#1, what Hazard said. #2, this proposal reminds me of the ITER project and the Human Brain Project, enormously expensive undertakings which are widely believed to be almost entirely pointless, which were/are organized, campaigned for and run by extremely smart people. The point is that well-meaning really smart people can still make grievous coordination errors.
The idea of a powerufl cabal of rationalists only works if all the members genuinely qualify as big-R Rationalists, people who are basically already superhuman at the types of skills that would make communication and coordination possible. I’m genuinely not sure of any of that type of person currently exist. I think the necessary and most difficult part of your approach would be actually finding and vetting such people.
I disagree that participants would already have to be superhuman, or even particularly strong rationalists. We can all get stronger together through mutual support even though none of us may already be “big-R Rationalists.”
In his post about explore/exploit tradeoffs, Sebastian Marshall remembers how Carlos Micelli scheduled a skype call everyday to improve his network and his English. I haven’t looked into how many of the people Micelli called were C-suite executives or research chairs or other similar high-status individuals. My guess is that he could have had good results speaking with interesting and smart people on any topic.
For myself, I remember a meetup that I attended in November last year. I was feeling drained by a day job that is not necessarily aligned with my purpose. The event itself was a meeting to brainstorm changes to the education system in Canada, which is also not necessarily aligned with my purpose. However, the charge and energy I got simply from speaking to smart people about interesting things was, and I want to stress this, amazing. For weeks afterwards, the feeling that I got from attending that meeting was all that I wanted to talk about.
Both projects successfully got politicians to spend lots of money to employ people of a given field while the money would have likely be better spent if you would have spread out the money inside a team better.
The Space Launch System that NASA currently funds would be another example of large scale government funded projects that are highly suboptimal. In contrast you have Elon Musk who managed to create a lot more effective organisation with SpaceX.
To answer your question, my understanding gleaned from reading a handful of articles on the topic is that many experts in fusion energy think that all money put into the Tokamak architecture is wasted because that architecture has been surpassed by better designs; very little transferrable knowledge can actually be learned via ITER, it doesn’t answer fundamental research questions and the engineering questions it answers weren’t worth spending ten billion dollars; and practically speaking, there’s no clear path from ITER to building a commercially viable fusion reactor, in other words, it does not actually serve a function as an engineering prototype.
“Widely believed” is a weasely enough term that I think the existence of multiple articles to this effect written by experts qualifies the stance as being “widely believed”.
To take a meta stance on the question, the fact that experts in the field of fusion energy can have this disagreement and yet the project went forward proves my original thesis that really smart people can disagree about the fundamental viability of a project, yet that project can still move forward and suck up billions of dollars due to one faction being more politically/bureaucratically successful for whatever reason. This is a coordination failure.
#1, what Hazard said. #2, this proposal reminds me of the ITER project and the Human Brain Project, enormously expensive undertakings which are widely believed to be almost entirely pointless, which were/are organized, campaigned for and run by extremely smart people. The point is that well-meaning really smart people can still make grievous coordination errors.
The idea of a powerufl cabal of rationalists only works if all the members genuinely qualify as big-R Rationalists, people who are basically already superhuman at the types of skills that would make communication and coordination possible. I’m genuinely not sure of any of that type of person currently exist. I think the necessary and most difficult part of your approach would be actually finding and vetting such people.
I disagree that participants would already have to be superhuman, or even particularly strong rationalists. We can all get stronger together through mutual support even though none of us may already be “big-R Rationalists.”
In his post about explore/exploit tradeoffs, Sebastian Marshall remembers how Carlos Micelli scheduled a skype call everyday to improve his network and his English. I haven’t looked into how many of the people Micelli called were C-suite executives or research chairs or other similar high-status individuals. My guess is that he could have had good results speaking with interesting and smart people on any topic.
For myself, I remember a meetup that I attended in November last year. I was feeling drained by a day job that is not necessarily aligned with my purpose. The event itself was a meeting to brainstorm changes to the education system in Canada, which is also not necessarily aligned with my purpose. However, the charge and energy I got simply from speaking to smart people about interesting things was, and I want to stress this, amazing. For weeks afterwards, the feeling that I got from attending that meeting was all that I wanted to talk about.
If I could get that feeling everyday...
Both projects successfully got politicians to spend lots of money to employ people of a given field while the money would have likely be better spent if you would have spread out the money inside a team better.
The Space Launch System that NASA currently funds would be another example of large scale government funded projects that are highly suboptimal. In contrast you have Elon Musk who managed to create a lot more effective organisation with SpaceX.
This is a tangent, but why is ITER almost entirely pointless? And why do you think this is “widely believed”?
To answer your question, my understanding gleaned from reading a handful of articles on the topic is that many experts in fusion energy think that all money put into the Tokamak architecture is wasted because that architecture has been surpassed by better designs; very little transferrable knowledge can actually be learned via ITER, it doesn’t answer fundamental research questions and the engineering questions it answers weren’t worth spending ten billion dollars; and practically speaking, there’s no clear path from ITER to building a commercially viable fusion reactor, in other words, it does not actually serve a function as an engineering prototype.
“Widely believed” is a weasely enough term that I think the existence of multiple articles to this effect written by experts qualifies the stance as being “widely believed”.
To take a meta stance on the question, the fact that experts in the field of fusion energy can have this disagreement and yet the project went forward proves my original thesis that really smart people can disagree about the fundamental viability of a project, yet that project can still move forward and suck up billions of dollars due to one faction being more politically/bureaucratically successful for whatever reason. This is a coordination failure.