I think the business PoV is a serious issue here that would need addressing, but the technical PoV problem proves too much. Yes, you are filtering for models that fuck up in less visible ways. But that is true for any form of monitoring. I think the correct lesson from this is “Monitoring is insufficient to save us”, but that does not necessarily lead to “We should not do monitoring.” I don’t see how this is any worse, for this problem, than CoT monitoring by the labs themselves (and is actually better, since it’s harder to get a lot of bits of optimisation pressure from this setup that is hopefully flagging things very rarely!)
If you think it’s worth doing CoT monitoring at all, the technical issue here shouldn’t dissuade you. If you do think we shouldn’t be monitoring at all because the good of monitoring is outweighed by the bad of filtering for less visibility, I disagree. While filtering for models that fuck up less visibly is bad, it’s bad because monitoring can’t catch it any more. Whereas if you don’t do monitoring at all, your visible-to-monitors fuckups may as well be invisible already.
I think the business PoV is a serious issue here that would need addressing, but the technical PoV problem proves too much. Yes, you are filtering for models that fuck up in less visible ways. But that is true for any form of monitoring. I think the correct lesson from this is “Monitoring is insufficient to save us”, but that does not necessarily lead to “We should not do monitoring.” I don’t see how this is any worse, for this problem, than CoT monitoring by the labs themselves (and is actually better, since it’s harder to get a lot of bits of optimisation pressure from this setup that is hopefully flagging things very rarely!)
If you think it’s worth doing CoT monitoring at all, the technical issue here shouldn’t dissuade you. If you do think we shouldn’t be monitoring at all because the good of monitoring is outweighed by the bad of filtering for less visibility, I disagree. While filtering for models that fuck up less visibly is bad, it’s bad because monitoring can’t catch it any more. Whereas if you don’t do monitoring at all, your visible-to-monitors fuckups may as well be invisible already.