Quick Takes

I think this post might be the best one of all the MIRI dialogues. I also feel confused about how to relate to the MIRI dialogues overall. A lot of the MIRI dialogues consist of Eliezer and Nate saying things that seem really important and obvious to me, and a lot of my love for them comes from a feeling of "this actually makes a bunch of the important arguments for why the problem is hard". But the nature of the argument is kind of closed off.  Like, I agree with these arguments, but like, if you believe these arguments, having traction on AI Alignment becomes much harder, and a lot of things that people currently label "AI Alignment" kind of stops feeling real, and I have this feeling that even though a really quite substantial fraction of the people I talk to about AI Alignment are compelled by Eliezer's argument for difficulty, that there is some kind of structural reason that AI Alignment as a field can't really track these arguments.  Like, a lot of people's jobs and funding rely on these arguments being false, and also, if these arguments are correct, the space of perspectives on the problem suddenly loses a lot of common ground on how to proceed or what to do, and it isn't really obvious that you even want an "AI Alignment field" or lots of "AI Alignment research organizations" or "AI Alignment student groups". Like, because we don't know how to solve this problem, it really isn't clear what the right type of social organization is, and there aren't obviously great gains from trade, and so from a coalition perspective, you don't get a coalition of people who think these arguments are real.  I feel deeply confused about this. Over the last two years, I think I wrongly ended up just kind of investing into an ecosystem of people that somewhat structurally can't really handle these arguments, and makes plans that assume that these arguments are false, and in doing so actually mostly makes the world worse, by having a far too optimistic stance on the differen

I think this post might be the best one of all the MIRI dialogues. I also feel confused about how to relate to the MIRI dialogues overall. A lot of the MIRI dialogues consist of Eliezer and Nate saying things that seem really important and obvious to me, and a lot of my love for them comes from a feeling of "this actually makes a bunch of the important arguments for why the problem is hard". But the nature of the argument is kind of closed off.  Like, I agree with these arguments, but like, if you believe these arguments, having traction on AI Alignment becomes much harder, and a lot of things that people currently label "AI Alignment" kind of stops feeling real, and I have this feeling that even though a really quite substantial fraction of the people I talk to about AI Alignment are compelled by Eliezer's argument for difficulty, that there is some kind of structural reason that AI Alignment as a field can't really track these arguments.  Like, a lot of people's jobs and funding rely on these arguments being false, and also, if these arguments are correct, the space of perspectives on the problem suddenly loses a lot of common ground on how to proceed or what to do, and it isn't really obvious that you even want an "AI Alignment field" or lots of "AI Alignment research organizations" or "AI Alignment student groups". Like, because we don't know how to solve this problem, it really isn't clear what the right type of social organization is, and there aren't obviously great gains from trade, and so from a coalition perspective, you don't get a coalition of people who think these arguments are real.  I feel deeply confused about this. Over the last two years, I think I wrongly ended up just kind of investing into an ecosystem of people that somewhat structurally can't really handle these arguments, and makes plans that assume that these arguments are false, and in doing so actually mostly makes the world worse, by having a far too optimistic stance on the differen