Philosophy strikes me as, on the whole, an unusually unproductive field full of people with highly questionable epistemics.
This is kind of tangential, but I wrote Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy in part to explain why we shouldn’t expect philosophy to be as productive as other fields. I do think it can probably be made more productive, by improving people’s epistemics, their incentives for working on the most important problems, etc., but the same can be said for lots of other fields.
I certainly don’t want to turn the engineers into philosophers
Not sure if you’re saying that you personally don’t have an interest in doing this, or that it’s a bad idea in general, but if the latter, see Counterintuitive Comparative Advantage.
I have an interest in making certain parts of philosophy more productive, and in helping some alignment engineers gain some specific philosophical skills. I just meant I’m not in general excited about making the average AIRCS participant’s epistemics more like that of the average professional philosopher.
This is kind of tangential, but I wrote Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy in part to explain why we shouldn’t expect philosophy to be as productive as other fields. I do think it can probably be made more productive, by improving people’s epistemics, their incentives for working on the most important problems, etc., but the same can be said for lots of other fields.
Not sure if you’re saying that you personally don’t have an interest in doing this, or that it’s a bad idea in general, but if the latter, see Counterintuitive Comparative Advantage.
I have an interest in making certain parts of philosophy more productive, and in helping some alignment engineers gain some specific philosophical skills. I just meant I’m not in general excited about making the average AIRCS participant’s epistemics more like that of the average professional philosopher.