LESSWRONG
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All of ft's Comments + Replies

What would a thriving progress movement look like?
ft10

That's a really great way to think about it- thank you for that metaphor.

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What would a thriving progress movement look like?
ft30

I'm sorry that I missed this. 

I don't have a great answer for you. It is largely speculation about counterfactual benefits. I would like to delude myself into thinking it's good counterfactual speculation, but that's probably just my ego talking. 

I'm mostly basing this around things that continue to be problems for years. For instance, I work as an AI research engineer at a large industry lab, and a common task is to launch experiments that use O(100) GPUs. We have a system that automatically schedules these jobs on different data centers dependi... (read more)

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3DirectedEvolution
Thank you for the response. Somehow, it seems difficult, yet valuable, for employees of a company, or members of a lab, to think of themselves as living in a small island economy. Somehow, all their efforts go into producing goods and services for export. They do virtually no production, no trade with each other, to grow the economy on the island itself.
What would a thriving progress movement look like?
ft30

Progress studies is really interesting to me, because if one actually believes that it has a >0 chance of working, the EV is so huge that we should be directing huge amounts of funding towards it. As we are not [0], this implies that most organizations/people either think it has no chance of working, or haven't heard of it. 


There's an analogy to be made to internal tooling at most companies. All companies I've been part of radically underfund their internal tooling, even though it has a direct and quantifiable ROI. I don't know why this is. Increas... (read more)

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3DirectedEvolution
This may come off as snarky, but I mean it entirely sincerely. How do you know the companies you worked for underfunded their internal tooling? The reason I ask is that I also suspect the lab I work in in my grad program underfunds its internal tooling. But that’s just based on informal observation and speculation about the counter factual benefits that greater investment might bring. Is that also the basis for your claim? Or do you have more in the way of legible evidence?