I would say this is the kind of unconventional angle that I was originally hoping to see pumped out of leading AI alignment researchers when they take a break to look at AI policy instead. I’m not sure how much more can be gained from first principles and publicly available information, as opposed to spending time in DC and talking with people like Akash to get into the nitty gritty of the situation on the ground.
This reminds me of a pretty serious issue with history; beyond lists of events and dates of when they happened, any further detail gets sucked into disputes as people develop their own theories and get territorial when someone challenges them, and unlike the natural sciences, these hypotheses cannot really be tested since empiricism is dependent on historical documents (and, in recent history e.g. WW2 and Cold War, testimony from retired government officials and intelligence agency leaks, which gradually became around as unreliable as news reporting). Worst of all, incentives to forge written records pointing towards a giant revelation, that will get them lots of citations.
People who went to school will remember that, at the most nuanced parts of history class/textbooks, they would just give lists of causes for major events e.g. 4 major causes of WW1, 6 major causes of the corruption and collapse of Rome or a major Chinese Dynasty, and no weight placed on how much each of those factors contributed, just more lists of reasons how and why (e.g. was corruption one of the reasons that was 40% responsible or was it one of the 5% ones?).
This is why books like Guns, Germs, and Steel became so popular; it was just way above par, not adequate (and it also had to be easy to understand for a wider audience in order to get enough sales/citations to be famous, balancing that with actually being good in reality). There’s no reference to bell curves or bayesian reasoning, and you can never even tell whether the scholar thinks humans are neurologically uniform, aside from Benjamin Franklin or Carnegie or Sun Tzu who were just badass™.
Afaik personal recommendations are required, but then you have to trust the people doing the recommending; will they select things maximally similar to Inadequate Equilibira e.g. only reading economic history because those are the only writers who sometimes bother to even attempt to think original thoughts about incentive structures?
I would say this is the kind of unconventional angle that I was originally hoping to see pumped out of leading AI alignment researchers when they take a break to look at AI policy instead. I’m not sure how much more can be gained from first principles and publicly available information, as opposed to spending time in DC and talking with people like Akash to get into the nitty gritty of the situation on the ground.
This reminds me of a pretty serious issue with history; beyond lists of events and dates of when they happened, any further detail gets sucked into disputes as people develop their own theories and get territorial when someone challenges them, and unlike the natural sciences, these hypotheses cannot really be tested since empiricism is dependent on historical documents (and, in recent history e.g. WW2 and Cold War, testimony from retired government officials and intelligence agency leaks, which gradually became around as unreliable as news reporting). Worst of all, incentives to forge written records pointing towards a giant revelation, that will get them lots of citations.
People who went to school will remember that, at the most nuanced parts of history class/textbooks, they would just give lists of causes for major events e.g. 4 major causes of WW1, 6 major causes of the corruption and collapse of Rome or a major Chinese Dynasty, and no weight placed on how much each of those factors contributed, just more lists of reasons how and why (e.g. was corruption one of the reasons that was 40% responsible or was it one of the 5% ones?).
This is why books like Guns, Germs, and Steel became so popular; it was just way above par, not adequate (and it also had to be easy to understand for a wider audience in order to get enough sales/citations to be famous, balancing that with actually being good in reality). There’s no reference to bell curves or bayesian reasoning, and you can never even tell whether the scholar thinks humans are neurologically uniform, aside from Benjamin Franklin or Carnegie or Sun Tzu who were just badass™.
Afaik personal recommendations are required, but then you have to trust the people doing the recommending; will they select things maximally similar to Inadequate Equilibira e.g. only reading economic history because those are the only writers who sometimes bother to even attempt to think original thoughts about incentive structures?