https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Afdohjyt6gESu4ANf/most-people-start-with-the-same-few-bad-ideas
Occasionally people say “hey, alignment research has lots of money behind it now, why not fund basically everyone who wants to try it?”. Often this involves an analogy to venture capital: alignment funding is hits-based (i.e. the best few people are much more productive than everyone else combined), funders aren’t actually that good at distinguishing the future hits, so what we want is a whole bunch of uncorrelated bets.
The main place where this fails, in practice, is the “uncorrelated” part. It turns out that most newcomers to alignment have the same few Bad Ideas.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Afdohjyt6gESu4ANf/most-people-start-with-the-same-few-bad-ideas
Occasionally people say “hey, alignment research has lots of money behind it now, why not fund basically everyone who wants to try it?”. Often this involves an analogy to venture capital: alignment funding is hits-based (i.e. the best few people are much more productive than everyone else combined), funders aren’t actually that good at distinguishing the future hits, so what we want is a whole bunch of uncorrelated bets.
The main place where this fails, in practice, is the “uncorrelated” part. It turns out that most newcomers to alignment have the same few Bad Ideas.