Yeah, that’s a bit confusing. I think technically, yes, IDA is iterated distillation and amplification and that Iterated Amplification is just IA. However, IIRC many people referred to Paul Christiano’s research agenda as IDA even though his sequence is called Iterated amplification, so I stuck to the abbreviation that I saw more often while also sticking to the ‘official’ name. (I also buried a comment on this in footnote 6)
I think lately, I’ve mostly seen people refer to the agenda and ideas as Iterated Amplification. (And IIRC I also think the amplification is the more relevant part.)
I agree that it’s very not ideal and maybe I should just switch it to Iterated Distillation and Amplification :/
Ah that sounds reasonable. As a stickler about abbreviations, I’ll just add that if you do want to stick with “IDA” and “Iterated Amplification” then it seems a little odd to use the phrase “stands for” to connect the two. (Since the D in “IDA” does not stand for anything in “Iterated Amplification”.)
EDIT: My inner pedant would be satisfied if this was simply worded as something like, “IDA stands for Iterated Distillation and Amplification, which we will refer to as Iterated Amplification for short.” (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether my inner pedant is your target audience. ;-) )
Copied from my comment on this from the EA forum:
I agree that it’s very not ideal and maybe I should just switch it to Iterated Distillation and Amplification :/
Ah that sounds reasonable. As a stickler about abbreviations, I’ll just add that if you do want to stick with “IDA” and “Iterated Amplification” then it seems a little odd to use the phrase “stands for” to connect the two. (Since the D in “IDA” does not stand for anything in “Iterated Amplification”.)
EDIT: My inner pedant would be satisfied if this was simply worded as something like, “IDA stands for Iterated Distillation and Amplification, which we will refer to as Iterated Amplification for short.” (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether my inner pedant is your target audience. ;-) )