Logan Strohl

Developing and sharing an investigative method to improve traction in pre-theoretic fields.

Logan has previously worked with the Center for Applied Rationality, but is now running an independent project aiming to help researchers in AI alignment and related pre-paradigmatic fields find more traction on philosophically confusing questions. I find work in this space potentially very valuable, but also very high-variance, so I assign high probability to this project not producing very much value. However, I think there’s at least some chance that it helps a substantial number of future AI alignment researchers in a way that few other interventions are capable of.

My general experience of talking to people who are trying to think about the long-term future (and AI alignment in particular) is that they often find it very difficult to productively make progress on almost any of the open problems in the field, with the problems often seeming far too big and ill-defined.

Many well-established research fields seem to have had these problems in their early stages. I think that figuring out how to productively gain traction on these kinds of ill-defined questions is one of the key bottlenecks for thinking about the long-term future. Substantially more so than, for example, getting more people involved in those fields, since my current sense is that marginal researchers currently struggle to find any area to meaningfully contribute and most people in the field have trouble productively integrating others’ contributions into their own thinking.

The basic approach Logan is aiming for seems descendant of some of Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing)” material, which I know has been quite useful for many people working in AI alignment and related research fields, based on many conversations I’ve had with researchers in the last few years. It seems to frequently come up as the single most useful individual thinking technique, next to the ability to make rough quantitative back-of-the-envelope estimates for many domains relevant to events and phenomena on a global scale. This makes me more optimistic than I would usually be about developing techniques in this space.

The approach itself still seems to be in very early stages, with only the very first post of the planned sequence of posts being available here. The current tentative name for it is “naturalism”:

“Naturalism” (an allusion to 19th century naturalists) is the name I use for a specific way of engaging curiously with the world. It’s a method of inquiry that uses patient observation and original seeing to build models that were previously unthinkable. It takes longer to learn than the spontaneous curiosity of pure exploration, but this specialized method helps you to make deliberate progress in areas where your existing concepts are leading you astray.

Logan is planning to work closely with a small number of interested researchers, which I think is generally the right approach for work like this, and is planning to err on the side of working with people in practical contexts instead of writing long blog posts full of theory. Armchair philosophizing about how thinking is supposed to work can sometimes be useful (particularly when combined with mathematical arguments — a combination which sparked, for example, the Bayesian theory of cognition). But most of the time, it seems to me to produce suggestions that are only hypothetically interesting, but ultimately ungrounded and hard to use for anything in practice. On the margin, investigations that integrate people’s existing curiosities and problems seem better suited to making progress on this topic.

In evaluating this grant, we received a substantial number of highly positive references for Logan, both through their historical work at CFAR, and from people involved in the early stages of their “naturalism” program. I’ve worked a bit with Logan in the context of a few rationality-related workshops and have generally been impressed by their thinking. I’ve also found many of their blog posts quite valuable.