edge_retainer's Shortform

edge_retainer

edge_retainer's Shortform — LessWrong

edge_retainer's Shortform

5th May 2025

1 min read

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edge_retainer's Shortform

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[-]edge_retainer1y10

is there a term for ai related works ratio of increasing safety to capabilities?

is there a list of the types of ai work that have the best ratio?

e.g. you would expect governance to probably have the best ratio

[-]edge_retainer5mo0-7

It seems to me that the hardest part of getting ai right will be coordination and governance, not technical alignment. Under this view, I think the EA/LW forums are net negative. They are really bad at creating coordination environments and are actively crowding out similar but more coordination/governance environments from existing.

[-]yams5mo40

Can you say more about the two claims in your last sentence?

[-]edge_retainer5mo10

Can you think of any examples of successful social movements whose main medium of communication was something akin to a forum? Maybe something involving riots?

To be more object level, doing things requires making not perfect decisions but making them with conviction. A panopticon where peoples explicit goal is to be scout mindset (at best) or pedantically criticize at worst is not going to foment do-acracy. It also requires sub groups/committees, incentivizing doing, etc. I can flesh this out more if you aren't getting the spirit of what I mean.

re crowding out, I think these forums are on net substitutes not complements for other forms of organization. I don't have specific evidence here and am not that confident though.

[-]yams5mo40

I think I get the spirit. I thought, from the way you phrased it, that you were making an empirical claim (eg: ‘I saw [x better thing] not happen because LessWrong something something’). But it sounds like you’re making a more conceptual argument (which I think has legs, but for different reasons than you do, and I think we disagree on the effect size).

Thanks for responding.