This post highlights for me that we don't have a good understanding of what things like "more rational" and "more sane" mean, in terms of what dimensions human minds tend to vary along as a result of nature, ordinary nurture, and specialized nurture of the kind CFAR is trying to do.
I mentioned some specific biases that seem especially likely to cause risk for an FAI team. Is that the kind of "understanding" you're talking about, or something else?
Your post suggests that an FAI feasibility team would be made of the same people who would then (depending on their findings) go ahead and form an actual FAI team, but does that need to be the case?
I think probably there would just be an FAI research team that is told to continually reevaluate feasibility/safety as it goes. I just called it "FAI feasibility team" to emphasize that at the start its most important aim would be to evaluate feasibility and safety. Having an actual separate feasibility team might buy some additional overall sanity (but how, besides that attachment to being FAI researchers won't be an issue since they won't continue to be FAI researchers either way?). It seems like there would probably be better ways to spend the extra resources if we had them though.
I mentioned some specific biases that seem especially likely to cause risk for an FAI team. Is that the kind of "understanding" you're talking about, or something else?
I think that falls under my parenthetical comment in the first paragraph. Understanding what rationality-type skills would make this specific thing go well is obviously useful, but it would also be great if we had a general understanding of what rationality-type skills naturally vary together, so that we can use phrases like "more rational" and have a better idea of wh...
One possible answer to the argument "attempting to build FAI based on Eliezer's ideas seems infeasible and increases the risk of UFAI without helping much to increase the probability of a good outcome, and therefore we should try to achieve a positive Singularity by other means" is that it's too early to decide this. Even if our best current estimate is that trying to build such an FAI increases risk, there is still a reasonable chance that this estimate will turn out to be wrong after further investigation. Therefore, the counter-argument goes, we ought to mount a serious investigation into the feasibility and safety of Eliezer's design (as well as other possible FAI approaches), before deciding to either move forward or give up.
(I've been given to understand that this is a standard belief within SI, except possibly for Eliezer, which makes me wonder why nobody gave this counter-argument in response to my post linked above. ETA: Carl Shulman did subsequently give me a version of this argument here.)
This answer makes sense to me, except for the concern that even seriously investigating the feasibility of FAI is risky, if the team doing so isn't fully rational. For example they may be overconfident about their abilities and thereby overestimate the feasibility and safety, or commit sunken cost fallacy once they have developed lots of FAI-relevant theory in the attempt to study feasibility, or become too attached to their status and identity as FAI researchers, or some team members may disagree with a consensus of "give up" and leave to form their own AGI teams and take the dangerous knowledge developed with them.
So the question comes down to, how rational is such an FAI feasibility team likely to be, and is that enough for the benefits to exceed the costs? I don't have a lot of good ideas about how to answer this, but the question seems really important to bring up. I'm hoping this post this will trigger SI people to tell us their thoughts, and maybe other LWers have ideas they can share.