we may be better off ignoring them after all. I don’t see a viable attack for applying LW-style rationality to political prediction, do you?
The general counter to the pattern is noting that problems may be difficult, and may or may not have viable attacks right now, so we may be better off ignoring them after all.
This is valid where there are experts that can confidently estimate that there are no attacks. There are lots of expert physicists, so if steps towards teleportation were feasible, someone would’ve noticed. In case there are no experts to produce such confidence, correct course of action is to create them (perhaps from more general experts, by way of giving a research focus).
The rule “If it’s an important problem, and we haven’t tried to understand it, we should” holds in any case, it’s just that in case of teleportation, we already did try to understand what we presently can, as a side effect of widespread knowledge of physics.
Your comment is an instance of the “forcing fallacy” which really deserves a post of its own: claiming that we should spend resources on a problem because a lot of utility depends, or could depend, on the answer. There are many examples of this on LW, but to choose an uncontroversial one from elsewhere: why aren’t more physicists working on teleportation? The general counter to the pattern is noting that problems may be difficult, and may or may not have viable attacks right now, so we may be better off ignoring them after all. I don’t see a viable attack for applying LW-style rationality to political prediction, do you?
This is valid where there are experts that can confidently estimate that there are no attacks. There are lots of expert physicists, so if steps towards teleportation were feasible, someone would’ve noticed. In case there are no experts to produce such confidence, correct course of action is to create them (perhaps from more general experts, by way of giving a research focus).
The rule “If it’s an important problem, and we haven’t tried to understand it, we should” holds in any case, it’s just that in case of teleportation, we already did try to understand what we presently can, as a side effect of widespread knowledge of physics.