A bit about our last few months:
- We’ve been working on getting a simple clear mission and an organization that actually works. We think of our goal as analogous to the transition that the old Singularity Institute underwent under Lukeprog (during which chaos was replaced by a simple, intelligible structure that made it easier to turn effort into forward motion).
- As part of that, we’ll need to find a way to be intelligible.
- This is the first of several blog posts aimed at causing our new form to be visible from outside. (If you're in the Bay Area, you can also come meet us at tonight's open house.) (We'll be talking more about the causes of this mission-change; the extent to which it is in fact a change, etc. in an upcoming post.)
-
We care a lot about AI Safety efforts in particular, and about otherwise increasing the odds that humanity reaches the stars.
-
Also, we[1] believe such efforts are bottlenecked more by our collective epistemology, than by the number of people who verbally endorse or act on "AI Safety", or any other "spreadable viewpoint" disconnected from its derivation.
-
Our aim is therefore to find ways of improving both individual thinking skill, and the modes of thinking and social fabric that allow people to think together. And to do this among the relatively small sets of people tackling existential risk.
Existential wins and AI safety
Who we’re focusing on, why
- AI and machine learning graduate students, researchers, project-managers, etc. who care; who can think; and who are interested in thinking better;
- Students and others affiliated with the “Effective Altruism” movement, who are looking to direct their careers in ways that can do the most good;
- Rationality geeks, who are interested in seriously working to understand how the heck thinking works when it works, and how to make it work even in domains as confusing as AI safety.
Brier-boosting, not Signal-boosting
- Further discussion of CFAR’s focus on AI safety, and the good things folks wanted from “cause neutrality”
- CFAR's mission statement (link post, linking to our website).
Please taboo "leading us". What is the actual job description for the leader you imagine? What is the expected outcome of having such leader?
And, depeding on your previous answer, could we achieve a similar outcome by simply having a specialist for given task? I mean, even actual leaders employ specialists, so why not skip the middleman? (Or do you believe that the leader would be better at finding the specialists? That sounds almost like a job description... of a specialist.)
Or is the leader supposed to be a symbol? A speaker for the movement?
Or perhaps a person who chooses an arbitrary goal (a meaningful one, but ultimately it would be an arbitrary choice among a few meaningful candidates) under the assumption that if we all focus on one goal, we are more likely to achieve it than if everyone follows a different goal (i.e. a suboptimal choice is still much better than no choice)?
I want someone who could effectively give orders/strong suggestions saying "give to this cause", "write to your congressman saying this", "if you have this skill please do this", "person A should help person B get this job", "person C is toxic and should be excluded from our community", "person D is fantastic, let's recruit her to our community", "everyone please read this and discuss", "person E is great, everyone thank her", "person F has made great contributions to our community but has suffered some recent bad news so let's help her out".