This is a special post for quick takes by Chris_Leong. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Thoughts on the introduction of Goodhart's. Currently, I'm more motivated by trying to make the leaderboard, so maybe that suggests that merely introducing a leaderboard, without actually paying people, would have had much the same effect. Then again, that might just be because I'm not that far off. And if there hadn't been the payment, maybe I wouldn't have ended up in the position where I'm not that far off.
I guess I feel incentivised to post a lot more than I would otherwise, but especially in the comments rather than the posts since if you post a lot of posts that likely suppresses the number of people reading your other posts. This probably isn't a worthwhile tradeoff given that one post that does really well can easily outweight 4 or 5 posts that only do okay or ten posts that are meh.
Another thing: downvotes feel a lot more personal when it means that you miss out on landing on the leaderboard. This leads me to think that having a leaderboard for the long term would likely be negative and create division.
Random idea: A lot of people seem discouraged from doing anything about AI Safety because it seems like such a big overwhelming problem.
What if there was a competition to encourage people to engage in low-effort actions towards AI safety, such as hosting a dinner for people who are interested, volunteering to run a session on AI safety for their local EA group, answering a couple of questions on the stampy wiki, offering to proof-read a few people’s posts or offering a few free tutorial sessions to aspiring AI Safety Researchers.
I think there’s a decent chance I could get this funded (prize might be $1000 for the best action and up to 5 prizes of $100 for random actions above a certain bar)
Possible downsides: Would be bad if people reach out to important people or the media without fully thinking stuff through, but can be mitigated by excluding those kinds of actions/ adding guidelines
Keen for thoughts or feedback.