CharlesR comments on MIRI strategy - Less Wrong

5 Post author: ColonelMustard 28 October 2013 03:33PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 28 October 2013 06:24:28PM * 36 points [-]

Pamphlets work for wells in Africa. They don't work for MIRI's mission. The inferential distance is too great, the ideas are too Far, the impact is too far away.
Eliezer spent SIAI's early years appealing directly to people about AI. Some good people found him, but the people were being filtered for "interest in future technology" rather than "able to think," and thus when Eliezer would make basic arguments about e.g. the orthogonality thesis or basic AI drives, the responses he would get were basically random (except for the few good people). So Eliezer wrote The Sequences and HPMoR and now the filter is "able to think" or at least "interest in improving one's thinking," and these people, in our experience, are much more likely to do useful things when we present the case for EA, for x-risk reduction, for FAI research, etc.
Still, we keep trying direct mission appeals, to some extent. I've given my standard talk, currently titled "Effective Altruism and Machine Intelligence," at Quixey, Facebook, and Heroku. This talk explains effective altruism, astronomical stakes, the x-risk landscape, and the challenge of FAI, all in 25 minutes. I don't know yet how much good effect this talk will have. There's Facing the Intelligence Explosion and the forthcoming Smarter Than Us. I've spent a fair amount of time promoting Our Final Invention.
I don't think we can get much of anywhere with a 1-page pamphlet, though. We tried a 4-page pamphlet once; it accomplished nothing.

Comment author: CharlesR 01 November 2013 06:26:00AM 3 points [-]

The next time you give your talk, record it, and put it on YouTube.