I began reading this charitably (unaware of whatever inside baseball is potentially going on, and seems to be alluded to), but to be honest struggled after “X” seemed to really want someone (Eliezer) to admit they’re “not smart”? I’m not sure why that would be relevant.
I think I found these lines especially confusing, if you want to explain:
“I just hope that people can generalize from “alignment is hard” to “generalized AI capabilities are hard”.
Is capability supposed to be hard for similar reasons as alignment? Can you expand/link? The only argument I can think of relating the two (which I think is a bad one) is “machines will have to solve their own alignment problem to become capable.”Eliezer is invalidating the second part of this but not the first.
This would be a pretty useless machiavellian strategy, so I’m assuming you’re saying it’s happening for other reasons? Maybe self-deception? Can you explain?Eliezer thinks that OpenAI will try to make things go faster rather than slower, but this is plainly inconsistent with things like the state of vitamin D research
This just made me go “wha” at first but my guess now is that this and the bits above it around speech recognition seem to be pointing at some AI winter-esque (or even tech stagnation) beliefs? Is this right?
It’s worth noting that David Friedman’s Price Theory clearly states this in the very first chapter, just three paragraphs down:
I don’t think it counts as a standard textbook, but it is meant to be a textbook.
On the whole, I think it’s perfectly okay for economists to mostly ignore how the equilibrium is achieved, since like you pointed out, there are so many juicy results popping out from just the fact that they are achieved on average.
Also, I enjoyed the examples in your post!