This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
I think it comes down to a combination of 1) not being very confident that CFAR has the True Material yet, and 2) not being very confident in CFAR's ability to correct misconceptions in any format other than teaching in-person workshops. That is, you might imagine that right now CFAR has some Okay Material, but that teaching it in any format other than in person risks misunderstandings where people come away with some Bad Material, and that neither of these is what we really want, which is for people to come away with the True Material, whatever that is. There's at least historically been a sense that one of the only ways to get people to approximately come away with the True Material is for them to actually talk in person to the instructors, who maybe have some of it in their heads but not quite in the CFAR curriculum yet.
(This is based on a combination of talking to CFAR instructors and volunteering at workshops.)
It's also worth pointing out that CFAR is incredibly talent-constrained as an organization, and that there are lots of things CFAR could do that would plausibly be a good idea and that CFAR might even endorse as plausibly a good idea but that they just don't have the person-hours to prioritize.
At the mainstream workshops there is no mention of a topic anywhere in the neighborhood of AI safety anywhere in the curriculum. If it comes up at all it's in informal conversations.
Could a possible solution be to teach new teachers?
How far is a person who "knows X" from a person who "can teach X"? I imagine that being able to teach X has essentially two requirements: First, understand X deeply -- which is what we want to achieve anyway. Second, general teaching skills, independent on X -- these could be taught as a separate package; which could already be interesting for people who teach. And what you need then, is a written material containing all known things that should be considered when teaching X, and a shor... (read more)