This is probably the best argument for why you should care about the surface-level analogy, but I still don’t find it compelling because you need quite different kinds of domain expertise when thinking about how air conditioners work compared to what you need for AI alignment work.
Many critics seem to be concerned about whether people working in alignment have their heads lost in clouds of abstraction or get proper contact with reality. This intuitively seems like it would be tested by whether the examples provided lack direct experience.
Even just a little bit of domain expertise is useful! I understand your point, and even agree to some extent, but I think it’s also great that others are discussing the object-level details of “the surface-level analogy”. Both the argument using the analogy, and the analogy itself, seem like potentially fruitful topics to discuss.
This is probably the best argument for why you should care about the surface-level analogy, but I still don’t find it compelling because you need quite different kinds of domain expertise when thinking about how air conditioners work compared to what you need for AI alignment work.
Many critics seem to be concerned about whether people working in alignment have their heads lost in clouds of abstraction or get proper contact with reality. This intuitively seems like it would be tested by whether the examples provided lack direct experience.
Even just a little bit of domain expertise is useful! I understand your point, and even agree to some extent, but I think it’s also great that others are discussing the object-level details of “the surface-level analogy”. Both the argument using the analogy, and the analogy itself, seem like potentially fruitful topics to discuss.