I would probably ask the smart people to both figure out a way for me to effectively use the funding for this task and to prioritise questions of metaphilosphy in hopes they can figure out what a good field of philosophy would look like and the feedback loops etc involved in it.
So then I think in practice this mostly comes down to delegating well which before I learn more about good delegation via thinking about it more and having the smart people work on it I’d likely start by announcing I want people to work on this, reading their output and talking to them and then hiring and funding promising / high integrity seeming people to build up more infrastructure and help me evaluate and grant to additional people.
If I had to design a bunch myself or predict what I’ll be advised to design, then I’d probably have some kind of thing where people get more money tied to having output that matches proxies of solving real world problems and convincing peers progress has been made and generally make sure things like this are measured and tracked precisely. I’d probably also try to have some kind of thing where if you made helpful contributions you can go be part of the think long about illegible problems squad or something and spend a couple years working on stuff without strong output signals while still getting increased money/status by being part of it, not sure. Generally I’d try to have a bunch of people whose job it is to track and measure how money/status are translating into differences between what a bunch of people think is worth prioritising Vs what is prioritised and how people are goodharting various infrastructure/signals. Could go on with trying to make these more concrete if useful
One maybe interesting related question with some overlap is: If you had a bunch of smart AIs and unlimited reward signals / instructions to make them work on something how would you design a field of philosophy that is actually good?
I would probably ask the smart people to both figure out a way for me to effectively use the funding for this task and to prioritise questions of metaphilosphy in hopes they can figure out what a good field of philosophy would look like and the feedback loops etc involved in it.
So then I think in practice this mostly comes down to delegating well which before I learn more about good delegation via thinking about it more and having the smart people work on it I’d likely start by announcing I want people to work on this, reading their output and talking to them and then hiring and funding promising / high integrity seeming people to build up more infrastructure and help me evaluate and grant to additional people.
If I had to design a bunch myself or predict what I’ll be advised to design, then I’d probably have some kind of thing where people get more money tied to having output that matches proxies of solving real world problems and convincing peers progress has been made and generally make sure things like this are measured and tracked precisely. I’d probably also try to have some kind of thing where if you made helpful contributions you can go be part of the think long about illegible problems squad or something and spend a couple years working on stuff without strong output signals while still getting increased money/status by being part of it, not sure. Generally I’d try to have a bunch of people whose job it is to track and measure how money/status are translating into differences between what a bunch of people think is worth prioritising Vs what is prioritised and how people are goodharting various infrastructure/signals. Could go on with trying to make these more concrete if useful
One maybe interesting related question with some overlap is: If you had a bunch of smart AIs and unlimited reward signals / instructions to make them work on something how would you design a field of philosophy that is actually good?