Have you noticed that you keep encountering the same ideas over and over? You read another post, and someone helpfully points out it’s just old Paul’s idea again. Or Eliezer’s idea. Not much progress here, move along.
Or perhaps you’ve been on the other side: excitedly telling a friend about some fascinating new insight, only to hear back, “Ah, that’s just another version of X.” And something feels not quite right about that response, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
Some questions regarding these contexts:
-Is it true that you can deduce that “not much progress” is being made? In (pure) maths, it is sometimes very useful to be able to connect to points of view/notions (e.g. (co)homological theories, to name the most obvious example that comes to mind).
-What is the goal of such interactions? Is it truly to point out relevant related work? To dismiss other people’s ideas for {political/tribal/ego-related} motives? Other?
As for possible fixes:
-Maintain a collective {compendium/graph/whatever data structure is relevant} of important concepts, with precise enough definitions, and comparison information (examples and/or theoretical arguments) between similar, but not identical, ideas.
Or rather: acknowledging that the AI Safety community(ies) is/are terrible at coordination, devise a way of combining/merging such {compendiums/graphs/whatever}, for it is unlikely that only one emerges...
Some questions regarding these contexts:
-Is it true that you can deduce that “not much progress” is being made? In (pure) maths, it is sometimes very useful to be able to connect to points of view/notions (e.g. (co)homological theories, to name the most obvious example that comes to mind).
-What is the goal of such interactions? Is it truly to point out relevant related work? To dismiss other people’s ideas for {political/tribal/ego-related} motives? Other?
As for possible fixes:
-Maintain a collective {compendium/graph/whatever data structure is relevant} of important concepts, with precise enough definitions, and comparison information (examples and/or theoretical arguments) between similar, but not identical, ideas.
Or rather: acknowledging that the AI Safety community(ies) is/are terrible at coordination, devise a way of combining/merging such {compendiums/graphs/whatever}, for it is unlikely that only one emerges...