Studying early cosmolog has a lot of the same epistemic problems as AI safety. You can’t do direct experiment. You can’t observe what’s going on. You have to extrapolate anything you know far beyond where this knolage is trustworthy.
By early cosmology I mean anything before recombination (when the matter transfomed from plasma to gas, and the uinverse became transparent to light) but especially anything to do with cosmic inflation or compeeting theories, or stuff about how it all started, or is cyclic, etc.
Unfortunatly I don’t know what lessons we can learn from cosmology. As far as I know they don’t know how to deal with this either. I worked in this field during my PhD and as far as I could see, everyone just used their personal intuission. There where som spectacular disagreement about how to apply probability to world trijectories, but very litte atempts to to solve this issue. I did not see any meta discussions, or people with diffrent intuissions trying to crux it out. But just because this things did not happen infront of me, don’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Studying early cosmolog has a lot of the same epistemic problems as AI safety. You can’t do direct experiment. You can’t observe what’s going on. You have to extrapolate anything you know far beyond where this knolage is trustworthy.
By early cosmology I mean anything before recombination (when the matter transfomed from plasma to gas, and the uinverse became transparent to light) but especially anything to do with cosmic inflation or compeeting theories, or stuff about how it all started, or is cyclic, etc.
Unfortunatly I don’t know what lessons we can learn from cosmology. As far as I know they don’t know how to deal with this either. I worked in this field during my PhD and as far as I could see, everyone just used their personal intuission. There where som spectacular disagreement about how to apply probability to world trijectories, but very litte atempts to to solve this issue. I did not see any meta discussions, or people with diffrent intuissions trying to crux it out. But just because this things did not happen infront of me, don’t mean it doesn’t happen.