One caveat to the claim that we should prioritize serial alignment work over parallelizable work, is that this assumes an omniscient and optimal allocator of researcher-hours to problems.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that these are logical assumptions necessary for us to prioritize serial work; but rather insofar as these assumptions don’t hold, prioritizing work that looks serial to us is less important at the margin.
Spelling out the assumptions more:
Omniscient meaning “perfect advance knowledge of what work will turn out to be serial vs parallelizable.” In practice I think this is very hard to know beforehand—a lot of work that turned out to be part of the “serial bottleneck” looked parallelizable ex ante.
Optimal meaning “institutions will actually allocate enough researchers to the problem in time for the parallelizable work to get done”. Insofar as we don’t expect this to hold, we will lose even if all the serial work gets done in time.
Why do you think it assumes that?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that these are logical assumptions necessary for us to prioritize serial work; but rather insofar as these assumptions don’t hold, prioritizing work that looks serial to us is less important at the margin.
Spelling out the assumptions more:
Omniscient meaning “perfect advance knowledge of what work will turn out to be serial vs parallelizable.” In practice I think this is very hard to know beforehand—a lot of work that turned out to be part of the “serial bottleneck” looked parallelizable ex ante.
Optimal meaning “institutions will actually allocate enough researchers to the problem in time for the parallelizable work to get done”. Insofar as we don’t expect this to hold, we will lose even if all the serial work gets done in time.