The conceptual work I was gesturing at here is more Paul’s work, since MIRI’s work (afaik) is not really neural net-focused. It’s true that Paul’s work also doesn’t assume a literal worst case; it’s a very fuzzy concept I’m gesturing at here. It’s more like, Paul’s research process is to a) come up with some procedure, b) try to think of any “plausible” set of empirical outcomes that cause the procedure to fail, and c) modify the procedure to try to address that case. (The slipperiness comes in at the definition of “plausible” here, but the basic spirit of it is to “solve for every case” in the way theoretical CS typically aims to do in algorithm design, rather than “solve for the case we’ll in fact encounter.”)
The conceptual work I was gesturing at here is more Paul’s work, since MIRI’s work (afaik) is not really neural net-focused. It’s true that Paul’s work also doesn’t assume a literal worst case; it’s a very fuzzy concept I’m gesturing at here. It’s more like, Paul’s research process is to a) come up with some procedure, b) try to think of any “plausible” set of empirical outcomes that cause the procedure to fail, and c) modify the procedure to try to address that case. (The slipperiness comes in at the definition of “plausible” here, but the basic spirit of it is to “solve for every case” in the way theoretical CS typically aims to do in algorithm design, rather than “solve for the case we’ll in fact encounter.”)