I wonder if more people would join you on this journey if you had more concrete progress to show so far?
If you’re trying to start something approximately like a new field, I think you need to be responsible for field-building. The best type of field-building is showing that the new field is not only full of interesting problems, but tractable ones as well.
Compare to some adjacent examples:
Eliezer had some moderate success building the field of “rationality”, mostly though explicit “social” field-building activities like writing the sequences or associated fanfiction, or spinning off groups like CFAR. There isn’t much to show in terms of actual results, IMO; we haven’t developed a race of Jeffreysai supergeniuses who can solve quantum gravity in a month by sufficiently ridding themselves of cognitive biases. But the social field-building was enough to create a great internet social scene of like-minded people.
MIRI tried to kickstart a field roughly in the cluster of theoretical alignment research, focused around topics like “how to align AIXI”, decision theories, etc. In terms of community, there are a number of researchers who followed in these footsteps, mostly at MIRI itself to my knowledge, but also elsewhere. (E.g. I enjoy @Koen.Holtman’s followup work such as Corrigibility with Utility Preservation.) In terms of actual results, I think we see a steady stream of papers/posts showing slow-but-legible progress on various sub-agendas here: infra-bayesianism, agent foundations, corrigibility, natural abstractions, etc. Most (?) results seem to be self-published to miri.org, the Alignment Forum, or the arXiv, and either don’t attempt or don’t make it past peer review. So those who are motivated to join a field by legible incentives such as academic recognition and acceptance are often not along for the ride. But it’s still something.
“Mainstream” AI alignment research, as seen by the kind of work published by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc., has taken a much more conventional approach. People in this workstream are employed at large organizations that pay well; they publish in peer-reviewed journals and present at popular conferences. Their work often has real-world applications in aligning or advancing the capabilities of products people use.
In contrast, I don’t see any of this sort of field-building work from you for meta-philosophy. Your post history doesn’t seem to be trying to do social field-building, nor does it contain published results that could make others sit up and take notice of a tractable research agenda they could join. If you’d spent age 35-45 publishing a steady stream of updates and progress reports on meta-philosophy, I think you’d have gathered at least a small following of interested people, in the same way that the theoretical alignment research folk have. And if you’d used that time to write thousands of words of primers and fanfic, maybe you could get a larger following of interested bystanders. Maybe there’s even something you could have done to make this a serious academic field, although that seems pretty hard.
In short, I like reading what you write! Consider writing more of it, more often, as a first step toward getting people to join you on this journey.
I wonder if more people would join you on this journey if you had more concrete progress to show so far?
If you’re trying to start something approximately like a new field, I think you need to be responsible for field-building. The best type of field-building is showing that the new field is not only full of interesting problems, but tractable ones as well.
Compare to some adjacent examples:
Eliezer had some moderate success building the field of “rationality”, mostly though explicit “social” field-building activities like writing the sequences or associated fanfiction, or spinning off groups like CFAR. There isn’t much to show in terms of actual results, IMO; we haven’t developed a race of Jeffreysai supergeniuses who can solve quantum gravity in a month by sufficiently ridding themselves of cognitive biases. But the social field-building was enough to create a great internet social scene of like-minded people.
MIRI tried to kickstart a field roughly in the cluster of theoretical alignment research, focused around topics like “how to align AIXI”, decision theories, etc. In terms of community, there are a number of researchers who followed in these footsteps, mostly at MIRI itself to my knowledge, but also elsewhere. (E.g. I enjoy @Koen.Holtman’s followup work such as Corrigibility with Utility Preservation.) In terms of actual results, I think we see a steady stream of papers/posts showing slow-but-legible progress on various sub-agendas here: infra-bayesianism, agent foundations, corrigibility, natural abstractions, etc. Most (?) results seem to be self-published to miri.org, the Alignment Forum, or the arXiv, and either don’t attempt or don’t make it past peer review. So those who are motivated to join a field by legible incentives such as academic recognition and acceptance are often not along for the ride. But it’s still something.
“Mainstream” AI alignment research, as seen by the kind of work published by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc., has taken a much more conventional approach. People in this workstream are employed at large organizations that pay well; they publish in peer-reviewed journals and present at popular conferences. Their work often has real-world applications in aligning or advancing the capabilities of products people use.
In contrast, I don’t see any of this sort of field-building work from you for meta-philosophy. Your post history doesn’t seem to be trying to do social field-building, nor does it contain published results that could make others sit up and take notice of a tractable research agenda they could join. If you’d spent age 35-45 publishing a steady stream of updates and progress reports on meta-philosophy, I think you’d have gathered at least a small following of interested people, in the same way that the theoretical alignment research folk have. And if you’d used that time to write thousands of words of primers and fanfic, maybe you could get a larger following of interested bystanders. Maybe there’s even something you could have done to make this a serious academic field, although that seems pretty hard.
In short, I like reading what you write! Consider writing more of it, more often, as a first step toward getting people to join you on this journey.