This sounds like you’re describing questions whose answers you know some things about. There is a subtle but important difference between knowing the answer, versus knowing something about the answer. It sounds like “direction” is metadata about answers, not the answer itself. In programming, I would liken it to the difference between knowing what type a function will return, versus knowing what value it will return when presented with a particular input. The direction is like the type; the answer itself is like the value.
I often get the impression that Eliezer thinks more abstractly than I tend to, so I find it useful to construct several embarrassingly concrete examples which seem to fit what he’s talking about and try to triangulate from them toward what he’s actually discussing.
What’s the most embarrassingly concrete, eli5 example that might highlight what “direction” is? Maybe we breed two organisms within the same species, and wonder what color the offspring will be. I’m reading “direction” as metadata about the answer, so the “direction” of the answer would be the space of possible colors for the species? I know that whatever color I observe on the offspring will be one of the possible colors for the species unless something went wrong—if it comes out a brand new color, I was wrong about what colors were possible within that species, and if the parents don’t reproduce successfully, I was wrong about the offspring existing at all.
This sounds like you’re describing questions whose answers you know some things about. There is a subtle but important difference between knowing the answer, versus knowing something about the answer. It sounds like “direction” is metadata about answers, not the answer itself. In programming, I would liken it to the difference between knowing what type a function will return, versus knowing what value it will return when presented with a particular input. The direction is like the type; the answer itself is like the value.
I often get the impression that Eliezer thinks more abstractly than I tend to, so I find it useful to construct several embarrassingly concrete examples which seem to fit what he’s talking about and try to triangulate from them toward what he’s actually discussing.
What’s the most embarrassingly concrete, eli5 example that might highlight what “direction” is? Maybe we breed two organisms within the same species, and wonder what color the offspring will be. I’m reading “direction” as metadata about the answer, so the “direction” of the answer would be the space of possible colors for the species? I know that whatever color I observe on the offspring will be one of the possible colors for the species unless something went wrong—if it comes out a brand new color, I was wrong about what colors were possible within that species, and if the parents don’t reproduce successfully, I was wrong about the offspring existing at all.