I think that we might want to encourage people to contribute what they can towards safety even if they only think they can make small contributions. I think that most people could find something useful to do if they really thought about it and were willing to put any ego aside.
Look at the sidebar here? Is this anywhere near optimal? I don’t think so. Surely it should be encouraging people to undertake logical first steps towards becoming involved in alignment (ie. AGI safety fundamentals course, 80,000 hours coaching or booking a call with AI Safety Support).
In a few weeks, I’ll probably be spending a few hours setting up a website for AI Safety Australia and NZ (a prospective org to do local movement-building). Lots of people have web development capabilities, but you don’t even need that with things like Wordpress.
I’ve been spending time going through recent threads and encouraging people who’ve expressed interest in doing something about this, but are unsure what to do, to consider a few logical next steps.
Or maybe just reading about safety and answering questions on the Stampy Wiki (https://stampy.ai)?
Or failing everything else, just do some local EA movement building and make sure to run a few safety events.
I don’t know, it just seems like there’s low-hanging fruit all over the place. Not claiming these are huge impacts, but beats doing nothing.
It seems like you’re pointing at a model where society can make progress on safety by having a bunch of people put some marginal effort towards it. That seems insane to me—have I misunderstood you?
Sorry, I don’t quite understand your objection? Is it that you don’t think these are net-positive, that you think all of these little bits will merely add up to a rounding error or that you think timelines are too short for them to make a difference?
I think the impact of little bits of “people engage with the problem” is not significantly positive. Maybe it rounds to zero. Maybe it is negative, if people engaging lightly flood serious people with noisy requests.
Hard research problems just don’t get solved by people thinking for five minutes. There are some people who can make real contributions [0] by thinking for ~five hours per week for a couple of months, but they are quite rare.
(This is orthogonal to the current discussion, but: I had not heard of stampy.ai before your comment. Probably you should refer to it as stampy.ai, because googling “stampy wiki” give sit as the ~fifth result, behind some other stuff that is kind of absurd.)
[0] say, write a blog post that gets read and incorporated into serious people’s world models
I’m not suggesting that they contribute towards research, just that if they were able to reliably get things done they’d be able to find someone who’d benefit from a volunteer. But I’m guessing you think they’d waste people’s time by sending them a bunch of emails asking if they need help? Or that a lot of people who volunteer then cause issues by being unreliable?
The question isn’t so much whether a contribution toward safety is small or big but whether you can actually find a contribution that’s certain to have a small contribution toward safety. If you think there are a bunch of small things toward safety that can be done, what do you have in mind?
I think that we might want to encourage people to contribute what they can towards safety even if they only think they can make small contributions. I think that most people could find something useful to do if they really thought about it and were willing to put any ego aside.
Sounds like a nice thing to think, but I don’t put much stock in it.
Look at the sidebar here? Is this anywhere near optimal? I don’t think so. Surely it should be encouraging people to undertake logical first steps towards becoming involved in alignment (ie. AGI safety fundamentals course, 80,000 hours coaching or booking a call with AI Safety Support).
In a few weeks, I’ll probably be spending a few hours setting up a website for AI Safety Australia and NZ (a prospective org to do local movement-building). Lots of people have web development capabilities, but you don’t even need that with things like Wordpress.
I’ve been spending time going through recent threads and encouraging people who’ve expressed interest in doing something about this, but are unsure what to do, to consider a few logical next steps.
Or maybe just reading about safety and answering questions on the Stampy Wiki (https://stampy.ai)?
Or failing everything else, just do some local EA movement building and make sure to run a few safety events.
I don’t know, it just seems like there’s low-hanging fruit all over the place. Not claiming these are huge impacts, but beats doing nothing.
I think it is good to do things if you have traction. I think it is good to grow the things you can do.
It seems like you’re pointing at a model where society can make progress on safety by having a bunch of people put some marginal effort towards it. That seems insane to me—have I misunderstood you?
Sorry, I don’t quite understand your objection? Is it that you don’t think these are net-positive, that you think all of these little bits will merely add up to a rounding error or that you think timelines are too short for them to make a difference?
I think the impact of little bits of “people engage with the problem” is not significantly positive. Maybe it rounds to zero. Maybe it is negative, if people engaging lightly flood serious people with noisy requests.
Hard research problems just don’t get solved by people thinking for five minutes. There are some people who can make real contributions [0] by thinking for ~five hours per week for a couple of months, but they are quite rare.
(This is orthogonal to the current discussion, but: I had not heard of stampy.ai before your comment. Probably you should refer to it as stampy.ai, because googling “stampy wiki” give sit as the ~fifth result, behind some other stuff that is kind of absurd.)
[0] say, write a blog post that gets read and incorporated into serious people’s world models
I’m not suggesting that they contribute towards research, just that if they were able to reliably get things done they’d be able to find someone who’d benefit from a volunteer. But I’m guessing you think they’d waste people’s time by sending them a bunch of emails asking if they need help? Or that a lot of people who volunteer then cause issues by being unreliable?
The question isn’t so much whether a contribution toward safety is small or big but whether you can actually find a contribution that’s certain to have a small contribution toward safety. If you think there are a bunch of small things toward safety that can be done, what do you have in mind?
See this comment.