Culture ↑ · institutional
Research community norms
The research community ultimately chooses what gets studied and published. Researcher identity shapes behaviour more than employment. Norms on publication, review, funding, and citation constrain frontier development upstream.
Mechanism
Conferences, review committees, and professional societies (NeurIPS, ACL lineage) decline to publish capability research above a threshold, require safety review for capability papers, or blacklist certain work. Asilomar analogue.
If it succeeds: what binds next
Research community norms constrain publication and research direction. The binding problem becomes enforcement, the community that set the norm has to retain standing to enforce it as industry outpaces academia.
A strategy that produces a worse next problem than the one it solved has not done durable work.
Historical analogue
Biotechnology · Asilomar (1975)Every strategy inherits a plausible ceiling from its precedent. The analogue conditions the realistic reach.
Produced
Slowed some research, established review cultures and voluntary compliance.
Did not produce
Norms set when biology was university-centred; AI research is not.
Load-bearing commitments
Worldview positions this strategy quietly assumes. If the claim fails empirically or philosophically, the strategy loses its target or its premise.
Researcher identity ("I am an ML researcher") shapes behaviour more than employment, and a community can set binding norms.
Fails if: When frontier research sits in commercial labs whose incentives override norms, the community becomes irrelevant to the binding decisions.
Coordinates
Conflicts, grouped by mechanism
0No strict conflicts catalogued. This strategy pulls a lever that nothing else pulls in the opposite direction.
Complements, grouped by mechanism
4Same phase, different layer
same stage, distinct leversBoth are active in the same phase of the transition but act on different layers (model vs institution vs culture). They cover different failure modes inside the same window.
Adjacent bet
different levers, loosely coupledDifferent levers, different directions of action. They reinforce only via the general principle that covering more bets dominates covering fewer.
Same-lever twins
2Both use the same lever in the same direction. Usually redundant inside a portfolio: each dollar or effort unit only buys one lever pull, even if two strategies are named.
Axis position
Source note: Research community norms strategy.md