This is a special post for quick takes by Raemon. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
'Straw MIRI researchers' seems basically right to me. Though if I were trying to capture all MIRI research I'd probably replace "try to build a robust theory of agency" with "try to get deconfused about powerful general-purpose intelligence/optimization" or "try to ensure that the future developers of AGI aren't flying blind; less like the black boxes of current ML, more like how NASA has to deal with some chaotic wind and weather patterns but the principles and parts of the rocket are fundamentally well-understood".
'Straw Paul Christiano' doesn't sound right to me, but I'm not sure how to fix it. Some things that felt off to me (though maybe I'm wrong about this too):
Disagreements about whether MIRI's approach is doomed or too-hard seem smaller and less cruxy to me than disagreements about whether prosaic AGI alignment is doomed.
"Timelines are too short" doesn't sound like a crux I've heard before.
A better example of a thing I think Paul thinks is pretty doomed is "trying to align AGI in hard-takeoff scenarios". I could see takeoff speed/continuity being a crux: either disagreement about the likelihood of hard takeoff, or disagreement about the feasibility of alignment given hard takeoff.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.