I think I should not have used the laptop example, it’s not really communicating what I meant it to communicate. I was trying to convey “mechanistic transparency is hard” rather than “mechanistic transparency requires a single person to understand everything”.
I guess I still don’t understand why you believe mechanistic transparency is hard. The way I want to use the term, as far as I can tell, laptops are acceptably mechanistically transparent to the companies that create them. Do you think I’m wrong?
No, which is why I want to stop using the example.
(The counterfactual I was thinking of was more like “imagine we handed a laptop to 19th-century scientists, can they mechanistically understand it?” But even that isn’t a good analogy, it overstates the difficulty.)
I think I should not have used the laptop example, it’s not really communicating what I meant it to communicate. I was trying to convey “mechanistic transparency is hard” rather than “mechanistic transparency requires a single person to understand everything”.
I guess I still don’t understand why you believe mechanistic transparency is hard. The way I want to use the term, as far as I can tell, laptops are acceptably mechanistically transparent to the companies that create them. Do you think I’m wrong?
No, which is why I want to stop using the example.
(The counterfactual I was thinking of was more like “imagine we handed a laptop to 19th-century scientists, can they mechanistically understand it?” But even that isn’t a good analogy, it overstates the difficulty.)