Paul Christiano: belief

Transcript context

…But isn’t it also the case that didn’t Hardy write in that all this prime shit is both not useless, but it’s fun to do, and it turned out that all the cryptography is based on all that prime shit. So I don’t know. But anyways, I’m trying to set you up so that you can tell and forget about if it doesn’t have applications in all those other fields. It matters a lot for Alignment and that’s why I’m trying to set you up to talk about if I think a lot of smart people listen to this podcast. If they’re a math or CS grad student and has gotten interested in this. Are you looking to potentially find talent to help you with this? Yeah, maybe we’ll start there. And then I also want to ask you if I think also maybe people who can provide funding might be listening to the podcast. So to both of them, what is your pitch? We’re definitely hiring and searching for collaborators. I think the most useful profile is probably a combination of intellectually interested in this particular project and motivated enough by alignment to work on this project, even if it’s really hard. I think there are a lot of good problems. The basic fact that makes this problem unappealing to work on I’m a really good salesman, but whatever. I think the only reason this isn’t a slam dunk thing to work on is that there are not great examples. So we’ve been working on it for a while, but we do not have beautiful results as of the recording of this podcast. Hopefully by the time it airs, you completely script. They’ve had great results since then, but. It was too long to put in the margins of the podcast.…

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