The obvious reason to form inside views is to form truer beliefs
No? The reason to form inside views is that it enables better research, and I’m surprised this mostly doesn’t feature in your post. Quoting past-you:
Research quality—Doing good research involves having good intuitions and research taste, sometimes called an inside view, about why the research matters and what’s really going on. This conceptual framework guides the many small decisions and trade-offs you make on a daily basis as a researcher
I think this is really important, but it’s worth distinguishing this from ‘is this research agenda ultimately useful’. This is still important in eg pure maths research just for doing good research, and there are areas of AI Safety where you can do ‘good research’ without actually reducing the probability of x-risk.
There’s a longstandingdebate about whether one should defer to some aggregation of experts (an “outside view”), or try to understand the arguments and come to your own conclusion (an “inside view”). This debate mostly focuses on which method tends to arrive at correct conclusions. I am not taking a stance on this debate; I think it’s mostly irrelevant to the problem of doing good research. Research is typically meant to advance the frontiers of human knowledge; this is not the same goal as arriving at correct conclusions. If you want to advance human knowledge, you’re going to need a detailed inside view.
Let’s say that Alice is an expert in AI alignment, and Bob wants to get into the field, and trusts Alice’s judgment. Bob asks Alice what she thinks is most valuable to work on, and she replies, “probably robustness of neural networks”. What might have happened in Alice’s head?
Alice (hopefully) has a detailed internal model of risks from failures of AI alignment, and a sketch of potential solutions that could help avert those risks. Perhaps one cluster of solutions seems particularly valuable to work on. Then, when Bob asks her what work would be valuable, she has to condense all of the information about her solution sketch into a single word or phrase. While “robustness” might be the closest match, it’s certainly not going to convey all of Alice’s information.
What happens if Bob dives straight into a concrete project to improve robustness? I’d expect the project will improve robustness along some axis that is different from what Alice meant, ultimately rendering the improvement useless for alignment. There are just too many constraints and considerations that Alice is using in rendering her final judgment, that Bob is not aware of.
I think Bob should instead spend some time thinking about how a solution to robustness would mean that AI risk has been meaningfully reduced. Once he has a satisfying answer to that, it makes more sense to start a concrete project on improving robustness. In other words, when doing research, use senior researchers as a tool for deciding what to think about, rather than what to believe.
It’s possible that after all this reflection, Bob concludes that impact regularization is more valuable than robustness. The outside view suggests that Alice is more likely to be correct than Bob, given that she has more experience. If Bob had to bet which of them was correct, he should probably bet on Alice. But that’s not the decision he faces: he has to decide what to work on. His options probably look like:
Work on a concrete project in robustness, which has perhaps a 1% chance of making valuable progress on robustness. The probability of valuable work is low since he does not share Alice’s models about how robustness can help with AI alignment.
Work on a concrete project in impact regularization, which has perhaps a 50% chance of making valuable progress on impact regularization.
It’s probably not the case that progress in robustness is 50x more valuable than progress in impact regularization, and so Bob should go with (2). Hence the advice: build a gearsy, inside-viewmodel of AI risk, and think about that model to find solutions.
(Though I should probably edit that section to also mention that Bob could execute on Alice’s research agenda, if Alice is around to mentor him; and that would probably be more directly impactful than either of the other two options.)
Other meta thoughts on inside views
Relatedly, it’s much more important to understandother people’s views than to evaluate them—if I can repeat a full, gears-level model of someone’s view back to them in a way that they endorse , that’s a lot more valuable than figuring out how much I agree or disagree with their various beliefs and conclusions.
[...] having several models lets you compare and contrast them, figure out novel predictions, better engage with technical questions, do much better research, etc
I’m having trouble actually visualizing a scenario where Alice understands Bob’s views (well enough to make novel predictions that Bob endorses, and say how Bob would update upon seeing various bits of evidence), but Alice is unable to evaluate Bob’s view. Do you think this actually happens? Any concrete examples that I can try to visualize?
(Based on later parts of the post maybe you are mostly saying “don’t reject an expert’s view before you’ve tried really hard to understand it and make it something that does work”, which I roughly agree with.)
Forming a “true” inside view—one where you fully understand something from first principles with zero deferring—is wildly impractical.
Yes, clearly true. I don’t think anyone is advocating for this. I would say I have an inside view on bio anchors as a way to predict timelines, but I haven’t looked into the data for Moore’s Law myself and am deferring to others on that.
People often orient to inside views pretty unhealthily.
:’(
What fraction of people who are trying to build inside views do you think have these problems? (Relevant since I often encourage people to do it)
I know some people who do great safety relevant work, despite not having an inside view.
Hmm, I kind of agree in that there are people without inside views who are working on projects that other people with inside views are mentoring them on. I’m not immediately thinking of examples of people without inside views doing independent research that I would call “great safety relevant work”.
(Unless perhaps you’re counting e.g. people who do work on forecasting AGI, without having an inside view on how AGI leads to x-risk? I would say they have a domain-specific inside view on forecasting AGI.)
Forming inside views will happen naturally, and will happen much better alongside actually trying to do things and contribute to safety—you don’t form them by locking yourself in your room for months and meditating on safety!
Idk, I feel like I formed my inside views by locking myself in my room for months and meditating on safety. This did involve reading things other people wrote, and talking with other junior grad students at CHAI who were also orienting to the problem. But I think it did not involve trying to do things and contributing to safety (I did do some of that but I think that was mostly irrelevant to me developing an inside view).
I do agree that if you work on topic X, you will naturally form an inside view on topic X as you get more experience with it. But in AI safety that would look more like “developing a domain-specific inside view on (say) learning from human feedback and its challenges” rather than an overall view on AI x-risk and how to address it. (In fact it seems like the way to get experience with an overall view on AI x-risk and how to address it is to meditate on it, because you can’t just run experiments on AGI.)
Inside views lie on a spectrum. You will never form a “true” inside view, but conversely, not having a true inside view doesn’t mean you’re failing, or that you shouldn’t even try. You want to aim to get closer to having an inside view! And making progress here is great and worthy
Strong +1
Aim for domain specific inside views. As an interpretability researcher, it’s much more important to me to have an inside view re how to make interpretability progress and how this might interact with AI X-risk, than it is for me to have an inside view on timelines, the worth of conceptual alignment work, etc.
Yes, once you’ve decided that you’re going to be an interpretability researcher, then you should focus on an interpretability-specific inside view. But “what should I work on” is also an important decision, and benefits from a broader inside view on a variety of topics. (I do agree though that it is a pretty reasonable strategy to just pick a domain based on deference and then only build a domain-specific inside view.)
Concrete advice
inside views are about zooming in. Concretely, in this framework, inside views look like starting with some high-level confusing claim, and then breaking it down into sub-claims, breaking those down into sub-claims, etc.
I agree that this is a decent way to measure your inside view—like, “how big can you make this zooming-in tree before you hit a claim where you have to defer” is a good metric for “how detailed your inside view is”.
I’m less clear on whether this is a good way to build an inside view, because a major source of difficulty for this strategy is in coming up with the right decomposition into sub-claims. Especially in the earlier stages of building an inside view, even your first and second levels of decomposition are going to be bad and will change over time. (For example, even for something like “why work on AI safety”, Buck and I have different decompositions.) It does seem more useful once you’ve got a relatively fleshed out inside view, as a way to extend it further—at this point I can in fact write out a tree of claims and expect that they will stay mostly the same (at the higher levels) after a few years, and so the leaves that I get to probably are good things to investigate.
Exercises
These seem great and I’d strongly recommend people try them out :)
Thanks for the thoughts, and sorry for dropping the ball on responding to this!
I appreciate the pushback, and broadly agree with most of your points.
In particular, I strongly agree that if you’re trying to form the ability to be a research lead in alignment (and less strongly, be an RE/otherwise notably contribute to research) that forming an inside view is important, totally independently from how well it tracks the truth, and agree that I undersold that in my post.
In part, I think the audience I had in mind is different from you? I see this as partially aimed at proto-alignment researchers, but also a lot of people who are just trying to figure out whether to work on it/how to get into the field, including in less technical roles (policy, ops, community building), where I also have often seen a strong push for inside views. I strongly agree that if someone is actively trying to be an alignment researcher that forming inside views is useful. Though it seems pretty fine to do this on the job/after starting a PhD program, and in parallel to trying to do research under a mentor.
don’t reject an expert’s view before you’ve tried really hard to understand it and make it something that does work
I’m pretty happy with this paraphrase of what I mean. Most of what I’m pointing to is using the mental motion of trying to understand things rather than the mental motion of trying to evaluate things, I agree that being literally unable to evaluate would be pretty surprising.
One way that I think it’s importantly different is that it feels more comfortable to maintain black boxes when trying to understand something than when trying to evaluate something. Eg, I want to understand why people in the field have short timelines. I get to the point where I see how if I bought scaling laws continuing then everything follows. I am not sure why people believe this, and personally feel pretty confused, but expect other people to be much more informed than me. This feels like an instance where I understand why they hold their view fairly well, and maybe feel comfortable deferring to them, but don’t feel like I can really evaluate their view?
What fraction of people who are trying to build inside views do you think have these problems? (Relevant since I often encourage people to do it)
Honestly I’m not sure—I definitely did, and have had some anecdata of people telling me they found my posts/claims extremely useful, or that they found these things pretty stressful, but obviously there’s major selection bias. This is also just an objectively hard thing that I think many people find overwhelming (especially when tied to their social identity, status, career plans, etc). I’d guess maybe 40%? I expect framing matters a lot, and that eg pointing people to my posts may help?
I’m not immediately thinking of examples of people without inside views doing independent research that I would call “great safety relevant work”.
Agreed, I’d have pretty different advice for people actively trying to do impactful independent research.
Idk, I feel like I formed my inside views by locking myself in my room for months and meditating on safety.
Interesting, thanks for the data point! That’s very different from the kinds of things that work well for me (possibly just because I find locking myself in my room for a long time hard and exhausting), and suggests my advice may not generalise that well. Idk, people should do what works for them. I’ve found that spending time in the field resulted in me being exposed to a lot of different perspectives and research agendas, forming clearer views on how to do research, flaws in different approaches, etc. And all of this has helped me figure out my own views on things. Though I would like to have much better and clearer views than I currently do.
also a lot of people who are just trying to figure out whether to work on it/how to get into the field, including in less technical roles (policy, ops, community building), where I also have often seen a strong push for inside views.
Oh wild. I assumed this must be directed at researchers since obviously they’re the ones who most need to form inside views. Might be worth adding a note at the top saying who your audience is.
For that audience I’d endorse something like “they should understand the arguments well enough that they can respond sensibly to novel questions”.
One proxy that I’ve considered previously is “can they describe an experiment (in enough detail that a programmer could go implement it today) that would mechanistically demonstrate a goal-directed agent pursuing some convergent instrumental subgoal”.
I think people often call this level of understanding an “inside view”, and so I feel like I still endorse what-people-actually-mean, even though it’s quantitatively much less understanding than you’d want to actively do research.
(Though it also wouldn’t shock me if people were saying “everyone in the less technical roles needs to have a detailed take on exactly which agendas are most promising and why and this take should be robust to criticism from senior AI safety people”. I would disagree with that.)
This feels like an instance where I understand why they hold their view fairly well, and maybe feel comfortable deferring to them, but don’t feel like I can really evaluate their view?
I would have said you don’t understand an aspect of their view, and that’s exactly the aspect you can’t evaluate. (And then if you try to make a decision, the uncertainty from that aspect propagates into uncertainty about the decision.) But this is mostly semantics.
I’d guess maybe 40%? I expect framing matters a lot, and that eg pointing people to my posts may help?
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
I’ve found that spending time in the field resulted in me being exposed to a lot of different perspectives and research agendas, forming clearer views on how to do research, flaws in different approaches, etc.
Tbc I did all of this too—by reading a lot of papers and blog posts and thinking about them.
(The main exception is “how to do research”, that I think I learned from just practicing doing research + advice from my advisors.)
(Copied from the EA Forum)
Lots of thoughts on this post:
Value of inside views
No? The reason to form inside views is that it enables better research, and I’m surprised this mostly doesn’t feature in your post. Quoting past-you:
Quoting myself:
(Though I should probably edit that section to also mention that Bob could execute on Alice’s research agenda, if Alice is around to mentor him; and that would probably be more directly impactful than either of the other two options.)
Other meta thoughts on inside views
I’m having trouble actually visualizing a scenario where Alice understands Bob’s views (well enough to make novel predictions that Bob endorses, and say how Bob would update upon seeing various bits of evidence), but Alice is unable to evaluate Bob’s view. Do you think this actually happens? Any concrete examples that I can try to visualize?
(Based on later parts of the post maybe you are mostly saying “don’t reject an expert’s view before you’ve tried really hard to understand it and make it something that does work”, which I roughly agree with.)
Yes, clearly true. I don’t think anyone is advocating for this. I would say I have an inside view on bio anchors as a way to predict timelines, but I haven’t looked into the data for Moore’s Law myself and am deferring to others on that.
:’(
What fraction of people who are trying to build inside views do you think have these problems? (Relevant since I often encourage people to do it)
Hmm, I kind of agree in that there are people without inside views who are working on projects that other people with inside views are mentoring them on. I’m not immediately thinking of examples of people without inside views doing independent research that I would call “great safety relevant work”.
(Unless perhaps you’re counting e.g. people who do work on forecasting AGI, without having an inside view on how AGI leads to x-risk? I would say they have a domain-specific inside view on forecasting AGI.)
Idk, I feel like I formed my inside views by locking myself in my room for months and meditating on safety. This did involve reading things other people wrote, and talking with other junior grad students at CHAI who were also orienting to the problem. But I think it did not involve trying to do things and contributing to safety (I did do some of that but I think that was mostly irrelevant to me developing an inside view).
I do agree that if you work on topic X, you will naturally form an inside view on topic X as you get more experience with it. But in AI safety that would look more like “developing a domain-specific inside view on (say) learning from human feedback and its challenges” rather than an overall view on AI x-risk and how to address it. (In fact it seems like the way to get experience with an overall view on AI x-risk and how to address it is to meditate on it, because you can’t just run experiments on AGI.)
Strong +1
Yes, once you’ve decided that you’re going to be an interpretability researcher, then you should focus on an interpretability-specific inside view. But “what should I work on” is also an important decision, and benefits from a broader inside view on a variety of topics. (I do agree though that it is a pretty reasonable strategy to just pick a domain based on deference and then only build a domain-specific inside view.)
Concrete advice
I agree that this is a decent way to measure your inside view—like, “how big can you make this zooming-in tree before you hit a claim where you have to defer” is a good metric for “how detailed your inside view is”.
I’m less clear on whether this is a good way to build an inside view, because a major source of difficulty for this strategy is in coming up with the right decomposition into sub-claims. Especially in the earlier stages of building an inside view, even your first and second levels of decomposition are going to be bad and will change over time. (For example, even for something like “why work on AI safety”, Buck and I have different decompositions.) It does seem more useful once you’ve got a relatively fleshed out inside view, as a way to extend it further—at this point I can in fact write out a tree of claims and expect that they will stay mostly the same (at the higher levels) after a few years, and so the leaves that I get to probably are good things to investigate.
Exercises
These seem great and I’d strongly recommend people try them out :)
Thanks for the thoughts, and sorry for dropping the ball on responding to this!
I appreciate the pushback, and broadly agree with most of your points.
In particular, I strongly agree that if you’re trying to form the ability to be a research lead in alignment (and less strongly, be an RE/otherwise notably contribute to research) that forming an inside view is important, totally independently from how well it tracks the truth, and agree that I undersold that in my post.
In part, I think the audience I had in mind is different from you? I see this as partially aimed at proto-alignment researchers, but also a lot of people who are just trying to figure out whether to work on it/how to get into the field, including in less technical roles (policy, ops, community building), where I also have often seen a strong push for inside views. I strongly agree that if someone is actively trying to be an alignment researcher that forming inside views is useful. Though it seems pretty fine to do this on the job/after starting a PhD program, and in parallel to trying to do research under a mentor.
I’m pretty happy with this paraphrase of what I mean. Most of what I’m pointing to is using the mental motion of trying to understand things rather than the mental motion of trying to evaluate things, I agree that being literally unable to evaluate would be pretty surprising.
One way that I think it’s importantly different is that it feels more comfortable to maintain black boxes when trying to understand something than when trying to evaluate something. Eg, I want to understand why people in the field have short timelines. I get to the point where I see how if I bought scaling laws continuing then everything follows. I am not sure why people believe this, and personally feel pretty confused, but expect other people to be much more informed than me. This feels like an instance where I understand why they hold their view fairly well, and maybe feel comfortable deferring to them, but don’t feel like I can really evaluate their view?
Honestly I’m not sure—I definitely did, and have had some anecdata of people telling me they found my posts/claims extremely useful, or that they found these things pretty stressful, but obviously there’s major selection bias. This is also just an objectively hard thing that I think many people find overwhelming (especially when tied to their social identity, status, career plans, etc). I’d guess maybe 40%? I expect framing matters a lot, and that eg pointing people to my posts may help?
Agreed, I’d have pretty different advice for people actively trying to do impactful independent research.
Interesting, thanks for the data point! That’s very different from the kinds of things that work well for me (possibly just because I find locking myself in my room for a long time hard and exhausting), and suggests my advice may not generalise that well. Idk, people should do what works for them. I’ve found that spending time in the field resulted in me being exposed to a lot of different perspectives and research agendas, forming clearer views on how to do research, flaws in different approaches, etc. And all of this has helped me figure out my own views on things. Though I would like to have much better and clearer views than I currently do.
Oh wild. I assumed this must be directed at researchers since obviously they’re the ones who most need to form inside views. Might be worth adding a note at the top saying who your audience is.
For that audience I’d endorse something like “they should understand the arguments well enough that they can respond sensibly to novel questions”.
One proxy that I’ve considered previously is “can they describe an experiment (in enough detail that a programmer could go implement it today) that would mechanistically demonstrate a goal-directed agent pursuing some convergent instrumental subgoal”.
I think people often call this level of understanding an “inside view”, and so I feel like I still endorse what-people-actually-mean, even though it’s quantitatively much less understanding than you’d want to actively do research.
(Though it also wouldn’t shock me if people were saying “everyone in the less technical roles needs to have a detailed take on exactly which agendas are most promising and why and this take should be robust to criticism from senior AI safety people”. I would disagree with that.)
I would have said you don’t understand an aspect of their view, and that’s exactly the aspect you can’t evaluate. (And then if you try to make a decision, the uncertainty from that aspect propagates into uncertainty about the decision.) But this is mostly semantics.
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
Tbc I did all of this too—by reading a lot of papers and blog posts and thinking about them.
(The main exception is “how to do research”, that I think I learned from just practicing doing research + advice from my advisors.)