Thank you Erik, that was super valuable feedback and gives some food for thought.
It also seems to me that humans being suboptimal planners and not knowing everything the AI knows seem like the hardest (and most informative) problems in IRL. I’m curious what you’d think about this approach for adressing the suboptimal planner sub-problem : “Include models from coginitive psychology about human decision in IRL, to allow IRL to better understand the decision process.” This would give IRL more realistic assumptions about the human planner and possibly allow it to understand it’s irrationalites and get to the values which drive behaviour.
Also do you have a pointer for something to read on preference comparisons?
I agree that focusing too much on gathering data now would be a mistake. I believe thinking about data for IRL now is mostly valuable to identify challenges which make IRL hard. Then we can try to develop algorithms that solve these challenges or find out IRL is not a tractable solution for alignment.