lukeprog comments on New Q&A by Nick Bostrom - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 15 November 2011 11:32AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 15 November 2011 08:47:34PM *  10 points [-]

2m38s. My rapidly typed transcript:

QUESTIONER:

There are two organizations, FHI and SIAI, working on this. Let's say I thought this was the most important problem in the world, and I should be donating money to this...

NICK:

It's good. We've come to the chase!

I think there is a sense that both organizations are synergistic. If one were about to go under... that would probably be the one [to donate to]. If both were doing well, it's... different people will have different opinions. We work quite closely with the folks from SIAI...

There is an advantage to having one academic platform and one outside academia. There are different things these types of organizations give us. If you wanna get academics to pay more attention to this, to get postdocs to work on this, that's much easier to do within academia; also to get the ear of policy-makers and media...

On the other hand, for SIAI there might be things that are easier for them to do. More flexibility, they're not embedded in a big bureaucracy. So they can more easily hire people with non-standard backgrounds... and also more grass-roots stuff like Less Wrong...

So yeah. I'll give the non-answer answer to that question.