Agreed that the current situation is weird and confusing.
The AI Alignment Forum is marketed as the actual forum for AI alignment discussion and research sharing. However, it seems that the majority of discussion shifted to LessWrong itself, in part due to most people not being allowed to post on the Alignment Forum, and most AI Safety related content not being actual AI Alignment research.
I basically agree with Reviewing LessWrong: Screwtape’s Basic Answer. It would be much better if AI Safety related content had its own domain name and home page, with some amount of curated posts flowing to LessWrong and the EA Forum to allow communities to stay aware of each other.
I think it would be extremely bad for most LW AI Alignment content if it was no longer colocated with the rest of LessWrong. Making an intellectual scene is extremely hard. The default outcome would be that it would become a bunch of fake ML research that has nothing to do with the problem. “AI Alignment” as a field does not actually have a shared methodological foundation that causes it to make sense to all be colocated in one space. LessWrong does have a shared methodology, and so it makes sense to have a forum of that kind.
I think it could make sense to have forums or subforums for specific subfields that do have enough shared perspective to make a coherent conversation possible, but I am confident that AI Alignment/AI Safety as a field does not coherently have such a thing.
Agreed that the current situation is weird and confusing.
The AI Alignment Forum is marketed as the actual forum for AI alignment discussion and research sharing. However, it seems that the majority of discussion shifted to LessWrong itself, in part due to most people not being allowed to post on the Alignment Forum, and most AI Safety related content not being actual AI Alignment research.
I basically agree with Reviewing LessWrong: Screwtape’s Basic Answer. It would be much better if AI Safety related content had its own domain name and home page, with some amount of curated posts flowing to LessWrong and the EA Forum to allow communities to stay aware of each other.
I think it would be extremely bad for most LW AI Alignment content if it was no longer colocated with the rest of LessWrong. Making an intellectual scene is extremely hard. The default outcome would be that it would become a bunch of fake ML research that has nothing to do with the problem. “AI Alignment” as a field does not actually have a shared methodological foundation that causes it to make sense to all be colocated in one space. LessWrong does have a shared methodology, and so it makes sense to have a forum of that kind.
I think it could make sense to have forums or subforums for specific subfields that do have enough shared perspective to make a coherent conversation possible, but I am confident that AI Alignment/AI Safety as a field does not coherently have such a thing.
Of note: the AI Alignment Forum content is a mirror of LW content, not distinct. It is a strict subset.