Man, I would not call the technique you described “mainline prediction”. It also seems kinda inconsistent with Vaniver’s usage; his writing suggests that a person only has one mainline at a time which seems odd for this technique.
Vaniver, is this what you meant?
Uh, I inherited “mainline” from Eliezer’s usage in the dialogue, and am guessing that his reasoning is following a process sort of like mine and John’s. My natural word for it is a ‘particle’, from particle filtering, as linked in various places, which I think is consistent with John’s description. I’m further guessing that Eliezer’s noticed more constraints / implied inconsistencies, and is somewhat better at figuring out which variables to drop, so that his cloud is narrower than mine / more generates ‘mainline predictions’ than ‘probability distributions’.
If so, my new answer is that I and others do in fact talk about “mainline predictions”—for me, there was that whole section talking about natural language debate as an alignment strategy.
Do you feel like you do this ‘sometimes’, or ‘basically always’? Maybe it would be productive for me to reread the dialogue (or at least part of it) and sort sections / comments by how much they feel like they’re coming from this vs. some other source.
As a specific thing that I have in mind, I think there’s a habit of thinking / discourse that philosophy trains, which is having separate senses for “views in consideration” and “what I believe”, and thinking that statements should be considered against all views in consideration, even ones that you don’t believe. This seems pretty good in some respects (if you begin by disbelieving a view incorrectly, your habits nevertheless gather you lots of evidence about it, which can cause you to then correctly believe it), and pretty questionable in other respects (conversations between Alice and Bob now have to include them shadowboxing with everyone else in the broader discourse, as Alice is asking herself “what would Carol say in response to that?” to things that Bob says to her).
When I imagine dialogues generated by people who are both sometimes doing the mainline thing and sometimes doing the ‘represent the whole discourse’ thing, they look pretty different from dialogues generated by people who are both only doing the mainline thing. [And also from dialogues generated by both people only doing the ‘represent the whole discourse’ thing, of course.]
Do you feel like you do this ‘sometimes’, or ‘basically always’?
I don’t know what “this” refers to. If the referent is “have a concrete example in mind”, then I do that frequently but not always. I do it a ton when I’m not very knowledgeable and learning about a thing; I do it less as my mastery of a subject increases. (Examples: when I was initially learning addition, I used the concrete example of holding up three fingers and then counting up two more to compute 3 + 2 = 5, which I do not do any more. When I first learned recursion, I used to explicitly run through an execution trace to ensure my program would work, now I do not.)
If the referent is “make statements that reflect my beliefs”, then it depends on context, but in the context of these dialogues, I’m always doing that. (Whereas when I’m writing for the newsletter, I’m more often trying to represent the whole discourse, though the “opinion” sections are still entirely my beliefs.)
Uh, I inherited “mainline” from Eliezer’s usage in the dialogue, and am guessing that his reasoning is following a process sort of like mine and John’s. My natural word for it is a ‘particle’, from particle filtering, as linked in various places, which I think is consistent with John’s description. I’m further guessing that Eliezer’s noticed more constraints / implied inconsistencies, and is somewhat better at figuring out which variables to drop, so that his cloud is narrower than mine / more generates ‘mainline predictions’ than ‘probability distributions’.
Do you feel like you do this ‘sometimes’, or ‘basically always’? Maybe it would be productive for me to reread the dialogue (or at least part of it) and sort sections / comments by how much they feel like they’re coming from this vs. some other source.
As a specific thing that I have in mind, I think there’s a habit of thinking / discourse that philosophy trains, which is having separate senses for “views in consideration” and “what I believe”, and thinking that statements should be considered against all views in consideration, even ones that you don’t believe. This seems pretty good in some respects (if you begin by disbelieving a view incorrectly, your habits nevertheless gather you lots of evidence about it, which can cause you to then correctly believe it), and pretty questionable in other respects (conversations between Alice and Bob now have to include them shadowboxing with everyone else in the broader discourse, as Alice is asking herself “what would Carol say in response to that?” to things that Bob says to her).
When I imagine dialogues generated by people who are both sometimes doing the mainline thing and sometimes doing the ‘represent the whole discourse’ thing, they look pretty different from dialogues generated by people who are both only doing the mainline thing. [And also from dialogues generated by both people only doing the ‘represent the whole discourse’ thing, of course.]
I don’t know what “this” refers to. If the referent is “have a concrete example in mind”, then I do that frequently but not always. I do it a ton when I’m not very knowledgeable and learning about a thing; I do it less as my mastery of a subject increases. (Examples: when I was initially learning addition, I used the concrete example of holding up three fingers and then counting up two more to compute 3 + 2 = 5, which I do not do any more. When I first learned recursion, I used to explicitly run through an execution trace to ensure my program would work, now I do not.)
If the referent is “make statements that reflect my beliefs”, then it depends on context, but in the context of these dialogues, I’m always doing that. (Whereas when I’m writing for the newsletter, I’m more often trying to represent the whole discourse, though the “opinion” sections are still entirely my beliefs.)