Ah, OK. Fair enough then. I think I get why they seem like a cult from the outside, to many people at least. I think where I’m coming from in this thread is that I’ve had enough interactions with enough MIRI people (and read and judged enough of their work) to be pretty confident that they aren’t a cult and that they are genuinely trying to save the world from AI doom and that some of them at least are probably more competent than me, generally speaking, and also exerting more effort and also less bound by convention than me.
I agree that it seems like they should be offering Terence Tao ten million dollars to work with them for six months, and I don’t know why they haven’t. (Or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear about it?) I just have enough knowledge about them to rule out the facile “oh they are incompetent” or “oh it’s because they are a cult” explanations. I was trying to brainstorm more serious answers (answers consistent with what I know about them) based on the various things I had heard (e.g. the experience of OpenPhil trying something similar, which led to a bunch of high-caliber academics producing useless research) and got frustrated with all the facile/cult accusations.
Being weird in your heavily filtered weirdness-optimized social environment is very different from being weird out there in the real world with the normies, though.
Ah, OK. Fair enough then. I think I get why they seem like a cult from the outside, to many people at least. I think where I’m coming from in this thread is that I’ve had enough interactions with enough MIRI people (and read and judged enough of their work) to be pretty confident that they aren’t a cult and that they are genuinely trying to save the world from AI doom and that some of them at least are probably more competent than me, generally speaking, and also exerting more effort and also less bound by convention than me.
I agree that it seems like they should be offering Terence Tao ten million dollars to work with them for six months, and I don’t know why they haven’t. (Or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear about it?) I just have enough knowledge about them to rule out the facile “oh they are incompetent” or “oh it’s because they are a cult” explanations. I was trying to brainstorm more serious answers (answers consistent with what I know about them) based on the various things I had heard (e.g. the experience of OpenPhil trying something similar, which led to a bunch of high-caliber academics producing useless research) and got frustrated with all the facile/cult accusations.
Being weird in your heavily filtered weirdness-optimized social environment is very different from being weird out there in the real world with the normies, though.