Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a version like this that would actually be decent at ‘getting people to grapple with’ the ideas? Like, if you got Alignment Skeptic Alice to judge the ELK prize submissions with Paul Christiano and Mark Xu (presumably by paying her a bunch of money), would Alice come away from the experience thinking “actually ELK is pretty challenging” or would she come away from it thinking “Christiano and Xu are weirdly worried about edge cases that would never happen in reality”?
would Alice come away from the experience thinking “actually ELK is pretty challenging” or would she come away from it thinking “Christiano and Xu are weirdly worried about edge cases that would never happen in reality”?
If Alice is a skeptic because she actually has thought about it for a while and come to an opinion, it will totally be the latter.
If Alice has just not thought about it much, and she believes that AGI is coming, then she might believe the former. But in that case I think you could just have Alice talk to e.g. me for, say, 10 hours, and I’d have a pretty decent chance of convincing her that we should have more investment in AGI alignment.
(Or to put it another way: just actually honestly debating with the other person seems a lot more likely to work than immersing them in difficult alignment research—at least as long as you know how to debate with non-rationalists.)
Of course, but “judge the ELK prize submissions with Paul Christiano and Mark Xu” is also not a scalable approach, since it requires a lot of conversation with Paul and Mark?
Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a version like this that would actually be decent at ‘getting people to grapple with’ the ideas? Like, if you got Alignment Skeptic Alice to judge the ELK prize submissions with Paul Christiano and Mark Xu (presumably by paying her a bunch of money), would Alice come away from the experience thinking “actually ELK is pretty challenging” or would she come away from it thinking “Christiano and Xu are weirdly worried about edge cases that would never happen in reality”?
If Alice is a skeptic because she actually has thought about it for a while and come to an opinion, it will totally be the latter.
If Alice has just not thought about it much, and she believes that AGI is coming, then she might believe the former. But in that case I think you could just have Alice talk to e.g. me for, say, 10 hours, and I’d have a pretty decent chance of convincing her that we should have more investment in AGI alignment.
(Or to put it another way: just actually honestly debating with the other person seems a lot more likely to work than immersing them in difficult alignment research—at least as long as you know how to debate with non-rationalists.)
Your time isn’t scalable, though—there are well over 10,000 replacement-level AI researchers.
Of course, but “judge the ELK prize submissions with Paul Christiano and Mark Xu” is also not a scalable approach, since it requires a lot of conversation with Paul and Mark?
I think we agree that scaling is relative and more is better!