Interesting. Reading the different paragraphs I am somewhat confused on how you classify thought experiments: part of engineering, part of philosophy, or third thing by itself?
I’d be curious to see you expand on following question: if we treat thought experiments as not being a philosophical technique, what other techniques or insights does philosophy have to offer to alignment?
Another comment: you write
When thinking about safety risks from ML, there are two common approaches, which I’ll call the Engineering approach and the Philosophy approach.
My recent critique here (and I expand on this in the full paper) is that the x-risk community is not in fact using a broad engineering approach to ML safety at all. What is commonly used instead is a much more narrow ML research approach, the approach which sees every ML safety problem as a potential ML research problem. On the engineering side, things need to get much more multi-disciplinary.
Interesting. Reading the different paragraphs I am somewhat confused on how you classify thought experiments: part of engineering, part of philosophy, or third thing by itself?
I’d be curious to see you expand on following question: if we treat thought experiments as not being a philosophical technique, what other techniques or insights does philosophy have to offer to alignment?
Another comment: you write
My recent critique here (and I expand on this in the full paper) is that the x-risk community is not in fact using a broad engineering approach to ML safety at all. What is commonly used instead is a much more narrow ML research approach, the approach which sees every ML safety problem as a potential ML research problem. On the engineering side, things need to get much more multi-disciplinary.