Aren’t you worried that by presenting this “in between” approach without mentioning that it would still require some amount of luck, or equivalently still incur some amount of risk (of potentially catastrophic philosophical failure/error), it can be misleading for people who might read the post without themselves specializing in this area?
I don’t want to mislead people, so I guess it’s just a question about how people interpret posts like this. I suppose I would worry about this if I was presenting something framed like a decisive solution. But I’d think it’s pretty normal for posts to talk about a problem and present some promising-seeming interventions without thereby implying that the problem would be entirely solved if the interventions got carried out. (E.g.: If I read a post about climate change that suggested some interventions, I wouldn’t assume that those interventions would necessarily solve the whole problem.)
It also feels relevant that I don’t have a prescription for actions anyone could take to predictably achieve high justified confidence that the problem was solved. I don’t think that discovering a solution to metaphilosophy would be sufficient, because a big part of the problem is that people might not care about doing good philosophy even if a solution existed. I think that slower AI development (including a global pause) would probably be helpful on the current margin, for this risk, but I don’t think that a very long pause would get the risk down to very low levels. (There’s just a bunch of stuff that influence societal epistemics and its hard to know whether it’s heading in a good or bad direction on the time-scale of decades, at present technology levels. And I expect societal epistemics to have a big influence on the risk here.)
I agree the factors you mention are relevant, but in my mind they don’t reduce the risk of misinterpretation to be low enough to make it not worth adding a sentence or two of explicit statement or explanation of the remaining risks. I think the main difference with something like climate change is that the latter is much more well-known and anyone reading an article about a partial solution is highly likely to already have a good idea of the overall shape of the problem (thus making the analogous misinterpretation very unlikely), and this can’t be said for an article on “AI for epistemics”.
I don’t think that discovering a solution to metaphilosophy would be sufficient, because a big part of the problem is that people might not care about doing good philosophy even if a solution existed.
Yeah I worry about this a lot too, but solving metaphilosophy can plausibly help substantially here, similar to how solving (in large part) the philosophy of math and science has (directly or indirectly) made many more people care about doing good math and science. Directly, it seems a lot easier to care about something if you actually understood what it really is, as that would likely tell you a lot about why it might be valuable. Indirectly, it would likely speed up philosophical progress and make it more prestigious, less contentious, appear less wasteful/pointless (to many), etc.
I don’t want to mislead people, so I guess it’s just a question about how people interpret posts like this. I suppose I would worry about this if I was presenting something framed like a decisive solution. But I’d think it’s pretty normal for posts to talk about a problem and present some promising-seeming interventions without thereby implying that the problem would be entirely solved if the interventions got carried out. (E.g.: If I read a post about climate change that suggested some interventions, I wouldn’t assume that those interventions would necessarily solve the whole problem.)
It also feels relevant that I don’t have a prescription for actions anyone could take to predictably achieve high justified confidence that the problem was solved. I don’t think that discovering a solution to metaphilosophy would be sufficient, because a big part of the problem is that people might not care about doing good philosophy even if a solution existed. I think that slower AI development (including a global pause) would probably be helpful on the current margin, for this risk, but I don’t think that a very long pause would get the risk down to very low levels. (There’s just a bunch of stuff that influence societal epistemics and its hard to know whether it’s heading in a good or bad direction on the time-scale of decades, at present technology levels. And I expect societal epistemics to have a big influence on the risk here.)
I agree the factors you mention are relevant, but in my mind they don’t reduce the risk of misinterpretation to be low enough to make it not worth adding a sentence or two of explicit statement or explanation of the remaining risks. I think the main difference with something like climate change is that the latter is much more well-known and anyone reading an article about a partial solution is highly likely to already have a good idea of the overall shape of the problem (thus making the analogous misinterpretation very unlikely), and this can’t be said for an article on “AI for epistemics”.
Yeah I worry about this a lot too, but solving metaphilosophy can plausibly help substantially here, similar to how solving (in large part) the philosophy of math and science has (directly or indirectly) made many more people care about doing good math and science. Directly, it seems a lot easier to care about something if you actually understood what it really is, as that would likely tell you a lot about why it might be valuable. Indirectly, it would likely speed up philosophical progress and make it more prestigious, less contentious, appear less wasteful/pointless (to many), etc.