Pamphlets work for wells in Africa. They don’t work for MIRI’s mission. The inferential distance is too great, the ideas are too Far, the impact is too far away.
Didn’t you get convinced about AI risk by reading a short paragraph of I. J. Good?
Certainly there exist people who will be pushed to useful action by a pamphlet. They’re fairly common for wells in Africa, and rare for risks from self-improving AI. To get 5 “hits” with well pamphlets, you’ve got to distribute maybe 1000 pamphlets. To get 5 hits with self-improving AI pamphlets, you’ve got to distribute maybe 100,000 pamphlets. Obviously you should be able to target the pamphlets better than that, but then distribution and planning costs are a lot higher, and the cost per New Useful Person look higher to me on that plan than distributing HPMoR to leading universities and tech companies, which is a plan for which we already have good evidence of effectiveness, and which we are therefore doing.
Didn’t you get convinced about AI risk by reading a short paragraph of I. J. Good?
Certainly there exist people who will be pushed to useful action by a pamphlet. They’re fairly common for wells in Africa, and rare for risks from self-improving AI. To get 5 “hits” with well pamphlets, you’ve got to distribute maybe 1000 pamphlets. To get 5 hits with self-improving AI pamphlets, you’ve got to distribute maybe 100,000 pamphlets. Obviously you should be able to target the pamphlets better than that, but then distribution and planning costs are a lot higher, and the cost per New Useful Person look higher to me on that plan than distributing HPMoR to leading universities and tech companies, which is a plan for which we already have good evidence of effectiveness, and which we are therefore doing.