Ah, well that’s mildly discouraging (encouraging that you’ve made this scale of effort; discouraging in what it says about the difficulty of progress).
I’d still be interested to know what you’d see as a promising approach here—if such crux resolution were the only problem, and you were able to coordinate things as you wished, what would be a (relatively) promising strategy? But perhaps you’re already pursuing it? I.e. if something like [everyone works on what they see as key problems, increases their own understanding and shares insights] seems most likely to open up paths to progress.
Assuming review wouldn’t do much to help on this, have you thought about distributed mechanisms that might? E.g. mapping out core cruxes and linking all available discussions where they seem a fundamental issue (potentially after holding/writing-up a bunch more MIRI Dialogues style interactions [which needn’t all involve MIRI]). Does this kind of thing seem likely to be of little value—e.g. because it ends up clearly highlighting where different intuitions show up, but shedding little light on their roots or potential justification?
I suppose I’d like to know what shape of evidence seems most likely to lead to progress—and whether much/any of it might be unearthed through clarification/distillation/mapping of existing ideas. (where the mapping doesn’t require connections that only people with the deepest models will find)
Personally if I were trying to do this I’d probably aim to do a combination of:
Identify what kinds of reasoning people are employing, investigate under what conditions they tend to lead to the truth. E.g. one way that I think I differ from many others is that I am skeptical of analogies as direct evidence about the truth; I see the point of analogies as (a) tools for communicating ideas more effectively and (b) locating hypotheses that you then verify by understanding the underlying mechanism and checking that the mechanism ports (after which you don’t need the analogy any more).
State arguments more precisely and rigorously, to narrow in on more specific claims that people disagree about (note there are a lot of skulls along this road)
Ah, well that’s mildly discouraging (encouraging that you’ve made this scale of effort; discouraging in what it says about the difficulty of progress).
I’d still be interested to know what you’d see as a promising approach here—if such crux resolution were the only problem, and you were able to coordinate things as you wished, what would be a (relatively) promising strategy?
But perhaps you’re already pursuing it? I.e. if something like [everyone works on what they see as key problems, increases their own understanding and shares insights] seems most likely to open up paths to progress.
Assuming review wouldn’t do much to help on this, have you thought about distributed mechanisms that might? E.g. mapping out core cruxes and linking all available discussions where they seem a fundamental issue (potentially after holding/writing-up a bunch more MIRI Dialogues style interactions [which needn’t all involve MIRI]).
Does this kind of thing seem likely to be of little value—e.g. because it ends up clearly highlighting where different intuitions show up, but shedding little light on their roots or potential justification?
I suppose I’d like to know what shape of evidence seems most likely to lead to progress—and whether much/any of it might be unearthed through clarification/distillation/mapping of existing ideas. (where the mapping doesn’t require connections that only people with the deepest models will find)
Personally if I were trying to do this I’d probably aim to do a combination of:
Identify what kinds of reasoning people are employing, investigate under what conditions they tend to lead to the truth. E.g. one way that I think I differ from many others is that I am skeptical of analogies as direct evidence about the truth; I see the point of analogies as (a) tools for communicating ideas more effectively and (b) locating hypotheses that you then verify by understanding the underlying mechanism and checking that the mechanism ports (after which you don’t need the analogy any more).
State arguments more precisely and rigorously, to narrow in on more specific claims that people disagree about (note there are a lot of skulls along this road)