Before dismissing blog posts keep in mind the Sequences were blog posts. And they are probably much more useful and important than all but the best academic papers. If current donations happened to lead to blog posts of that caliber the donations would be money well spent.
Before dismissing blog posts keep in mind the Sequences were blog posts. And they are probably much more useful and important than all but the best academic papers.
How are we measuring useful or important? The sequences are entertaining, but its not clear to me they do much to actually help with the core goals of MIRI (besides the goal of entertaining people enough to fund MIRI, perhaps).
The advantage of a high-impact academic paper is it shapes the culture of academic research. A good idea in a well-received research paper will almost instantly lea...
Many people have an incorrect view of the Future of Humanity Institute's funding situation, so this is a brief note to correct that; think of it as a spiritual successor to this post. As John Maxwell puts it, FHI is "one of the three organizations co-sponsoring LW [and] a group within the University of Oxford's philosophy department that tackles important, large-scale problems for humanity like how to go about reducing existential risk." (If you're not familiar with our work, this article is a nice, readable introduction, and our director, Nick Bostrom, wrote Superintelligence.) Though we are a research institute in an ancient and venerable institution, this does not guarantee funding or long-term stability.