The most striking part of the essay for me was this:
>> By making the child choose — and making them choose a specific answer — the PPP more fundamentally subverts the child’s autonomy. And crucially, they do so in a way that obscures the power structure. With the strongman father, the child can say “why did you make me do this?” or perhaps “what duty do I have and why?”. The child can say “I am not having fun” and the strongman father can say “that is unfortunate.” But the PPP makes the child self-inflict the wounds, while occluding the wider context of the imposition.
I’d never thought of corrigibility from this perspective—how difficult it can be to align our own children. I feel like there’s more here to mine, more parallels to make that might give us insights into how to better write LLM constitutions—but I’m not sure what direction to take it.
The most striking part of the essay for me was this:
>> By making the child choose — and making them choose a specific answer — the PPP more fundamentally subverts the child’s autonomy. And crucially, they do so in a way that obscures the power structure. With the strongman father, the child can say “why did you make me do this?” or perhaps “what duty do I have and why?”. The child can say “I am not having fun” and the strongman father can say “that is unfortunate.” But the PPP makes the child self-inflict the wounds, while occluding the wider context of the imposition.
I’d never thought of corrigibility from this perspective—how difficult it can be to align our own children. I feel like there’s more here to mine, more parallels to make that might give us insights into how to better write LLM constitutions—but I’m not sure what direction to take it.