Re. “useless but easy problems”, we agree to disagree. Mentor selection at MATS is very hard, so we defer a lot to a committee of experts. Admittedly, choosing this committee necessarily entails some bias. I’d be interested if anyone wants to DM me nominations!
(Ryan is correct about what I’m referring to, and I don’t know any details).
I want to say publicly, since my comment above is a bit cruel in singling out MATS specifically: I think MATS is the most impressively well-run organisation that I’ve encountered, and overall supports good research. Ryan has engaged at length with my criticisms (both now and when I’ve raised them before), as have others on the MATS team, and I appreciate this a lot.
Ultimately most of our disagreements are about things that I think a majority of “the alignment field” is getting wrong. I think most people don’t consider it Ryan’s responsibility to do better at research prioritization than the field as a whole. But I do. It’s easy to shirk responsibility by deferring to committees, so I don’t consider that a good excuse.
A good excuse is defending the object-level research prioritization decisions, which Ryan and other MATS employees happily do. I appreciate them for this, and we agree to disagree for now.
Tying back to the OP, I maintain that multiplier effects are often overrated because of people “slipping off the real problem” and this is a particularly large problem with founders of new orgs.
Re. “useless but easy problems”, we agree to disagree. Mentor selection at MATS is very hard, so we defer a lot to a committee of experts. Admittedly, choosing this committee necessarily entails some bias. I’d be interested if anyone wants to DM me nominations!
(Ryan is correct about what I’m referring to, and I don’t know any details).
I want to say publicly, since my comment above is a bit cruel in singling out MATS specifically: I think MATS is the most impressively well-run organisation that I’ve encountered, and overall supports good research. Ryan has engaged at length with my criticisms (both now and when I’ve raised them before), as have others on the MATS team, and I appreciate this a lot.
Ultimately most of our disagreements are about things that I think a majority of “the alignment field” is getting wrong. I think most people don’t consider it Ryan’s responsibility to do better at research prioritization than the field as a whole. But I do. It’s easy to shirk responsibility by deferring to committees, so I don’t consider that a good excuse.
A good excuse is defending the object-level research prioritization decisions, which Ryan and other MATS employees happily do. I appreciate them for this, and we agree to disagree for now.
Tying back to the OP, I maintain that multiplier effects are often overrated because of people “slipping off the real problem” and this is a particularly large problem with founders of new orgs.