I definitely expect there to be lot of room for improvement here – each of the areas you point to is something we’ve talked about.
One quick check (too late in this case, but fairly high priority to figure out IMO) is “do they even think of LW as a place they should have considered reading?”
A thing I’d been considering for awhile is “make an actual alignment subforum on LessWrong”, which includes both the high signal official AlignmentForum posts, as well as other random posts about alignment, so that if you’ve come to LessWrong explicitly for AI you can see everything relevant.
Meanwhile my guess is at least some of those people showed up on LessWrong, saw a bunch of random posts irrelevant to them, and then bounced off. (And meanwhile showed up on AlignmentForum.org and saw less commenting activity, although I’m not sure how big a deal that’d be)
(there’s a question of what you’d want such a subforum to include – there’s a carving that looks more like “math stuff” and there’s a carving that includes things like AI policy or whatever. Also it’s sort of awkward to have the two places to hang out be “The AlignmentForum” and “The Alignment Subforum [of LessWrong]”)
I definitely expect there to be lot of room for improvement here – each of the areas you point to is something we’ve talked about.
That’s good to hear.
One quick check (too late in this case, but fairly high priority to figure out IMO) is “do they even think of LW as a place they should have considered reading?”
A lot of them know of LW/AF and at least read some of the posts.
Also it’s sort of awkward to have the two places to hang out be “The AlignmentForum” and “The Alignment Subforum [of LessWrong]”
Agreed this seems really awkward/confusing, but it makes me realize we do need better ways to onboard people who are mainly interested in AI alignment as opposed to rationality and cater to their needs generally. If a new user tries to comment on a post on AF now, it just pops up a message “Log in or go to LessWrong to submit your comment.” and there’s not even a link to the same post on LW. This whole experience probably needs to be reconsidered.
a) Do you have a sense that these people think of LW/AF as a/the primary nexus for discussion alignment-related issues? (but didn’t either because they didn’t expect to get much benefit, or would endure too much cost)
b) I don’t actually know if there’s any other actual locus of conversation happening anywhere other than individual private google docs, curious if you know of any such thing? (such as mailing lists. Not asking for the specific details of any such mailing list, just wanting to check if such a thing exists at all).
Agree that the onboarding experience should be much better, one way or another.
a) Do you have a sense that these people think of LW/AF as a/the primary nexus for discussion alignment-related issues? (but didn’t either because they didn’t expect to get much benefit, or would endure too much cost)
Again I didn’t get a chance to talk much about this topic, but I would guess yes.
b) I don’t actually know if there’s any other actual locus of conversation happening anywhere other than individual private google docs, curious if you know of any such thing? (such as mailing lists. Not asking for the specific details of any such mailing list, just wanting to check if such a thing exists at all).
The only thing I personally know is a low-traffic private mailing list run by FHI which has non-FHI researchers on it but mostly consist of discussions between FHI researchers.
I definitely expect there to be lot of room for improvement here – each of the areas you point to is something we’ve talked about.
One quick check (too late in this case, but fairly high priority to figure out IMO) is “do they even think of LW as a place they should have considered reading?”
A thing I’d been considering for awhile is “make an actual alignment subforum on LessWrong”, which includes both the high signal official AlignmentForum posts, as well as other random posts about alignment, so that if you’ve come to LessWrong explicitly for AI you can see everything relevant.
Meanwhile my guess is at least some of those people showed up on LessWrong, saw a bunch of random posts irrelevant to them, and then bounced off. (And meanwhile showed up on AlignmentForum.org and saw less commenting activity, although I’m not sure how big a deal that’d be)
(there’s a question of what you’d want such a subforum to include – there’s a carving that looks more like “math stuff” and there’s a carving that includes things like AI policy or whatever. Also it’s sort of awkward to have the two places to hang out be “The AlignmentForum” and “The Alignment Subforum [of LessWrong]”)
That’s good to hear.
A lot of them know of LW/AF and at least read some of the posts.
Agreed this seems really awkward/confusing, but it makes me realize we do need better ways to onboard people who are mainly interested in AI alignment as opposed to rationality and cater to their needs generally. If a new user tries to comment on a post on AF now, it just pops up a message “Log in or go to LessWrong to submit your comment.” and there’s not even a link to the same post on LW. This whole experience probably needs to be reconsidered.
a) Do you have a sense that these people think of LW/AF as a/the primary nexus for discussion alignment-related issues? (but didn’t either because they didn’t expect to get much benefit, or would endure too much cost)
b) I don’t actually know if there’s any other actual locus of conversation happening anywhere other than individual private google docs, curious if you know of any such thing? (such as mailing lists. Not asking for the specific details of any such mailing list, just wanting to check if such a thing exists at all).
Agree that the onboarding experience should be much better, one way or another.
Again I didn’t get a chance to talk much about this topic, but I would guess yes.
The only thing I personally know is a low-traffic private mailing list run by FHI which has non-FHI researchers on it but mostly consist of discussions between FHI researchers.