An example: when I first heard the Ought experiments described, I was pretty highly confident how they’d turn out—people would mostly fail to coordinate on any problem without an already-very-obvious factorization. (See here for the kinds of evidence informing that high confidence, though applied to a slightly different question. See here and here for the more general reasoning/world models which underlie that prediction.) From what I’ve heard of the experiments, it seems that that is indeed basically what happened; therefore the experiments provided approximately-zero new information to my model. They were “useless” in that sense.
(I actually think those experiments were worth running just on the small chance that they’d find something very high value, or more likely that the people running them would have some high-value insight, but I’d still say “probably useless” was a reasonable description beforehand.)
I don’t know if Eliezer would agree with this particular example, but I think this is the sort of thing he’s gesturing at.
That one makes sense (to the extent that Eliezer did confidently predict the results), since the main point of the work was to generate information through experiments. I thought the “predictable” part was also meant to apply to a lot of ML work where the main point is to produce new algorithms, but perhaps it was just meant to apply to things like Ought.
An example: when I first heard the Ought experiments described, I was pretty highly confident how they’d turn out—people would mostly fail to coordinate on any problem without an already-very-obvious factorization. (See here for the kinds of evidence informing that high confidence, though applied to a slightly different question. See here and here for the more general reasoning/world models which underlie that prediction.) From what I’ve heard of the experiments, it seems that that is indeed basically what happened; therefore the experiments provided approximately-zero new information to my model. They were “useless” in that sense.
(I actually think those experiments were worth running just on the small chance that they’d find something very high value, or more likely that the people running them would have some high-value insight, but I’d still say “probably useless” was a reasonable description beforehand.)
I don’t know if Eliezer would agree with this particular example, but I think this is the sort of thing he’s gesturing at.
That one makes sense (to the extent that Eliezer did confidently predict the results), since the main point of the work was to generate information through experiments. I thought the “predictable” part was also meant to apply to a lot of ML work where the main point is to produce new algorithms, but perhaps it was just meant to apply to things like Ought.