Ngl I did not fully understand this, but to be clear I don’t think understanding alignment through the lense of agency is “excessively abstract.” In fact I think I’d agree with the implicit default view that it’s largely the single most productive lense to look through. My objection to the status quo is that it seems like the scale/ontology/lense/whatever I was describing is getting 0% of the research attention whereas perhaps it should be getting 10 or 20%.
Not sure this analogy works, but if NIH was spending $10B on cancer research, I would (prima facie, as a layperson) want >$0 but probably <$2B spent on looking at cancer as an atomic-scale phenomenon, and maybe some amount at an even lower-scale scale
yeah I was probably too abstract in my reply—to rephrase: a thermostat (or other extremely small control system) is a perfectly valid example of agency. it’s not dangerously strong agency or any such thing. but my point is really to say that you’re on the right track here, looking at the micro-scale versions of things is very promising.
Ngl I did not fully understand this, but to be clear I don’t think understanding alignment through the lense of agency is “excessively abstract.” In fact I think I’d agree with the implicit default view that it’s largely the single most productive lense to look through. My objection to the status quo is that it seems like the scale/ontology/lense/whatever I was describing is getting 0% of the research attention whereas perhaps it should be getting 10 or 20%.
Not sure this analogy works, but if NIH was spending $10B on cancer research, I would (prima facie, as a layperson) want >$0 but probably <$2B spent on looking at cancer as an atomic-scale phenomenon, and maybe some amount at an even lower-scale scale
yeah I was probably too abstract in my reply—to rephrase: a thermostat (or other extremely small control system) is a perfectly valid example of agency. it’s not dangerously strong agency or any such thing. but my point is really to say that you’re on the right track here, looking at the micro-scale versions of things is very promising.