This might not be a useful or productive comment, sorry. I found this paper pretty difficult to follow. The abstract is high level enough that it doesn’t actually describe the argument your making in enough detail to assess. Meanwhile, the full text is pretty in the weeds and I got confused a lot. I suspect the paper would benefit from an introduction that tries to bridge this gap and lay out the main arguments / assumptions / claims in 2-3 pages — this would at least benefit my understanding.
Questions that I would want to be answered in that Intro that I’m currently confused by: What is actually doing the work in your arguments? — it seems to me like Sia’s uncertainty about what world W she is in is doing much of the work, but I’m confused. What is the natural language version of the appendix? Proposition 3 in particular seems like one of the first places where I find myself going “huh, that doesn’t seem right.”
Sorry this is pretty messy feedback. It’s late and I didn’t understand this paper very much. Insofar as I am somebody who you want to read + understand +update from your paper, that may be worth addressing. After some combination of skimming and reading, I have not changed my beliefs about the orthogonality thesis or instrumental convergence in response to your paper. Again, I think this is mostly because I didn’t understand key parts of your argument.
This might not be a useful or productive comment, sorry. I found this paper pretty difficult to follow. The abstract is high level enough that it doesn’t actually describe the argument your making in enough detail to assess. Meanwhile, the full text is pretty in the weeds and I got confused a lot. I suspect the paper would benefit from an introduction that tries to bridge this gap and lay out the main arguments / assumptions / claims in 2-3 pages — this would at least benefit my understanding.
Questions that I would want to be answered in that Intro that I’m currently confused by: What is actually doing the work in your arguments? — it seems to me like Sia’s uncertainty about what world W she is in is doing much of the work, but I’m confused. What is the natural language version of the appendix? Proposition 3 in particular seems like one of the first places where I find myself going “huh, that doesn’t seem right.”
Sorry this is pretty messy feedback. It’s late and I didn’t understand this paper very much. Insofar as I am somebody who you want to read + understand +update from your paper, that may be worth addressing. After some combination of skimming and reading, I have not changed my beliefs about the orthogonality thesis or instrumental convergence in response to your paper. Again, I think this is mostly because I didn’t understand key parts of your argument.