Even when the research wasn’t that fundamental, it was able to grapple with ideas that other intellectual communities simply weren’t able to collectively think about. Consider Omohundro’s paper on convergent instrumental goals, or Eliezer’s paper on intelligence explosion microeconomics. Neither of these contain powerful or surprising results—they’re just fairly straightforward analyses of concepts that can be explained in a single sentence. But no other community was able to reliably produce or build on such analyses. This effect is even starker when thinking about less technical work—like Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, or Astronomical Waste, or Hanson’s thoughts on signalling (later elaborated upon in The Elephant in the Brain). When I talk about intellectual clarity, a lot of what I’m talking about is the ability to take ideas that are actually very simple, internalize them, and then use them as building blocks to construct the next generation of ideas.
Haven’t groups of people been doing this since the Greeks?
Haven’t groups of people been doing this since the Greeks?