Elliott Thornley (EJT) comments on Why Corrigibility is Hard and Important (i.e. “Whence the high MIRI confidence in alignment difficulty?”)

[Elliott Thornley (EJT)]

Perhaps the best approach is to build something that isn’t (at least, isn’t explicitly/​directly) an expected utility maximizer. Then the challenge is to come up with a way to build a thing that does stuff you want without even having that bit of foundation.

Yep, this is what I try to do here!

This seems likely harder than the world where the best approach is a clever trick that fixes it for expected utility maximizers.

I think that’s reasonable on priors, but these papers plus the empirical track record suggests there’s no clever trick that makes EUMs corrigible.