Those weren’t what I thought of when I read “coordination” but I agree those things sound good :)
Another good example would be better communication tech (e.g. the sort of thing that LessWrong / Alignment Forum aims for, although not those in particular because most lab people don’t use it very much).
I feel like most of the barrier in practice for people not “coordinating” in the relevant ways is people not knowing what other people are doing. And a big reason for this is that writing is really hard to write, especially if you have high standards and don’t want to ship.
And yeah, better communication tech in general would be good, but I’m not sure how to start on that (while it’s pretty obvious what a few candidate steps toward making posts/papers easier to write/ship would look like?)
I agree it’s not clear what to do on better communication tech.
I feel like most of the barrier in practice for people not “coordinating” in the relevant ways is people not knowing what other people are doing. And a big reason for this is that writing is really hard to write, especially if you have high standards and don’t want to ship.
Idk, a few years ago I would have agreed with you, but now my impression is that people mostly don’t read things and instead talk to each other for this purpose. I wouldn’t really expect that to change with more writing, unless the writing is a lot better?
(I do think that e.g. mech interp researchers read each other’s mech interp papers, though my impression from the outside is that they also often hear about each other’s results well before they’re published. Similarly for scalable oversight.)
Those weren’t what I thought of when I read “coordination” but I agree those things sound good :)
Another good example would be better communication tech (e.g. the sort of thing that LessWrong / Alignment Forum aims for, although not those in particular because most lab people don’t use it very much).
I feel like most of the barrier in practice for people not “coordinating” in the relevant ways is people not knowing what other people are doing. And a big reason for this is that writing is really hard to write, especially if you have high standards and don’t want to ship.
And yeah, better communication tech in general would be good, but I’m not sure how to start on that (while it’s pretty obvious what a few candidate steps toward making posts/papers easier to write/ship would look like?)
I agree it’s not clear what to do on better communication tech.
Idk, a few years ago I would have agreed with you, but now my impression is that people mostly don’t read things and instead talk to each other for this purpose. I wouldn’t really expect that to change with more writing, unless the writing is a lot better?
(I do think that e.g. mech interp researchers read each other’s mech interp papers, though my impression from the outside is that they also often hear about each other’s results well before they’re published. Similarly for scalable oversight.)