It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.
This seems more and more like the most damaging meme ever created on LessWrong. It persistently leads to people that could have made useful contributions (to AI safety) making no such contribution. Would it be a better world in which lots more people tried to contribute usefully to FAI and a small percentage succeeded? Yes, it would, even taking into account whatever cost the unsuccessful people pay.
There are many ways to do, even small, contributions for everyone. The easiest is giving money (to someone whom you believe is trying to address the “really hard problems”). But there are many others. I would take two examples of things I do (or plan to do in the short future) : I’m helping with the French translation of HP:MoR and I’ll (try to at least, nothing serious done yet) help SIAI with migrating their publication to their new LaTeX template (see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9d3/new_si_publications_design/ ). Both are tiny contributions, but which can in the hand help in various ways the SIAI to tackle the really hard problems. A lot of people doing those small things can allow the great things to happen much faster.
Of course, you can replace SIAI with anyone you think could solve the hard problems—other kind of research, charity, political party if you believe a given one is doing more good than harm, …
The hardest part in that is probably in identifying who is more likely to actually help in solving the really hard problems. I tend to “invest” my energy and money in different kind of entities, hoping at least one of them will do something good enough on the long run.
I agree. But compared to where we are right now, I think more people should actually go work directly on the core FAI problem. If the smartest half of each LW meetup earnestly and persistently worked on the most promising open problem they could identify, I’d give 50% chance that at least one would make valuable progress somewhere.
This seems more and more like the most damaging meme ever created on LessWrong. It persistently leads to people that could have made useful contributions (to AI safety) making no such contribution. Would it be a better world in which lots more people tried to contribute usefully to FAI and a small percentage succeeded? Yes, it would, even taking into account whatever cost the unsuccessful people pay.
There are many ways to do, even small, contributions for everyone. The easiest is giving money (to someone whom you believe is trying to address the “really hard problems”). But there are many others. I would take two examples of things I do (or plan to do in the short future) : I’m helping with the French translation of HP:MoR and I’ll (try to at least, nothing serious done yet) help SIAI with migrating their publication to their new LaTeX template (see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9d3/new_si_publications_design/ ). Both are tiny contributions, but which can in the hand help in various ways the SIAI to tackle the really hard problems. A lot of people doing those small things can allow the great things to happen much faster.
Of course, you can replace SIAI with anyone you think could solve the hard problems—other kind of research, charity, political party if you believe a given one is doing more good than harm, …
The hardest part in that is probably in identifying who is more likely to actually help in solving the really hard problems. I tend to “invest” my energy and money in different kind of entities, hoping at least one of them will do something good enough on the long run.
I agree. But compared to where we are right now, I think more people should actually go work directly on the core FAI problem. If the smartest half of each LW meetup earnestly and persistently worked on the most promising open problem they could identify, I’d give 50% chance that at least one would make valuable progress somewhere.