How does one get invited to the alignment forum?
At the moment there is a link on the Alignment Forum to apply for membership. You can apply by submitting papers, blog posts or comments. However, there is very little in the way of detail of what kind of work they expect they expect in order for you to have a reasonable chance of being invited. I’m not saying that there should be specific criteria as I’m in favour of the moderators using their judgement. However, more detail on what they are looking for would provide encouragement for people to work towards achieving the level of knowledge and good judgement that they expect for their members.
We’ve been in something of a transition period with the alignment forum, where no one was paying active attention to promoting comments or posts or adding users, but starting soon I should be doing that. The primary thing that happens when someone’s an AF member is that they can add posts and comments without approval (and one’s votes also convey AF karma); I expect I’ll mostly go through someone’s comments on AF posts and ask “would I reliably promote content like this?” (or, indeed, “have I reliably promoted this person’s comments on AF posts?”).
Details about what sort of comments I’ll think are helpful or insightful are, unfortunately, harder to articulate.
I just got approved for the Alignment Forum. I don’t suppose you could explain why I was approved? I had others ask me about what gets someone approved.
Basically, in the runup for MSFP blog post day I reviewed a bunch of the old applications and approved three or four people, if I remember correctly. The expected pathways are something like “write good comment on LW and get them promoted to alignment forum” or “be someone whose name I recognize because of the AI alignment work (and think it’s good)” or “come to an event where we think attendees should get membership.”
Well, you don’t have to answer this now. You’ll probably have a better idea once you’ve promoted a few more people.
I look to Marx[1] in my approach to things like this. I don’t want to associate with a club which has someone like me as a member.
[1] Groucho, not Karl.