I definitely don’t think that Open Phil thought of “have more people take MIRI seriously” as a core objective
FWIW I heard rumor they thought of the roughly opposite, “Have people think OpenPhil doesn’t take MIRI seriously”, as an objective. I heard a story that when OpenPhil staff went to academia to interview lots of academics about doing grantmaking in the field of AI, all the academics strongly dismissed MIRI as cranks and bad to associate with, and OpenPhil felt their credibility would be harmed by associating with MIRI.
This is consistent with (and somewhat supported by) the OpenPhil grant report to MIRI saying that they could’ve picked anywhere between $1.5M and $0.5M, and they picked the latter for signaling reasons.
I’m not sure I follow[1]. It’s not a perfect match for the opposite (“Have fewer people take MIRI seriously”) but it’s roughly/functionally in the opposite direction in terms of their funding choices and influence on the discourse.
You may be responding to an earlier of edit of mine, I somewhat substantially edited within ~5 mins of commenting, and then found you’d already replied.
(Yeah, I was responding to the earlier version. I meant that in some cases you might want to cause someone to be taken more seriously but not want to cause people to think you take them more seriously (or not want to make that salient, or to make people think that you want them to think you want it to be salient, or whatever). Those are just different objectives you might have.)
FWIW I heard rumor they thought of the roughly opposite, “Have people think OpenPhil doesn’t take MIRI seriously”, as an objective. I heard a story that when OpenPhil staff went to academia to interview lots of academics about doing grantmaking in the field of AI, all the academics strongly dismissed MIRI as cranks and bad to associate with, and OpenPhil felt their credibility would be harmed by associating with MIRI.
This is consistent with (and somewhat supported by) the OpenPhil grant report to MIRI saying that they could’ve picked anywhere between $1.5M and $0.5M, and they picked the latter for signaling reasons.
That’s not literally the opposite, that’s a different thing, obviously.
I’m not sure I follow[1]. It’s not a perfect match for the opposite (“Have fewer people take MIRI seriously”) but it’s roughly/functionally in the opposite direction in terms of their funding choices and influence on the discourse.
You may be responding to an earlier of edit of mine, I somewhat substantially edited within ~5 mins of commenting, and then found you’d already replied.
(Yeah, I was responding to the earlier version. I meant that in some cases you might want to cause someone to be taken more seriously but not want to cause people to think you take them more seriously (or not want to make that salient, or to make people think that you want them to think you want it to be salient, or whatever). Those are just different objectives you might have.)