Treat exposition as a scientific field of inquiry: try to open up the black box of what makes an explanation good and come up with techniques or “building blocks” of good explanations. Tim Gowers is the best example I know of, with his blog posts, YouTube videos, and the Tricki.
Thanks for reminding me of these resources, I think I knew about all of them at some point then forgot.
This makes me worried about the encouragement and “throw money” strategies being the main strategies: both are important, but if we don’t also employ other strategies, then we will end up with a bunch of mediocre explanations.
Strong agree. That’s my main problem with the current push for more distillation (I mentioned the problem to John at some point). Distillation is just plain hard, and most distillation I have seen around here (including a fair bunch of mine) has been useful as a learning exercise but completely useless for most other people.
Also alignment is particularly difficult to distill and explain IMO, for epistemological reasons that I will go into in a post in the near future.
This leaves the “exposition as science” strategy, which I believe is the best main strategy to use, along with the other three strategies. I have not said much concretely about what kinds of work this strategy would involve. I hope to do this in a future post.
That’s very exciting to me! I personally study how science worked and failed historically and epistemic progress and vigilance in general to make alignment go faster and better, so I’ll be interested to discuss exposition as a science with you (and maybe give feedback on your follow-up posts if you want. ;) )
That’s very exciting to me! I personally study how science worked and failed historically and epistemic progress and vigilance in general to make alignment go faster and better, so I’ll be interested to discuss exposition as a science with you (and maybe give feedback on your follow-up posts if you want. ;) )
Cool! I just shared my draft post with you that goes into detail about the “exposition as science” strategy (ETA for everyone else: the post has now been published); if that post seems interesting to you, I’d be happy to discuss more with you (or you can just leave comments on the post if that is easier).
Thanks for the post!
Thanks for reminding me of these resources, I think I knew about all of them at some point then forgot.
Strong agree. That’s my main problem with the current push for more distillation (I mentioned the problem to John at some point). Distillation is just plain hard, and most distillation I have seen around here (including a fair bunch of mine) has been useful as a learning exercise but completely useless for most other people.
Also alignment is particularly difficult to distill and explain IMO, for epistemological reasons that I will go into in a post in the near future.
That’s very exciting to me! I personally study how science worked and failed historically and epistemic progress and vigilance in general to make alignment go faster and better, so I’ll be interested to discuss exposition as a science with you (and maybe give feedback on your follow-up posts if you want. ;) )
Cool! I just shared my draft post with you that goes into detail about the “exposition as science” strategy (ETA for everyone else: the post has now been published); if that post seems interesting to you, I’d be happy to discuss more with you (or you can just leave comments on the post if that is easier).
Thanks!
I will look at the post soonish. Sorry for the delay in answering, I was in holidays this week. ^^