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siduri comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong
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Not 'a lot' and present-day non-sharing imperatives are driven by an (obvious) strategy to accumulate a long-term advantage for FAI projects over AGI projects which is impossible if all lines of research are shared at all points when they are not yet imminently dangerous. No present-day knowledge is imminently dangerous AFAIK.
Thanks for the clarification!
I thought this was an engaging, well-written summary targeted to the general audience, and I'd like to encourage more articles along these lines. So as a follow-up question: How much income for MIRI would it take, per article, for the beneficial effects of sharing non-dangerous research to outweigh the negatives?
(Gah, the editor in me WINCES at that sentence. Is it clear enough or should I re-write? I'm asking how much I-slash-we should kick in per article to make the whole thing generally worth your while.)
Given how many underpaid science writers are out there, I'd have to say that ~50k/year would probably do it for a pretty good one, especially given the 'good cause' bonus to happiness that any qualified individual would understand and value. But is even 1k/week in donations realistic? What are the page view numbers? I'd pay $5 for a good article on a valuable topic; how many others would as well? I suspect the numbers don't add up, but I don't even have an order-of-magnitude estimate on current or potential readers, so I can't myself say.
You need not only a good science writer, but one who either already groks the problem, or can be made to do so with a quick explanation.
Furthermore, they need to have the above qualifications without being capable of doing primary research on the problem (this is the issue with Eliezer - he would certainly be capable of doing it, but his time is better spent elsewhere.)
Well, $100K/year would probably pay someone to write things up full time, if we only had the right candidate hire for it - I'm not sure we do. The issue is almost never danger, it's just that writing stuff up is hard.
Apropos the above conversation: Do you know Annalee Newitz? (Of io9). If not, would you like to? I think you guys would get on like a house on fire.
I can certainly see that people who can both understand these issues and write them up for a general audience would be rare. Working in your favor is the fact that writers in general are terribly underpaid, and a lot of smart tech journalists have been laid off in recent years. (I used to be the news editor for Dr. Dobb's Journal, and although I am not looking for a job right now, I have contacts who could probably fill the position for you.)
But I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and it doesn't seem like this effort would pay for itself. I doubt you have enough questions like this to cover a daily article, and for a weekly one you'd need to take in over $2K in donations (counting taxes) to cover your writer's salary. And that seems...unlikely.
Sad! But I get it.