Today, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is launching a new forum for research discussion: the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum! It's already been seeded with a bunch of new work on MIRI topics from the last few months.
We've covered most of the (what, why, how) subjects on the forum's new welcome post and the How to Contribute page, but this post is an easy place to comment if you have further questions (or if, maths forbid, there are technical issues with the forum instead of on it).
But before that, go ahead and check it out!
(Major thanks to Benja Fallenstein, Alice Monday, and Elliott Jin for their work on the forum code, and to all the contributors so far!)
EDIT 3/22: Jessica Taylor, Benja Fallenstein, and I wrote forum digest posts summarizing and linking to recent work (on the IAFF and elsewhere) on reflective oracle machines, on corrigibility, utility indifference, and related control ideas, and on updateless decision theory and the logic of provability, respectively! These are pretty excellent resources for reading up on those topics, in my biased opinion.
As a supporter of effective altruism who's interested in risks from superintelligence, where should I post now? What I mean by "interested" is someone who is sympathetic to the reasoning but skeptical about the tractability of the work MIRI and their allies do. For myself as well as on behalf of friends who share my concern, I would ask of MIRI what they think of the cause as a whole, how they think it will change in light of e.g., Elon Musk's donation to FLI and growing publicity, and the Open Philanthropy Project's investigation of the cause. I have one friend earning to give, a few acquaintances doing the same, and at least a couple friends my age in university still who may do so. As potential future donors and vocal supporters, provision of information would help each of us as individuals reach better conclusions. I wouldn't demand Eliezer Yudkowsky or Luke Muehlhauser respond, really just someone affiliated with the organization. Could I expect something like that on LessWrong still, or has everyone working for MIRI disappeared from LessWrong forever to go to this new forum? My questions wouldn't be on technical research, but I'd like to know where and how to address questions and concerns to the organization.
The new forum will not cause people to disappear from Less Wrong, I expect. In fact, note the narrow focus of the IAFF:
Less Wrong continues to be a great place to discuss those topics (which includes the topics you're interested in). And as for the technical topics, I hope to make some posts on here for the more digestible forum work.