Meta: Strong upvote for pulling a specific mistake out and correcting it; this is a good method because in such a high-activity post it would be easy for the discussion to get lost in the comments (especially in the presence of other wrong criticisms).
That being said, I disagree with your recommendation against inclusion in the 2019 review for two reasons:
The flaw doesn’t invalidate the core claim of the essay. More detailed mechanisms for understanding how technical leads are established and sustained at most adjusts the time margins of the model; the updated argument does not call into question whether slow takeoff is a thing or weigh against DSA being achievable.
This kind of change clearly falls within the boundary of reasonable edits to essays which are being included.
I am heartened to hear this. I do agree that the core claim of the essay is not invalidated—“Soft takeoff can still lead to DSA.” However, I do think the core argument of the essay has been overturned, such that it leads to something close to the opposite conclusion: There is a strong automatic force that works to make DSA unlikely to the extent that takeoff is distributed (and distributed = a big part of what it means to be soft, I think).
Basically, I think that if I were to rewrite this post to fix what I now think are errors and give what I now think is the correct view, including uncertainties, it would be a completely different post. In fact, it would be basically this review post that I just wrote! (Well, that plus the arguments for steps 2 and 4 from the original post, which I still stand by.) I guess I’d be happy to do that if that’s what people want.
the opposite conclusion: There is a strong automatic force that works to make DSA unlikely to the extent that takeoff is distributed
By the standards of inclusion, I feel like this is an even better contribution! My mastery of our corpus is hardly complete, but it appears to me until you picked up this line of inquiry deeper interrogation of the circumstances surrounding DSA was sorely lacking on LessWrong. Being able to make more specific claims about causal mechanisms is huge.
I propose a different framing than opposite conclusion: rather you are suggesting some causal mechanism for why a slow takeoff DSA is different in character from FOOM with fewer gigahertz.
I am going to add a review on the original post so this conversation doesn’t get missed in the voting phase.
Meta: Strong upvote for pulling a specific mistake out and correcting it; this is a good method because in such a high-activity post it would be easy for the discussion to get lost in the comments (especially in the presence of other wrong criticisms).
That being said, I disagree with your recommendation against inclusion in the 2019 review for two reasons:
The flaw doesn’t invalidate the core claim of the essay. More detailed mechanisms for understanding how technical leads are established and sustained at most adjusts the time margins of the model; the updated argument does not call into question whether slow takeoff is a thing or weigh against DSA being achievable.
This kind of change clearly falls within the boundary of reasonable edits to essays which are being included.
I am heartened to hear this. I do agree that the core claim of the essay is not invalidated—“Soft takeoff can still lead to DSA.” However, I do think the core argument of the essay has been overturned, such that it leads to something close to the opposite conclusion: There is a strong automatic force that works to make DSA unlikely to the extent that takeoff is distributed (and distributed = a big part of what it means to be soft, I think).
Basically, I think that if I were to rewrite this post to fix what I now think are errors and give what I now think is the correct view, including uncertainties, it would be a completely different post. In fact, it would be basically this review post that I just wrote! (Well, that plus the arguments for steps 2 and 4 from the original post, which I still stand by.) I guess I’d be happy to do that if that’s what people want.
By the standards of inclusion, I feel like this is an even better contribution! My mastery of our corpus is hardly complete, but it appears to me until you picked up this line of inquiry deeper interrogation of the circumstances surrounding DSA was sorely lacking on LessWrong. Being able to make more specific claims about causal mechanisms is huge.
I propose a different framing than opposite conclusion: rather you are suggesting some causal mechanism for why a slow takeoff DSA is different in character from FOOM with fewer gigahertz.
I am going to add a review on the original post so this conversation doesn’t get missed in the voting phase.