I guess this is a concern, but I’m also concerned if we don’t invest enough in deep ideas that we then later regret working on. This seems less a matter of choosing between than doing both and growing the number of folks working on alignment so we can tackle many potential solutions to find what works.
I wanna flag the distinction between “deep” and “profound”. They might both be subject to the same bias you articulate here, but I think they have different connotations, and I think important ideas are systematically more likely to be “deep” than they are likely to be “profound.” (i.e. deep ideas have a lot of implications and are entangled with more things than ‘shallow’ ideas. I think profound tends to imply something like ‘changing your conception of something that was fairly important in your worldview.’)
I guess this is a concern, but I’m also concerned if we don’t invest enough in deep ideas that we then later regret working on. This seems less a matter of choosing between than doing both and growing the number of folks working on alignment so we can tackle many potential solutions to find what works.
I think on the margin new alignment researchers should be more likely to work on ideas that seem less deep then they currently seem to me to be.
Working on a wide variety of deep ideas does sound better to me than working on a narrow set of them.
I wanna flag the distinction between “deep” and “profound”. They might both be subject to the same bias you articulate here, but I think they have different connotations, and I think important ideas are systematically more likely to be “deep” than they are likely to be “profound.” (i.e. deep ideas have a lot of implications and are entangled with more things than ‘shallow’ ideas. I think profound tends to imply something like ‘changing your conception of something that was fairly important in your worldview.’)
i.e. profound is maybe “deep + contrarian”
Hm, yeah that seems like a relevant and important distinction.