I guess I think this is, at best, only part of your true rejection. If there were some visionary artist who wanted to create art that would get thousands of people interested in the SIAI cause, such that donations poured in and some bright mathy kids decided to help solve FAI problems, I have a feeling you’d tell that artist “Go for it, with our gratitude.”
This would in no way entail converting that person into anything other than a “pure” artist. There would be no need for that person to become the kind of highly flexible SIAI researcher you’re suggesting here.
I think your true rejection is roughly as follows:
What you’re arguing here is that some kinds of things are just plain unuseful to the SIAI cause. You almost certainly don’t need the assistance of a musicologist, much as it may pain me to say. If I show up and say “I’m a musicologist, how can I help?”, you’re going to say “Well, either learn to do something useful for us or else donate some portion of your lavish musicologist salary to SIAI.” And then if I say, “No no, how can I use musicology to help?”, you’re going to think I’m an idiot. This is more or less what you’ve sketched above.
However, a whole bunch of other things, including all the activities you included above (artist, scientist, business person, politician, hacker) are indeed potentially useful to SIAI. What you actually don’t want—and quite reasonably so—is to be in the position of needing to manage those people’s efforts. This is for a variety of reasons: You don’t have enough people to manage them. You don’t have enough in-house expertise in those fields to manage them effectively. You don’t have jobs for them yet and don’t want them hanging around in the meantime. You don’t want the inertia that can come along with having a bunch of affiliated helpers act like they’re owed a role when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Or, as you hint at the end, you don’t think very highly of the quality of people who want to help but don’t want to learn a bunch of new skills and shed some of their old identity, which seems like a reasonable heuristic to me.
As I say, these are all perfectly good reasons to demur when asked “I’m a [whatever], how can I help?”. But I do not think that the answer is really “Sorry, an artist can’t help.” It’s more like “Sorry, we’re not interested in helping an artist figure out how to use art to help—if you can figure it out yourself, knock yourself out.”
I guess I think this is, at best, only part of your true rejection. If there were some visionary artist who wanted to create art that would get thousands of people interested in the SIAI cause, such that donations poured in and some bright mathy kids decided to help solve FAI problems, I have a feeling you’d tell that artist “Go for it, with our gratitude.”
(Ahem.)
This would in no way entail converting that person into anything other than a “pure” artist. There would be no need for that person to become the kind of highly flexible SIAI researcher you’re suggesting here.
I think your true rejection is roughly as follows:
What you’re arguing here is that some kinds of things are just plain unuseful to the SIAI cause. You almost certainly don’t need the assistance of a musicologist, much as it may pain me to say. If I show up and say “I’m a musicologist, how can I help?”, you’re going to say “Well, either learn to do something useful for us or else donate some portion of your lavish musicologist salary to SIAI.” And then if I say, “No no, how can I use musicology to help?”, you’re going to think I’m an idiot. This is more or less what you’ve sketched above.
However, a whole bunch of other things, including all the activities you included above (artist, scientist, business person, politician, hacker) are indeed potentially useful to SIAI. What you actually don’t want—and quite reasonably so—is to be in the position of needing to manage those people’s efforts. This is for a variety of reasons: You don’t have enough people to manage them. You don’t have enough in-house expertise in those fields to manage them effectively. You don’t have jobs for them yet and don’t want them hanging around in the meantime. You don’t want the inertia that can come along with having a bunch of affiliated helpers act like they’re owed a role when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Or, as you hint at the end, you don’t think very highly of the quality of people who want to help but don’t want to learn a bunch of new skills and shed some of their old identity, which seems like a reasonable heuristic to me.
As I say, these are all perfectly good reasons to demur when asked “I’m a [whatever], how can I help?”. But I do not think that the answer is really “Sorry, an artist can’t help.” It’s more like “Sorry, we’re not interested in helping an artist figure out how to use art to help—if you can figure it out yourself, knock yourself out.”