To give a direct answer, not a lot come to mind outside of the MIRI cluster. I think the Center on Long-Term Risk cluster did a bunch of work on decision theory and acausal trade, but it was mostly after I had moved on to other topics, so I’m not sure how much of it constituted progress. Christiano acknowledged some of the problems I pointed out with IDA and came up with some attempted solutions, which I’m not convinced really work.
However, in my previous post, Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems, I explained my latest thinking that the most important motivation for legibilizing AI safety problems isn’t to induce faster progress on them as object-level problems, but instead to decrease the probability that AGI/ASI is developed or deployed while key decision makers (e.g., company leaders, government officials, voters) are not even aware of or don’t understand the importance of some such problems. So a better metric for measuring the success of this strategy is how much increased legibility has been effected in this wider audience, assuming “how successful has it been” is the main motivation behind your question.
On that front, I think the main weakness of my approach has been its limited reach beyond LW. If someone with better public communications skills were convinced of the value of legibilizing these lesser known problems, that could potentially greatly boost the effectiveness of this strategy.
(Of course, if I’ve inferred a wrong motivation for your question, please let me know!)
Has anyone else, or anyone outside the tight MIRI cluster, made progress on any of the problems you’ve tried to legibilize for them?
To give a direct answer, not a lot come to mind outside of the MIRI cluster. I think the Center on Long-Term Risk cluster did a bunch of work on decision theory and acausal trade, but it was mostly after I had moved on to other topics, so I’m not sure how much of it constituted progress. Christiano acknowledged some of the problems I pointed out with IDA and came up with some attempted solutions, which I’m not convinced really work.
However, in my previous post, Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems, I explained my latest thinking that the most important motivation for legibilizing AI safety problems isn’t to induce faster progress on them as object-level problems, but instead to decrease the probability that AGI/ASI is developed or deployed while key decision makers (e.g., company leaders, government officials, voters) are not even aware of or don’t understand the importance of some such problems. So a better metric for measuring the success of this strategy is how much increased legibility has been effected in this wider audience, assuming “how successful has it been” is the main motivation behind your question.
On that front, I think the main weakness of my approach has been its limited reach beyond LW. If someone with better public communications skills were convinced of the value of legibilizing these lesser known problems, that could potentially greatly boost the effectiveness of this strategy.
(Of course, if I’ve inferred a wrong motivation for your question, please let me know!)