Why would the amount of research being done stay the same, if the amount of money coming in goes up by a factor of 10?
I guess they might spend it on advocacy, or buying hardware, or something, but surely what it would take for your comment about utility to be correct would be for them to do nothing with it. Why would they do that?
Russell, I think you misunderstood Eliezer. (Perhaps he’s now made himself clear enough that this comment is redundant.) He was, AIUI, making much the same point as the Anonymous Artist: it’s stupid to say “We want contributions from artists” if you don’t actually have some reason to think that artists’ contributions would be of special value. In the absence of such reasons, saying that is just posturing.
But: Suppose you are trying to think about something you regard as very important and difficult, and you know that almost all the people you have thinking about it have a lot of mental features in common. Then it might be sensible to solicit contributions from people whose minds you expect to be different even if you have no idea what distinctive contribution they might make. In which case, the appropriate answer to the Anonymous Artist’s question might be something like “You should come and talk to us and think as deeply as you know how about these matters, and tell us if there’s something that seems to you to be missing from our thinking.”
Why would the amount of research being done stay the same, if the amount of money coming in goes up by a factor of 10?
I guess they might spend it on advocacy, or buying hardware, or something, but surely what it would take for your comment about utility to be correct would be for them to do nothing with it. Why would they do that?
Russell, I think you misunderstood Eliezer. (Perhaps he’s now made himself clear enough that this comment is redundant.) He was, AIUI, making much the same point as the Anonymous Artist: it’s stupid to say “We want contributions from artists” if you don’t actually have some reason to think that artists’ contributions would be of special value. In the absence of such reasons, saying that is just posturing.
But: Suppose you are trying to think about something you regard as very important and difficult, and you know that almost all the people you have thinking about it have a lot of mental features in common. Then it might be sensible to solicit contributions from people whose minds you expect to be different even if you have no idea what distinctive contribution they might make. In which case, the appropriate answer to the Anonymous Artist’s question might be something like “You should come and talk to us and think as deeply as you know how about these matters, and tell us if there’s something that seems to you to be missing from our thinking.”
Or, of course, Josh’s suggestion.