In both digital money and decision theory, academia was going in the wrong direction, in the sense that you did worse if you tried to build on top of the state of the art in academia instead of starting over from a past point. In digital money you essentially had to go back to just basic cryptographic primitives. (I can’t think of anything in the hundreds of academic papers on digital money that Bitcoin uses.) In decision theory the state of the art was CDT, and one of the justifications for CDT was that, to be rational, one ought to two-box in Newcomb’s problem and CDT does that while EDT doesn’t. I recall trying to come up with a version of UDT that would two-box in Newcomb’s problem and play D in PD against a copy because (until reading Eliezer’s posts on LW) I just took for granted without thinking about it that CDT must be an improvement over EDT and the academic consensus on Newcomb’s problem must be correct. I think I posted the resulting decision theory (which ended up being a lot more complex than the UDT I posted LW) to the “everything-list” and I can try to find it if you’d like.
We also don’t have evidence that following steps can be done by academia. In both Bitcoin and UDT the following steps are all being done outside of academia, as far as I can tell. I don’t think “we’ve stagnated” is right since the obvious next step after UDT is trying to solve logical uncertainty so we can tell what UDT actually recommends, and progress is being made there.
Even if we put this dispute aside, and just assume that key steps in each field need to be done by outsiders, that seems enough to conclude that we wouldn’t be better off now if Eliezer had gone into academia. If that had happened, there wouldn’t be anyone to catalyze the crucial “outsider step” and we’d still be stuck with CDT (and the overly complex and wrong version of UDT) today.
In both digital money and decision theory, academia was going in the wrong direction, in the sense that you did worse if you tried to build on top of the state of the art in academia instead of starting over from a past point. In digital money you essentially had to go back to just basic cryptographic primitives. (I can’t think of anything in the hundreds of academic papers on digital money that Bitcoin uses.) In decision theory the state of the art was CDT, and one of the justifications for CDT was that, to be rational, one ought to two-box in Newcomb’s problem and CDT does that while EDT doesn’t. I recall trying to come up with a version of UDT that would two-box in Newcomb’s problem and play D in PD against a copy because (until reading Eliezer’s posts on LW) I just took for granted without thinking about it that CDT must be an improvement over EDT and the academic consensus on Newcomb’s problem must be correct. I think I posted the resulting decision theory (which ended up being a lot more complex than the UDT I posted LW) to the “everything-list” and I can try to find it if you’d like.
We also don’t have evidence that following steps can be done by academia. In both Bitcoin and UDT the following steps are all being done outside of academia, as far as I can tell. I don’t think “we’ve stagnated” is right since the obvious next step after UDT is trying to solve logical uncertainty so we can tell what UDT actually recommends, and progress is being made there.
Even if we put this dispute aside, and just assume that key steps in each field need to be done by outsiders, that seems enough to conclude that we wouldn’t be better off now if Eliezer had gone into academia. If that had happened, there wouldn’t be anyone to catalyze the crucial “outsider step” and we’d still be stuck with CDT (and the overly complex and wrong version of UDT) today.