I think these are great points, thanks for leaving this comment. I myself patiently await the possible day where I hit an obvious shard theory landmine which has the classic alignment-difficulty “feel” to it. That day can totally come, and I want to be ready to recognize if it does.
at the same time it seems way too early to say, hey let’s stop working on other approaches and focus just on this one.
FWIW I’m not intending to advocate “shard theory or GTFO”, and agree that would be bad as a community policy.
I’ve tried to mention a few times[1] (but perhaps insufficiently prominently) that I’m less excited about people going “oh yeah I guess shard theory is great or something, let’s just think about that now” and more excited about reactions like “Oh, I guess I should have been practicing more constant vigilance, time to think about alignment deeply on my own terms, setting aside established wisdom for the moment.” I’m excited about other people thinking about alignment from first principles and coming up with their own inside views, with their own theories and current-best end-to-end pictures of AGI training runs.
A-Outer: Suppose I agreed. Suppose I just dropped outer/inner. What next?
A: Then you would have the rare opportunity to pause and think while floating freely between agendas. I will, for the moment, hold off on proposing solutions. Even if my proposal is good, discussing it now would rob us of insights you could have contributed as well. There will be a shard theory research agenda post which will advocate for itself, in due time.
I’ve also made this point briefly at the end of in-person talks. Maybe I should say it more often.
I think these are great points, thanks for leaving this comment. I myself patiently await the possible day where I hit an obvious shard theory landmine which has the classic alignment-difficulty “feel” to it. That day can totally come, and I want to be ready to recognize if it does.
FWIW I’m not intending to advocate “shard theory or GTFO”, and agree that would be bad as a community policy.
I’ve tried to mention a few times[1] (but perhaps insufficiently prominently) that I’m less excited about people going “oh yeah I guess shard theory is great or something, let’s just think about that now” and more excited about reactions like “Oh, I guess I should have been practicing more constant vigilance, time to think about alignment deeply on my own terms, setting aside established wisdom for the moment.” I’m excited about other people thinking about alignment from first principles and coming up with their own inside views, with their own theories and current-best end-to-end pictures of AGI training runs.
From Inner and outer alignment decompose one hard problem into two extremely hard problems:
I’ve also made this point briefly at the end of in-person talks. Maybe I should say it more often.