This is not at all central to the topic of the post, but:
It’s surprising and unusual that eg. MIRI and CFAR were able to say “our research project has failed” and “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well” respectively, without a complete loss of face.
I’m familiar with MIRI’s public “our research project has failed” commentary. However, I can’t recall any public “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well” comments from CFAR. Does anyone have any links they can provide for this?
Quoting the provided summary, for convenience of anyone reading this:
*Short version of my thesis: *It seems to me that CFAR got less far with “make a real art of rationality, that helps people actually make progress on tricky issues such as AI risk” than one might have hoped. My lead guess is that the barriers and tricky spots we ran into are somewhat similar to those that lots of efforts at self-help / human potential movement / etc. things have run into, and are basically **“it’s easy and locally reinforcing to follow gradients toward what one might call ‘guessing the student’s password’, and much harder and much less locally reinforcing to reason/test/whatever one’s way toward a real art of rationality. Also, the process of following these gradients tends to corrupt one’s ability to reason/care/build real stuff, as does assimilation into many parts of wider society.” **
I’m not sure that I’d characterize the position taken in the linked post as “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well”, frankly… but I agree that it’s plausible that it’s what OP had in mind.
(I might just be wrong here. I had some memory that after the Brent Dill affair there were some “we bungled the whole thing, actually, and people were harmed as a result” type posts on facebook.)
Sure that definitely happened. But that didn’t have any comment at all on CFAR’s “stuff”. (Though of course, one might reason “wow, those guys don’t seem that good at decision making.”)
Er, well, it was that plus stuff like this post that Ray linked above (I didn’t necessarily remember this exactly, maybe there was just this one post.) If my gloss landed wrong I’m mostly glad to defer to you there.
I definitely don’t think that CFAR ever made any kind of public “actually we think our stuff doesn’t work” statement, though many individuals who were involved with CFAR (such as myself) do have various complaints and disappointments, which we sometimes talk publicly or privately about.
This is not at all central to the topic of the post, but:
I’m familiar with MIRI’s public “our research project has failed” commentary. However, I can’t recall any public “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well” comments from CFAR. Does anyone have any links they can provide for this?
Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn’t get farther with a “real/efficacious art of rationality”
Thanks!
Quoting the provided summary, for convenience of anyone reading this:
I’m not sure that I’d characterize the position taken in the linked post as “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well”, frankly… but I agree that it’s plausible that it’s what OP had in mind.
I had that in mind, and some things people wrote after the Brent Dill stuff.
I also, was surpised at that. (Also I worked at CFAR for 5 years).
(I might just be wrong here. I had some memory that after the Brent Dill affair there were some “we bungled the whole thing, actually, and people were harmed as a result” type posts on facebook.)
Sure that definitely happened. But that didn’t have any comment at all on CFAR’s “stuff”. (Though of course, one might reason “wow, those guys don’t seem that good at decision making.”)
Er, well, it was that plus stuff like this post that Ray linked above (I didn’t necessarily remember this exactly, maybe there was just this one post.) If my gloss landed wrong I’m mostly glad to defer to you there.
I definitely don’t think that CFAR ever made any kind of public “actually we think our stuff doesn’t work” statement, though many individuals who were involved with CFAR (such as myself) do have various complaints and disappointments, which we sometimes talk publicly or privately about.