more likely to be productive than talking about 'true essences'.
So who, in (contemporary, analytical) philosophy talks about true essences?
In practice, then, progress toward engineering can involve moving two steps forward, then one (or two, or three) steps back.
But that's inefficient. It's wasted effort to quantify what doesn't work conceptually. It may be impossible to always get the conceptual stage right first time, but one can adopt a policy of getting it as firm as possible...rather than a policy of cpnnitatiinally associating conceptual analysis with "semantics", "true essences" and other bad things, and going straight to maths.
The highest-value things MIRI can do right now mostly involving moving toward mathematics -- including better formalizing the limitations of the AIXI equation, and coming up with formally specified alternatives
I would have thought that the highest value work is work that is relevant to systems that exist, or will argue in the near future. ...but what I see is a lot of work on AIXI (not computably tractable), Bayes (ditto), goal stable agents (no one knows how to build one).
It may be impossible to always get the conceptual stage right first time, but one can adopt a policy of getting it as firm as possible...rather than a policy of cpnnitatiinally associating conceptual analysis with "semantics", "true essences" and other bad things, and going straight to maths.
I think you've got this backward. Conceptual understanding comes from formal understanding--not the other way around. First, you lay out the math in rigorous fashion with no errors. Then you do things with the math--very carefully. Only then do y...
MIRI has an organizational goal of putting a wider variety of mathematically proficient people in a position to advance our understanding of beneficial smarter-than-human AI. The MIRIx workshops, our new research guide, and our more detailed in-the-works technical agenda are intended to further that goal.
To encourage the growth of a larger research community where people can easily collaborate and get up to speed on each other's new ideas, we're also going to roll out an online discussion forum that's specifically focused on resolving technical problems in Friendly AI. MIRI researchers and other interested parties will be able to have more open exchanges there, and get rapid feedback on their ideas and drafts. A relatively small group of people with relevant mathematical backgrounds will be authorized to post on the forum, but all discussion on the site will be publicly visible to visitors.
Topics will run the gamut from logical uncertainty in formal agents to cognitive models of concept generation. The exact range of discussion topics is likely to evolve over time as researchers' priorities change and new researchers join the forum.
We're currently tossing around possible names for the forum, and I wanted to solicit LessWrong's input, since you've been helpful here in the past. (We're also getting input from non-LW mathematicians and computer scientists.) We want to know how confusing, apt, etc. you perceive these variants on 'forum for doing exploratory engineering research in AI' to be:
1. AI Exploratory Research Forum (AIXRF)
2. Forum for Exploratory Engineering in AI (FEEAI)
3. Forum for Exploratory Research in AI (FERAI, or FXRAI)
4. Exploratory AI Research Forum (XAIRF, or EAIRF)
We're also looking at other name possibilities, including:
5. AI Foundations Forum (AIFF)
6. Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum (IAFF)
7. Reflective Agents Research Forum (RARF)
We're trying to avoid names like "friendly" and "normative" that could reinforce someone's impression that we think of AI risk in anthropomorphic terms, that we're AI-hating technophobes, or that we're moral philosophers.
Feedback on the above ideas is welcome, as are new ideas. Feel free to post separate ideas in separate comments, so they can be upvoted individually. We're especially looking for feedback along the lines of: 'I'm a grad student in theoretical computer science and I feel that the name [X] would look bad in a comp sci bibliography or C.V.' or 'I'm friends with a lot of topologists, and I'm pretty sure they'd find the name [Y] unobjectionable and mildly intriguing; I don't know how well that generalizes to mathematical logicians.'