Our Active thesis - WHAT CAN WE OFFER THAT NO ONE CAN? - What is our comparative advantage as a group? - So far, we are a very big collection of practicing independent scientists with SKILL, but are searching for problems. - We have some edge in natural sciences, network theory, formalisation of physics - I would probably call our topic space 'Independent applied engineering' - We have growing connections with metascience funders. - Do we need specific subject matter? - In analogy with the AI community, it feels like we do - they have really done well, but I don't know what in the hard sciences we can do since we don't have experimetns - What are we not? - Probably not like these private labs, which are vulnerable to being closed source - We are not that focused, and we shouldn't probably be diving too deep into 'specific areas' - more meta style infra support - We are not explicitly EA / rationalist aligned - Do we need more independent scientists in the world? - What edge do independent scientists have over regular scientists in academia? - This seems to be skills related to industry - No financial constraints / publish or perish - Better expertise in coding and tooling - Better expertise in project delivery - What would successful infrastructure look like? - Conferences - this is the main place where ideas are generated - Would a publication be at all useful? - if so - what would it look like? - A publication with 1000s of readers, filled with submissions from independent reseachers - But then - Is upskilling something that we should focus on? - A platform for upskilling - I would need someone to compile resources / build tech to get a collection of problems from textbooks / modify them. But the thing is, there are so many places to upskill online (everyone is using chatGPT) and so it's hard to imagine we could make a better one unless we had a REALLY significant targeted project. - I think people use AI + textbooks to learn - so - Our only possible edge that I can see is physLean, but this is a WHOLE thing - In this case - we should probably be doing as much as possible to support AI for Math, PhysLean, and other conferecnes - A wiki where we can share resources