What I like about this thread, and why I’m worried about people reading this post and updating away from thinking that sufficiently powerful processes that don’t look like what we think are dangerous is safe, is that it helps make clear that Rohin seems to be making an argument that hinges on leaky or even confused abstractions. I’m not sure any of the rest of us have much better abstractions to offer that aren’t leaky, and I want to encourage what Rohin does in this post of thinking through the implications of the abstractions he’s using to draw conclusions that are specific enough to be critiqued, because through a process like this we can get a clearer idea of where we have shared confusion and then work to resolve it.
The argument Rohin is responding to also rests on leaky abstractions, I would argue.
At the end of the day sometimes the best approach, if there aren’t any good abstractions in a particular domain, is to set aside your abstractions and look directly at the object level.
If there is a fairly simple, robust FAI design out there, and we rule out the swath of design space it resides in based on an incorrect inference from a leaky abstraction, that would be a bad outcome.
What I like about this thread, and why I’m worried about people reading this post and updating away from thinking that sufficiently powerful processes that don’t look like what we think are dangerous is safe, is that it helps make clear that Rohin seems to be making an argument that hinges on leaky or even confused abstractions. I’m not sure any of the rest of us have much better abstractions to offer that aren’t leaky, and I want to encourage what Rohin does in this post of thinking through the implications of the abstractions he’s using to draw conclusions that are specific enough to be critiqued, because through a process like this we can get a clearer idea of where we have shared confusion and then work to resolve it.
The argument Rohin is responding to also rests on leaky abstractions, I would argue.
At the end of the day sometimes the best approach, if there aren’t any good abstractions in a particular domain, is to set aside your abstractions and look directly at the object level.
If there is a fairly simple, robust FAI design out there, and we rule out the swath of design space it resides in based on an incorrect inference from a leaky abstraction, that would be a bad outcome.