Founder, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org). Part-time tech consultant, Our World in Data. Former software engineering manager and tech startup founder.
jasoncrawford(Jason Crawford)
Software/internet gives us much better ability to find.
Re competitors, the idea is that we’re not all competing for a single prize; we’re being sorted into niches. If there is 1 songwriter and 1 lyricist, they kind of have to work together. If there are 100 of each, then they can match with each other according to style and taste. That’s not 100x competition, it’s just much better matching.
That is a good point. Still, the fact that individual companies, for instance, develop layers of bureaucracy is not an argument against having a large economy. It’s an argument for having a lot of companies of different sizes, and in particular for making sure that market entry doesn’t become too difficult and that competition is always possible. And maybe at the governance level it is an argument for many smaller nations rather than one world government.
I feel that you’re only paying attention to the “more geniuses and researchers” part and ignoring the parts about market size, better matching, more niches?
Also “focus on it at the exclusion of everything else” is a strawman, I’m not advocating that of course. Certainly increasing intelligence would be good (although we don’t know how to do that yet!) Better education would be great and I am a strong advocate of that. Same for better scientific institutions, etc.
I think the positive externalities of one genius are much greater than the negative externalities of one idiot or jerk. A genius can create a breakthrough discovery or invention that elevates the entire human race. Hard for an idiot or jerk to do damage of equivalent magnitude.
Maybe a better argument is “what about more Hitlers or Stalins?” But I still think that looking at the overall history of humanity, it seems that the positives of people outweigh the negatives, or we wouldn’t even be here now.
First, this seems to be arguing against strawman. No one is advocating literally infinite growth forever, which is obviously impossible.
Second, the current reality is not exponential population growth. It is a decelerating population. The UN projections show world population likely leveling off around 10 or 11 billion people in in this century, and possibly even declining:
Even if we were to get back on an exponential population growth curve, the limits seem to me to be many orders of magnitude away. I don’t see why we would worry about them until we get much closer.
Investigators get fired when they aren’t being productive. This does happen. The difference in the block model is that whether someone is being productive is determined by their manager, with input from their peers.
Who says they would be MBAs? The best science managers are highly technical themselves and started out as scientists. It’s just that their career from there evolves more in a management direction.
I really don’t think a group of, say, university professors could join in such a contract. For one, I’m not sure their universities would let them, especially if they weren’t all at the same university. For another, the granting organizations (e.g., NIH) put a lot of restrictions on the grant money. You can’t redistribute it to other labs.
Also, the grants are still going to be small ones to fund a single lab, not large ones that could fund hundreds of researchers. If everyone still has to seek grants you haven’t really solved the problem, even if they are spreading risk/reward somehow.
Yes, but those researchers are typically grad students. To become a professor, get tenure, get your own grants, etc., you need to go run your own lab. At least that is my understanding of the system.
Oh, yes, there is that problem too.
There is certainly no moral equivalence between the two of them; SBF was a fraud and Toner was (from what I can tell) acting honestly according to her convictions. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear enough.
But I disagree about destroying OpenAI—that would have been a massive destruction of value and very far from justified IMO.
Did Sam threaten to take the team with him, or did the team threaten to quit and follow him? From what I saw it looked like the latter.
I was basing my (uncertain) interpretation on a number of sources, and I only linked to one, sorry.
In particular, the only substantive board disagreement that I saw was over Toner’s report that was critical of OpenAI for releasing models too quickly, and Sam being upset over it.
Thanks. I was quoting Semafor, but on a closer reading of Tallinn’s quote I agree that they might have been misinterpreting him. (Has he commented on this, does anyone know?)
Yes, but not all of it is well-understood as problem-solving ahead of time:
It feels strained to say that Henry Ford solved the problem that people couldn’t move over land faster than horses. Or that Apple solved the problem that people couldn’t carry the internet in their pockets. Or that telephones solved the problem that people couldn’t communicate in real time without being in the same room. The list of technologies that didn’t solve a problem except in retrospect is long.
https://blog.spec.tech/p/is-necessity-actually-the-mother
Thank you! That means a lot to me, especially since these posts are never the ones that go viral, so it’s good to know that someone appreciates them.
I haven’t investigated this, but there is a long essay from Eli Dourado here that is bullish on the concept.
I don’t think this is exactly correct: I’m pretty sure that many cities including London and Paris had sewer systems much earlier than that, although they modernized them / made major overhauls in the 19th century. (Anyway, kind of besides the point of the linked thread)
Update: I’m already planning to give brief remarks at a few events coming up very soon:
Thurs, Aug 24: Recur Club founders meetup in Indiranagar. Register/apply here
Sun, Aug 27: LessWrong / Astral Codex Ten meetup at Matteo Coffea
If you’re in/near Bangalore, hope to see you there!
I don’t think that’s right. The world now is much better than the world when it was smaller, and I think that is closely related to population growth. So I think it is actually possible to conclude that more people are better.