I agree in the abstract with the idea of looking for niches, and I think that several of these ideas have something to them. Nevertheless when I read the list of suggestions my overall feeling is that it’s going in a slightly wrong direction, or missing the point, or something. I thought I’d have a go at articulating why, although I don’t think I’ve got this to the point where I’d firmly stand behind it:
It seems to me like some of the central FHI virtues were:
Offering a space to top thinkers where the offer was pretty much “please come here and think about things that seem important in a collaborative truth-seeking environment”
I think that the freedom of direction, rather than focusing on an agenda or path to impact, was important for:
attracting talent
finding good underexplored ideas (b/c of course at the start of the thinking people don’t know what’s important)
Caveats:
This relies on your researchers having some good taste in what’s important (so this needs to be part of what you select people on)
FHI also had some success launching research groups where people were hired to more focused things
I think this was not the heart of the FHI magic, though, but more like a particular type of entrepreneurship picking up and running with things from the core
Willingness to hang around at whiteboards for hours talking and exploring things that seemed interesting
With an attitude of “OK but can we just model this?” and diving straight into it
Someone once described FHI as “professional amateurs”, which I think is apt
The approach is a bit like the attitude ascribed to physicists in this xkcd, but applied more to problems-that-nobody-has-good-answers-for than things-with-lots-of-existing-study (and with more willingness to dive into understanding existing fields when they’re importantly relevant for the problem at hand)
Importantly mostly without directly asking “ok but where is this going? what can we do about it?”
Prioritization at a local level is somewhat ruthless, but is focused on “how do we better understand important dynamics?” and not “what has external impact in the world?”
Sometimes orienting to “which of our ideas does the world need to know about? what are the best ways to disseminate these?” and writing about those in high-quality ways
I’d draw some contrast with MIRI here, who I think were also good at getting people to think of interesting things, but less good at finding articulations that translated to broadly-accessible ideas
Reading your list, a bunch of it seems to be about decisions about what to work on or what locally to pursue. My feeling is that those are the types of questions which are largely best left open to future researchers to figure out, and that the appropriate focus right now is more like trying to work out how to create the environment which can lead to some of this stuff.
Overall, the take in the previous paragraph is slightly too strong. I think it is in fact good to think through these things to get a feeling for possible future directions. And I also think that some of the good paths towards building a group like this start out by picking a topic or two to convene people on and get them thinking about. But if places want to pick up the torch, I think it’s really important to attend to the ways in which it was special that aren’t necessarily well-represented in the current x-risk ecosystem.
You’d have a much better idea of what made FHI successful than I would. At the same time, I would bet that in order to make this new project successful—and be its own thing—it’d likely have to break at least one assumption behind what made old FHI work well.
Reading your list, a bunch of it seems to be about decisions about what to work on or what locally to pursue.
I think my list appears more this way then I intended because I gave some examples of projects I would be excited by if they happened. I wasn’t intending to stake out a strong position as to whether these projects should projects chosen by the institute vs. some examples of projects that it might be reasonable for a researcher to choose within that particular area.
Makes sense! My inference was because the discussion at this stage is a high-level one about ways to set things up, but it does seem good to have space to discuss object-level projects that people might get into.
I agree in the abstract with the idea of looking for niches, and I think that several of these ideas have something to them. Nevertheless when I read the list of suggestions my overall feeling is that it’s going in a slightly wrong direction, or missing the point, or something. I thought I’d have a go at articulating why, although I don’t think I’ve got this to the point where I’d firmly stand behind it:
It seems to me like some of the central FHI virtues were:
Offering a space to top thinkers where the offer was pretty much “please come here and think about things that seem important in a collaborative truth-seeking environment”
I think that the freedom of direction, rather than focusing on an agenda or path to impact, was important for:
attracting talent
finding good underexplored ideas (b/c of course at the start of the thinking people don’t know what’s important)
Caveats:
This relies on your researchers having some good taste in what’s important (so this needs to be part of what you select people on)
FHI also had some success launching research groups where people were hired to more focused things
I think this was not the heart of the FHI magic, though, but more like a particular type of entrepreneurship picking up and running with things from the core
Willingness to hang around at whiteboards for hours talking and exploring things that seemed interesting
With an attitude of “OK but can we just model this?” and diving straight into it
Someone once described FHI as “professional amateurs”, which I think is apt
The approach is a bit like the attitude ascribed to physicists in this xkcd, but applied more to problems-that-nobody-has-good-answers-for than things-with-lots-of-existing-study (and with more willingness to dive into understanding existing fields when they’re importantly relevant for the problem at hand)
Importantly mostly without directly asking “ok but where is this going? what can we do about it?”
Prioritization at a local level is somewhat ruthless, but is focused on “how do we better understand important dynamics?” and not “what has external impact in the world?”
Sometimes orienting to “which of our ideas does the world need to know about? what are the best ways to disseminate these?” and writing about those in high-quality ways
I’d draw some contrast with MIRI here, who I think were also good at getting people to think of interesting things, but less good at finding articulations that translated to broadly-accessible ideas
Reading your list, a bunch of it seems to be about decisions about what to work on or what locally to pursue. My feeling is that those are the types of questions which are largely best left open to future researchers to figure out, and that the appropriate focus right now is more like trying to work out how to create the environment which can lead to some of this stuff.
Overall, the take in the previous paragraph is slightly too strong. I think it is in fact good to think through these things to get a feeling for possible future directions. And I also think that some of the good paths towards building a group like this start out by picking a topic or two to convene people on and get them thinking about. But if places want to pick up the torch, I think it’s really important to attend to the ways in which it was special that aren’t necessarily well-represented in the current x-risk ecosystem.
Just thought I’d add a second follow-up comment.
You’d have a much better idea of what made FHI successful than I would. At the same time, I would bet that in order to make this new project successful—and be its own thing—it’d likely have to break at least one assumption behind what made old FHI work well.
I think my list appears more this way then I intended because I gave some examples of projects I would be excited by if they happened. I wasn’t intending to stake out a strong position as to whether these projects should projects chosen by the institute vs. some examples of projects that it might be reasonable for a researcher to choose within that particular area.
Makes sense! My inference was because the discussion at this stage is a high-level one about ways to set things up, but it does seem good to have space to discuss object-level projects that people might get into.