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.)

I'm struggling to think of any. Some runners-up:

• Threads (1984) because Beyond the Reach of God.

• Bird Box because Contrapositive Litany of Hodgell.

• Ghostbusters because whatever is real is lawful; it's up to you to Think Like Reality, and then you can bust ghosts.

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947, NOT 2013) because at some point you have to take the Inside View.

• Pi (1998) because The Solomonoff Prior is Malign.

Cf. Moneyball.

Emotions are hardwired stereotyped syndromes of hardwired blunt-force cognitive actions. E.g. fear makes your heart beat faster and puts an expression on your face and makes you consider negative outcomes more and maybe makes you pay attention to your surroundings. So it doesn't make much sense to value emotions, but emotions are good ways of telling that you value something; e.g. if you feel fear in response to X, probably X causes something you don't want, or if you feel happy when / after doing Y, probably Y causes / involves something you want.

we've checked for various forms of funny business and our tools would notice if it was happening.

I think it's a high bar due to the nearest unblocked strategy problem and alienness.

I agree that when AGI R&D starts to 2x or 5x due to AI automating much of the process, that's when we need the slowdown/pause)

If you start stopping proliferation when you're a year away from some runaway thing, then everyone has the tech that's one year away from the thing. That makes it more impossible that no one will do the remaining research, compared to if the tech everyone has is 5 or 20 years away from the thing.

10 more years till interpretability? That's crazy talk. What do you mean by that and why do you think it? (And if it's a low bar, why do you have such a low bar?)

"Pre-AGI we should be comfortable with proliferation" Huh? Didn't you just get done saying that pre-AGI AI is going to contribute meaningfully to research (such as AGI research)?