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?
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?