I totally agree, you should apply to PhD programs. (In stem cell biology.)

The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter in general, because even if we are systematically underestimating the realistic upper bound for our skill level in these areas, we would still have to deal with diminishing marginal returns to investing in any particular one.

On the other hand, even if what you say is true, skill headroom may still imply that it's worth building shared arts around such skills. Shareability and build-on-ability changes the marginal returns a lot.

Philology is philosophy, because it lets you escape the trap of the language you were born with. Much like mathematics, humanity's most ambitious such escape attempt, still very much in its infancy.

True...

If you really want to express the truth about what you feel and see, you need to be inventing new languages. And if you want to preserve a culture, you must not lose its language.

I think this is a mistake, made by many. It's a retreat and an abdication. We are in our native language, so we should work from there.

My conjecture (though beware mind fallacy), is that it's because you emphasize "naive deference" to others, which looks obviously wrong to me and obviously not what most people I know who suffer from this tend to do (but might be representative of the people you actually met).

Instead, the mental move that I know intimately is what I call "instrumentalization" (or to be more memey, "tyranny of whys"). It's a move that doesn't require another or a social context (though it often includes internalized social judgements from others, aka superego); it only requires caring deeply about a goal (the goal doesn't actually matter that much), and being invested in it, somewhat neurotically.

I'm kinda confused by this. Glancing back at the dialogue, it looks like most of the dialogue emphasizes general "Urgent fake thinking", related to backchaining and slaving everything to a goal; it mentions social context in passing; and then emphasizes deference in the paragraph starting "I don't know.".

But anyway, I strongly encourage you to write something that would communicate to past-Adam the thing that now seems valuable to you. :)

That's my guess at the level of engagement required to understand something. Maybe just because when I've tried to use or modify some research that I thought I understood, I always realise I didn't understand it deeply enough. I'm probably anchoring too hard on my own experience here, other people often learn faster than me.

Hm. A couple things:

• Existing AF research is rooted in core questions about alignment.
• Existing AF research, pound for pound / word for word, and even idea for idea, is much more unnecessary stuff than necessary stuff. (Which is to be expected.)
• Existing AF research is among the best sources of compute-traces of trying to figure some of this stuff out (next to perhaps some philosophy and some other math).
• Empirically, most people who set out to stuff existing AF fail to get many of the deep lessons.
• There's a key dimension of: how much are you always asking for the context? E.g.: Why did this feel like a mainline question to investigate? If we understood this, what could we then do / understand? If we don't understand this, are we doomed / how are we doomed? Are there ways around that? What's the argument, more clearly?
• It's more important whether people are doing that, than whether / how exactly they engage with existing AF research.
• If people are doing that, they'll usually migrate away from playing with / extending existing AF, towards the more core (more difficult) problems.

I was thinking "should grantmakers let the money flow to unknown young people who want a chance to prove themselves."

Ah ok you're right that that was the original claim. I mentally autosteelmanned.

I'm curious how satisfied people seemed to be with the explanations/descriptions of consciousness that you elicited from them. E.g., on a scale from

"Oh! I figured it out; what I mean when I talk about myself being consciousness, and others being conscious or not, I'm referring to affective states / proprioception / etc.; I feel good about restricting away other potential meanings."

to

"I still have no idea, maybe it has something to do with X, that seems relevant, but I feel there's a lot I'm not understanding."

where did they tend to land, and what was the variance?

We agree this is a crucial lever, and we agree that the bar for funding has to be in some way "high". I'm arguing for a bar that's differently shaped. The set of "people established enough in AGI alignment that they get 5 [fund a person for 2 years and maybe more depending how things go in low-bandwidth mentorship, no questions asked] tokens" would hopefully include many people who understand that understanding constraints is key and that past research understood some constraints.

build on past agent foundations research

I don't really agree with this. Why do you say this?

a lot of wasted effort if you asked for out-of-paradigm ideas.

I agree with this in isolation. I think some programs do state something about OOP ideas, and I agree that the statement itself does not come close to solving the problem.

(Also I'm confused about the discourse in this thread (which is fine), because I thought we were discussing "how / how much should grantmakers let the money flow".)

upskilling or career transition grants, especially from LTFF, in the last couple of years

Interesting; I'm less aware of these.

How are they falling short?

I'll answer as though I know what's going on in various private processes, but I don't, and therefore could easily be wrong. I assume some of these are sort of done somewhere, but not enough and not together enough.

• Favor insightful critiques and orientations as much as constructive ideas. If you have a large search space and little traction, a half-plane of rejects is as or more valuable than a guessed point that you knew how to even generate.
• Explicitly allow acceptance by trajectory of thinking, assessed by at least a year of low-bandwidth mentorship; deemphasize agenda-ish-ness.
• For initial exploration periods, give longer commitments with less required outputs; something like at least 2 years. Explicitly allow continuation of support by trajectory.
• Give a path forward for financial support for out of paradigm things. (The Vitalik fellowship, for example, probably does not qualify, as the professors, when I glanced at the list, seem unlikely to support this sort of work; but I could be wrong.)
• Generally emphasize judgement of experienced AGI alignment researchers, and deemphasize judgement of grantmakers.
• Explicitly asking for out of paradigm things.
• Do a better job of connecting people. (This one is vague but important.)

(TBC, from my full perspective this is mostly a waste because AGI alignment is too hard; you want to instead put resources toward delaying AGI, trying to talk AGI-makers down, and strongly amplifying human intelligence + wisdom.)

grantmakers have tried pulling that lever a bunch of times

What do you mean by this? I can think of lots of things that seem in some broad class of pulling some lever that kinda looks like this, but most of the ones I'm aware of fall greatly short of being an appropriate attempt to leverage smart young creative motivated would-be AGI alignment insight-havers. So the update should be much smaller (or there's a bunch of stuff I'm not aware of).

(FWIW this was my actual best candidate for a movie that would fit, but I remembered so few details that I didn't want to list it.)