Correct credit-tracking is very important if we want our community to generate new good ideas.

https://arbital.com/p/6yv

by Anna Salamon Dec 16 2016 updated Dec 16 2016

Correct credit-tracking is very important if we want our community to generate new good ideas.


Correct credit-assignment for this: I got this rule from Eric Weinstein, who seems to think it very important. I've been trying to do it some since.


Comments

Anna Salamon

This is one of the causes of my believing [NEWCLAIM AI Safety should show its history].

Travis Rivera

Can you explain what you mean by "correct credit-tracking" and "new good ideas"?

Alexei Andreev

Anna might have different definitions, but here are mine:

correct credit-tracking

Basically, there is usually one (or a few) strong proponents of an idea when it's first voiced. Those proponents (or someone who picks it up) does a lot of work to explain and popularize that idea. All those people deserve credit, because sometimes other people come and take those ideas and present as basically their own / ideas they just found around.

new good ideas

Ideas that are still correct. For example, that AI safety is important and highly under-prioritized.

Travis Rivera

I see, so it's more of a "Who said it first" kind of tracking rather than a reputation system like loan credit.

That will incentivize useful ideas. Might also weakly incentivize the generation of ideas that contain no information whatsoever (not unlike the library of babel.) I would guess credit-tracking would be a useful tool for a human to gauge where an idea might originate but would probably take some extra components to make it a correct credit-tracker without opening it up to be gamed for some kind of profit (or status/incentive/ect). So I guess I agree with the claim.

Ryan Carey

The thing that seems necessary to me is having a way to transmit good ideas from those who reliably generate them to those who can act on them. If, for example, Bob reliably adopts all of Adam's ideas, and folks attribute them to Bob, and act on these ideas, that's fine.

In practice, I could imagine it being sufficiently specific to say that our good ideas emerge from some recognized nexus of a few dozen people.