If you’re interested in the history of analytic philosophy, I highly recommend Scott Soames’s books. His Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century is an excellent two-volume set, and he’s also working on a five-volume series called The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy—though only the first two volumes are out so far. (As a PhD student in a top philosophy department, I’ve found these books invaluable. There’s really nothing else quite like them.)
Felipe
Karma: 4
What are the most important and overlooked problems to be working on right now? Alignment is getting a lot of attention these days, so the marginal impact of working on it might be lower at the moment. But I think there are still plenty of big, unanswered questions about what happens if alignment goes well. For example, how would democratic voting procedures adapt if we had digital beings that could replicate endlessly? That’s just one case, but I’d love to hear other ideas—what important problems aren’t getting enough focus right now?
How much should we take from the fact that LLMs’ choices across a range of scenarios can be organized into a consistent utility function? Non-human animals are often more rational than humans in the axiomatic sense. (The following paper has an interesting discussion of this and other related topics: https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Adam-Bales-Will-AI-Avoid-Exploitation.pdf.)