What if we think about it the following way? ML researchers range from _theorists_ (who try to produce theories that describe how ML/AI/intelligence works at the deep level and how to build it) to _experimenters_ (who put things together using some theory and lots of trial and error and try to make it perform well on the benchmarks). Most people will be somewhere in between on this spectrum but people focusing on interpretability will be further towards theorists than most of the field.
Now let’s say we boost the theorists and they produce a lot of explanations that make better sense of the state of the art that experimenters have been playing with. The immediate impact of this will be improved understanding of our best models and this is good for safety. However, when the experimenters read these papers, their search space (of architectures, hyperparameters, training regimes, etc.) is reduced and they are now able to search more efficiently. Standing on the shoulders of the new theories they produce even better performing models (however they still incorporate a lot of trial and error because this is what experimenters do).
So what we achieved is better understanding of the current state of the art models combined with new improved state of the art that we still don’t quite understand. It’s not immediately clear whether we’re better off this way. Or is this model too coarse to see what’s going on?
I enjoyed reading the hand-written text from images (although I found it a bit surprising that I did). I feel that the resulting slower reading pace fit the content well and that it allowed me to engage with it better. It was also aesthetically pleasant.
Content-wise I found that it more or less agrees with my experience (I have been meditating every day for ~1 hour for a bit over a month and after that non-regularly). It also gave me some insight in terms of every-day mindfulness and some motivation for resuming regular practice or at least making it more regular.
My favorite quote was the this:
(thanks to @gjm for transcribing it, so I didn’t have to :)