Yeah, I had an initial gut sense of “oh man this seems important and but I’m worried it’d quietly fade out of consciousness by default.” Much of my advice would be whpearson’s. Some additional thoughts (I think mostly fleshing out why I think whpearson’s suggestions are important)
i. Big Activation Costs
You are asking people to do a hard thing. You’d providing money to incentivize them, but people are lazy—they will forget, or start doing it but not get around to finish or not get around to finishing until too late.
Anything to reduce the activation cost is good.
1) Maybe have the first thing you ask is for people to apply if they might be interested, with as low a cost to doing so as possible (while gaining at least some information about people and weeding out dead-wood).
This gets people slightly committed, and gives you the opportunity to spam a much narrower subset of people to remind them. (see spam section)
2) It’s ambiguous to me what kind of writing you’re looking for, which in turn makes me unsure if it’s be a good use of my time to work on this, which makes me hesitate. (I’m currently assuming that this is not the right use of my talents both for altruistic and selfish reasons, but I can imagine a slightly different version of me for whom it’d be ambiguous)
Whpearson’s “list good existing articles, as diverse as possible” helps counteract part of this, but still doesn’t answer questions like “should I be doing this if this is currently my day job? Presumably the point is to get more people workin on this.” (and the correlary: if professional AI safety workers are submitting, what chance do I have of contributing something useful?)
(Relatedly—I’d originally thought you should spell out what sort of questions you were looking to resolve, then saw you had linked to Paul Christiano’s doc. I think attempting to summarize the doc might accidentally focus on too narrow a domain, but the current linking of the doc is so small I missed it the first time)
ii. Spam vs Valuable-Self-Promoting-Machinery
By default, you need to spam things a lot. One way to get the word out is to post on all the relevant FB groups, discords, etc—multiple times, so that when they forget and fade to the backburner it doesn’t disappear forever.
Being forced to spam everyone once a week is a bad equilibrium. If you can figure out how to spam exactly the people who matter (see i.1) that’s also better.
If you can spam in a way that’s providing value rather than sucking up attention, that’s better. If you can make the thing spam itself in a way that provides value, better still.
One way of spamming-that-provides value might be having a couple followup posts that do things like “provide suggestions and reading lists for people who are considering working on this but don’t quite know how to approach the problem.” (targeting the sort of person who you think almost has the skills the contribute, and is just missing a few key elements that are easy to teach)
Another might be encouraging to post their drafts publicly to attract additional attention and comments that keep the thing in public consciousness. (This may work against the contest model though)
Yeah, I had an initial gut sense of “oh man this seems important and but I’m worried it’d quietly fade out of consciousness by default.” Much of my advice would be whpearson’s. Some additional thoughts (I think mostly fleshing out why I think whpearson’s suggestions are important)
i. Big Activation Costs
You are asking people to do a hard thing. You’d providing money to incentivize them, but people are lazy—they will forget, or start doing it but not get around to finish or not get around to finishing until too late.
Anything to reduce the activation cost is good.
1) Maybe have the first thing you ask is for people to apply if they might be interested, with as low a cost to doing so as possible (while gaining at least some information about people and weeding out dead-wood).
This gets people slightly committed, and gives you the opportunity to spam a much narrower subset of people to remind them. (see spam section)
2) It’s ambiguous to me what kind of writing you’re looking for, which in turn makes me unsure if it’s be a good use of my time to work on this, which makes me hesitate. (I’m currently assuming that this is not the right use of my talents both for altruistic and selfish reasons, but I can imagine a slightly different version of me for whom it’d be ambiguous)
Whpearson’s “list good existing articles, as diverse as possible” helps counteract part of this, but still doesn’t answer questions like “should I be doing this if this is currently my day job? Presumably the point is to get more people workin on this.” (and the correlary: if professional AI safety workers are submitting, what chance do I have of contributing something useful?)
(Relatedly—I’d originally thought you should spell out what sort of questions you were looking to resolve, then saw you had linked to Paul Christiano’s doc. I think attempting to summarize the doc might accidentally focus on too narrow a domain, but the current linking of the doc is so small I missed it the first time)
ii. Spam vs Valuable-Self-Promoting-Machinery
By default, you need to spam things a lot. One way to get the word out is to post on all the relevant FB groups, discords, etc—multiple times, so that when they forget and fade to the backburner it doesn’t disappear forever.
Being forced to spam everyone once a week is a bad equilibrium. If you can figure out how to spam exactly the people who matter (see i.1) that’s also better.
If you can spam in a way that’s providing value rather than sucking up attention, that’s better. If you can make the thing spam itself in a way that provides value, better still.
One way of spamming-that-provides value might be having a couple followup posts that do things like “provide suggestions and reading lists for people who are considering working on this but don’t quite know how to approach the problem.” (targeting the sort of person who you think almost has the skills the contribute, and is just missing a few key elements that are easy to teach)
Another might be encouraging to post their drafts publicly to attract additional attention and comments that keep the thing in public consciousness. (This may work against the contest model though)