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Raemon comments on Online Optimal Philanthropy Meeting - Less Wrong
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If we're focusing on Nick's four classes, can he write up a more in depth description of them and post them here, so that we can think about them in more detail.
Good point. I've contacted him. I suppose we should discuss it at a later date instead.
I suggest as an alternative topic of discussion - identifying cascades, cycles, insights and recursive loops that might be available to altruistic actions. An abstract but important issue.
"Cascades are when one development leads the way to another - for example, once you discover gravity, you might find it easier to understand a coiled spring.
Cycles are feedback loops where a process's output becomes its input on the next round. As the classic example of a fission chain reaction illustrates, a cycle whose underlying processes are continuous, may show qualitative changes of surface behavior - a threshold of criticality - the difference between each neutron leading to the emission of 0.9994 additional neutrons versus each neutron leading to the emission of 1.0006 additional neutrons. k is the effective neutron multiplication factor and I will use it metaphorically.
Insights are items of knowledge that tremendously decrease the cost of solving a wide range of problems - for example, once you have the calculus insight, a whole range of physics problems become a whole lot easier to solve. Insights let you fly through, or teleport through, the solution space, rather than searching it by hand - that is, "insight" represents knowledge about the structure of the search space itself. and finally,
Recursion is the sort of thing that happens when you hand the AI the object-level problem of "redesign your own cognitive algorithms".
What concerns me is whether this will lead to specific, new knowledge or concrete actions. I feel like we talk a lot about big ideas in a vague sense and small ideas in a concrete sense. I'd like to be able to talk about big ideas more concretely (though if need be, breaking them down into smaller chunks).
I don't actually have a recommendation right now (although I plan on talking with a few local people tonight and hopefully generate ideas). But I think as many people as possible should come to this online meetup with a concrete list of things to talk about - last time we covered a few new ideas but the discussion was sort of meandering. I think pre-planned mini-presentations would help a lot.
I have a recommendation: set the focus of the discussion to be "how do we make near-mode progress on far-mode problems?"
Just to prime you on the sort of things I'd expect to come up:
Just to be clear, those points aren't a suggested agenda for a meeting but rather they're an example of what I'd expect to come out of a meeting - a list of points that a researcher could conceivably start working on tomorrow, and which (while they don't directly address the main issues) would seem to be aimed at directly tackling relevant stuff.