(I will go on the record that I think this comment seems to me terribly confused about what “LW style theoretic research” is. In-particular, I think of Redwood as one of the top organizations doing LW style theoretic research, with a small empirical component, and so clearly some kind of mismatch about concepts is going on here. AI 2027 also strikes me as very centrally the kind of “theoretical” thinking that characterizes LW.
My sense is some kind of weird thing is happening where people conjure up some extremely specific thing as the archetype of LW-style research, in ways that is kind of disconnected from reality, and I would like to avoid people forming annoyingly hard to fix stereotypes as a result of that)
I’m using the word “theoretical” more narrowly than you and not including conceptual/AI-futurism research. I agree the word “theoretical” is underdefined and there is a reasonable category that includes Redwood and AI 2027 which you could call theoretical research, I’d just typically use a different term for this and I don’t think Matthew was including this.
I was trying to discuss what I thought Matthew was pointing at, I could be wrong about this of course.
(Similarly, I’d guess that Matthew wouldn’t have counted Epoch’s work on takeoff speeds and what takeoff looks like as an example of “LW-style theoretical research”, but I think this work is very structurally/methodologically similar to stuff like AI 2027.”)
If Matthew said “LW-style conceptual/non-empirical research” I would have interpreted this pretty differently.
(I will go on the record that I think this comment seems to me terribly confused about what “LW style theoretic research” is. In-particular, I think of Redwood as one of the top organizations doing LW style theoretic research, with a small empirical component, and so clearly some kind of mismatch about concepts is going on here. AI 2027 also strikes me as very centrally the kind of “theoretical” thinking that characterizes LW.
My sense is some kind of weird thing is happening where people conjure up some extremely specific thing as the archetype of LW-style research, in ways that is kind of disconnected from reality, and I would like to avoid people forming annoyingly hard to fix stereotypes as a result of that)
I’m using the word “theoretical” more narrowly than you and not including conceptual/AI-futurism research. I agree the word “theoretical” is underdefined and there is a reasonable category that includes Redwood and AI 2027 which you could call theoretical research, I’d just typically use a different term for this and I don’t think Matthew was including this.
I was trying to discuss what I thought Matthew was pointing at, I could be wrong about this of course.
(Similarly, I’d guess that Matthew wouldn’t have counted Epoch’s work on takeoff speeds and what takeoff looks like as an example of “LW-style theoretical research”, but I think this work is very structurally/methodologically similar to stuff like AI 2027.”)
If Matthew said “LW-style conceptual/non-empirical research” I would have interpreted this pretty differently.