Was the cause of such debate an issue of thinking that these ideas are too close to actually useful for making an AGI? If so, this makes me worried that MIRI is overestimating the importance of its current results.
Not quite. I shared a version of this concern initially, but making something public is an irreversible decision. Given a reasonable amount of uncertainty about whether making a given thing public is a good idea, there’s very little downside to hesitating about making it public before some kind of further discussion. The risk of overestimating the importance of our current results is pretty minor. (The risk of appearing to overestimate the importance of our current results is maybe worse, so possibly I shouldn’t have brought this up at all.)
That seems quite reasonable. Having a specific period of time to wait on announcing anything might make sense in that sort of context. I agree that some of the issues here do seem to be potential bad signaling. But this is a context where MIRI really should be careful about the easier to deal with signaling issues.
Not quite. I shared a version of this concern initially, but making something public is an irreversible decision. Given a reasonable amount of uncertainty about whether making a given thing public is a good idea, there’s very little downside to hesitating about making it public before some kind of further discussion. The risk of overestimating the importance of our current results is pretty minor. (The risk of appearing to overestimate the importance of our current results is maybe worse, so possibly I shouldn’t have brought this up at all.)
That seems quite reasonable. Having a specific period of time to wait on announcing anything might make sense in that sort of context. I agree that some of the issues here do seem to be potential bad signaling. But this is a context where MIRI really should be careful about the easier to deal with signaling issues.