I guess another point here is that we won’t know how different (for example) our results when sampling from the training distribution will be from our results if we just run the network on random noise and then intervene on neurons; this would be an interesting thing to experimentally test. If they’re very similar, this neatly sidesteps the problem of deciding which one is more “natural”, and if they’re very different then that’s also interesting
I guess another point here is that we won’t know how different (for example) our results when sampling from the training distribution will be from our results if we just run the network on random noise and then intervene on neurons; this would be an interesting thing to experimentally test. If they’re very similar, this neatly sidesteps the problem of deciding which one is more “natural”, and if they’re very different then that’s also interesting