I like the general thrust here, although I have a different version of this idea, which I would call “minimizing philosophical pre-commitments”. For instance, there is a great deal of debate about whether Bayesian probability is a reasonable philosophical foundation for statistical reasoning. It seems that it would be better, all else equal, for approaches to AI alignment to not hinge on being on the right side of this debate.
I think there are some places where it is hard to avoid pre-commitments. For instance, while this isn’t quite a philosophical pre-commitment, it is probably hard to develop approaches that are simultaneously optimized for short and long timelines. In this case it is probably better to explicitly do case splitting on the two worlds and have some subset of people pursuing approaches that are good in each individual world.
I agree we must make some assumptions or pre-commitments and don’t expect we can avoid them. In particular there are epistemological issues that force our hands and require we make assumptions because complete knowledge of the universe is beyond the capacity we have to know it. I’ve talked about this idea some and I plan to revisit it as part of this work.
I like the general thrust here, although I have a different version of this idea, which I would call “minimizing philosophical pre-commitments”. For instance, there is a great deal of debate about whether Bayesian probability is a reasonable philosophical foundation for statistical reasoning. It seems that it would be better, all else equal, for approaches to AI alignment to not hinge on being on the right side of this debate.
I think there are some places where it is hard to avoid pre-commitments. For instance, while this isn’t quite a philosophical pre-commitment, it is probably hard to develop approaches that are simultaneously optimized for short and long timelines. In this case it is probably better to explicitly do case splitting on the two worlds and have some subset of people pursuing approaches that are good in each individual world.
I agree we must make some assumptions or pre-commitments and don’t expect we can avoid them. In particular there are epistemological issues that force our hands and require we make assumptions because complete knowledge of the universe is beyond the capacity we have to know it. I’ve talked about this idea some and I plan to revisit it as part of this work.