I agree with the main generator of this post (a small number of people produce a wildly disproportionate amount of the intellectual progress on hard problems) and one of the conclusions (don’t water down your messages at all, if people need watered down messages they are unlikely to be helpful) but I think there’s significant value in trying to communicate the hard problem of alignment broadly anyway because:
Filtering who are the best people is expensive and error-prone, so if you don’t put the correct models in general circulation even pretty great people might just not become aware of them
People who are highly competent but not highly confident seem to often run into people who have been misinformed and become less sure of their own positions, having more generally circulating models of the main threat models would help those people get less distracted
Planting lots of seeds can be relatively cheap.
Also, related anecdote, I ran ~8 retreats at my house covering around 60 people in 2022⁄23. I got a decent read on how much of the core stack of alignment concepts at least half of them had, and how often they made hopeful mistakes which were transparently going to fail based on not having picked up the core ideas from arbital or understood the top ~10 alignment related concepts clearly. There were only two who cleared this bar.
Also, relatedly, the people you left Bluedot to seem to not reliably be teaching people the core things they need to learn. They are friendly and receptive each time I get on calls with them and ask them to fix their courses, and often do fix some of the stuff, but some of the core generators there look to me like they’re just missing from the people picking course materials and lots of people are getting watered down versions of alignment because of this. Consider taking a skim through their courses and advising them on learning objectives etc, you’re probably the best-placed person to do this.
I agree with the main generator of this post (a small number of people produce a wildly disproportionate amount of the intellectual progress on hard problems) and one of the conclusions (don’t water down your messages at all, if people need watered down messages they are unlikely to be helpful) but I think there’s significant value in trying to communicate the hard problem of alignment broadly anyway because:
Filtering who are the best people is expensive and error-prone, so if you don’t put the correct models in general circulation even pretty great people might just not become aware of them
People who are highly competent but not highly confident seem to often run into people who have been misinformed and become less sure of their own positions, having more generally circulating models of the main threat models would help those people get less distracted
Planting lots of seeds can be relatively cheap.
Also, related anecdote, I ran ~8 retreats at my house covering around 60 people in 2022⁄23. I got a decent read on how much of the core stack of alignment concepts at least half of them had, and how often they made hopeful mistakes which were transparently going to fail based on not having picked up the core ideas from arbital or understood the top ~10 alignment related concepts clearly. There were only two who cleared this bar.
Also, relatedly, the people you left Bluedot to seem to not reliably be teaching people the core things they need to learn. They are friendly and receptive each time I get on calls with them and ask them to fix their courses, and often do fix some of the stuff, but some of the core generators there look to me like they’re just missing from the people picking course materials and lots of people are getting watered down versions of alignment because of this. Consider taking a skim through their courses and advising them on learning objectives etc, you’re probably the best-placed person to do this.