I think the biggest difference between wall-thinking and bridge-thinking here isn’t actually about the size of , but rather how easy is to alter. From a more mathematical standpoint, what matters is the rate of change of with respect to the effort put in. In AI safety, believing is very high is also correlated with a bunch of bridge thinking like “Alignment is incredibly difficult and current techniques have essentially zero chances of working”—i.e .
If I were to sum it up—bridge thinking assumes you need a lot of effort to start to meaningfully reduce from where we currently are. Wall thinking thinks there are marginal gains from the current position.
As an example, let’s take the following hypothetical belief: “If we had really good interpretability tools, then there would be a lot of low-hanging fruit we could pick with those tools. But without those tools we’re operating blindly, and can’t make much progress at all”. By this belief, we are currently in a bridge model—small improvements to current interpretability techniques will yield almost nothing. But if we did develop those good tools, we would now transition to wall thinking—there’s lots of marginal effort that leads to a reduction in by using those tools.
Here is a Claude-generated visualisation of what that would look like, demonstrating what the curves look like in each regime in my mind. This works whether initially starts high or low. Which frame is appropriate would here depend on where you think we currently are on this graph, and is invariant with respect to the initial value of , provided is at least large enough to be concerning.
I think the biggest difference between wall-thinking and bridge-thinking here isn’t actually about the size of
If I were to sum it up—bridge thinking assumes you need a lot of effort to start to meaningfully reduce
As an example, let’s take the following hypothetical belief: “If we had really good interpretability tools, then there would be a lot of low-hanging fruit we could pick with those tools. But without those tools we’re operating blindly, and can’t make much progress at all”. By this belief, we are currently in a bridge model—small improvements to current interpretability techniques will yield almost nothing. But if we did develop those good tools, we would now transition to wall thinking—there’s lots of marginal effort that leads to a reduction in
Here is a Claude-generated visualisation of what that would look like, demonstrating what the curves look like in each regime in my mind. This works whether