I don’t really know what I think about retrospectives in general, and I don’t always find them that helpful, because causal attribution is hard. Nonetheless, here are some reasons why I wanted to curate this:
I like that it both covers kind of a broad spectrum of stuff that influences a research project, and also manages to go into some interesting detail: high-level research direction and its feasibility, concrete sub-problems attempted and the outcome, particular cognitive and problem-solving strategies that were tried, as well as motivational and emotional aspects of the project. Hearing about what it was like when the various agent confusions collided with the various humans involved, was quite interesting and I feel like it actually gave me a somewhat richer view of both
It discusses some threads that seem important and that I’ve heard people talk about offline, but that I’ve seen less discussed online recently (the impact of infohazard policies, ambiguous lines between safety and capabilities research and how different inside views might cause one to pursue one rather than the other, people’s experience of interfacing with the MIRI_Nate way of doing research and communicating)
It holds different perspectives from the people involved in the research group, and I like how the dialogues feature kind of allows each to coexist without feeling a need to squeeze them into a unified narrative (the way things might feel if one were to coauthor a post or paper).
(Note: I chose to curate this, and I am also listed as a coauthor. I think this is fine because ultimately the impetus for writing up this content came from Thomas. Me and Raemon mostly just served as facilitators and interlocutors helping him get this stuff into writing.)
Curated! (And here’s the late curation notice)
I don’t really know what I think about retrospectives in general, and I don’t always find them that helpful, because causal attribution is hard. Nonetheless, here are some reasons why I wanted to curate this:
I like that it both covers kind of a broad spectrum of stuff that influences a research project, and also manages to go into some interesting detail: high-level research direction and its feasibility, concrete sub-problems attempted and the outcome, particular cognitive and problem-solving strategies that were tried, as well as motivational and emotional aspects of the project. Hearing about what it was like when the various agent confusions collided with the various humans involved, was quite interesting and I feel like it actually gave me a somewhat richer view of both
It discusses some threads that seem important and that I’ve heard people talk about offline, but that I’ve seen less discussed online recently (the impact of infohazard policies, ambiguous lines between safety and capabilities research and how different inside views might cause one to pursue one rather than the other, people’s experience of interfacing with the MIRI_Nate way of doing research and communicating)
It holds different perspectives from the people involved in the research group, and I like how the dialogues feature kind of allows each to coexist without feeling a need to squeeze them into a unified narrative (the way things might feel if one were to coauthor a post or paper).
(Note: I chose to curate this, and I am also listed as a coauthor. I think this is fine because ultimately the impetus for writing up this content came from Thomas. Me and Raemon mostly just served as facilitators and interlocutors helping him get this stuff into writing.)