Thanks! Despite the lack of SMART goals, I still feel like this reply gave me a better sense of what your priorities are & how you’ll be assessing success/failure.
One failure mode– which I’m sure is already on your radar– is something like: “MIRI ends up producing lots of high-quality stuff but no one really pays attention. Policymakers and national security people are very busy and often only read things that (a) directly relate to their work or (b) are sent to them by someone who they respect.”
Another is something like: “MIRI ends up focusing too much on making arguments/points that are convincing to general audiences but fail to understand the cruxes/views of the People Who Matter.” (A strawman version of this is something like “MIRI ends up spending a lot of time in the Bay and there’s lots of pressure to engage a bunch with the cruxes/views of rationalists, libertarians, e/accs, and AGI company employees. Meanwhile, the kinds of conversations happening among natsec folks & policymakers look very different, and MIRI’s materials end up being less relevant/useful to this target audience.”
I’m extremely confident that these are already on your radar, but I figure it might be worth noting that these are two of the failure modes I’m most worried about. (I guess besides the general boring failure mode along the lines of “hiring is hard and doing anything is hard and maybe things just stay slow and when someone asks what good materials you guys have produced the answer is still ‘we’re working on it’.)
(Final note: A lot of my questions and thoughts have been critical, but I should note that I appreciate what you’re doing & I’m looking forward to following MIRI’s work in the space! :D)
Thanks! Despite the lack of SMART goals, I still feel like this reply gave me a better sense of what your priorities are & how you’ll be assessing success/failure.
One failure mode– which I’m sure is already on your radar– is something like: “MIRI ends up producing lots of high-quality stuff but no one really pays attention. Policymakers and national security people are very busy and often only read things that (a) directly relate to their work or (b) are sent to them by someone who they respect.”
Another is something like: “MIRI ends up focusing too much on making arguments/points that are convincing to general audiences but fail to understand the cruxes/views of the People Who Matter.” (A strawman version of this is something like “MIRI ends up spending a lot of time in the Bay and there’s lots of pressure to engage a bunch with the cruxes/views of rationalists, libertarians, e/accs, and AGI company employees. Meanwhile, the kinds of conversations happening among natsec folks & policymakers look very different, and MIRI’s materials end up being less relevant/useful to this target audience.”
I’m extremely confident that these are already on your radar, but I figure it might be worth noting that these are two of the failure modes I’m most worried about. (I guess besides the general boring failure mode along the lines of “hiring is hard and doing anything is hard and maybe things just stay slow and when someone asks what good materials you guys have produced the answer is still ‘we’re working on it’.)
(Final note: A lot of my questions and thoughts have been critical, but I should note that I appreciate what you’re doing & I’m looking forward to following MIRI’s work in the space! :D)
Yup to all of that. :)