You’ve heard of crucial considerations, but have you heard of red herring considerations?
These are considerations that intuitively sound like they could matter a whole lot, but actually no matter how the consideration turns out it doesn’t affect anything decision-relevant.
To solve a problem quickly, it’s important to identify red herring considerations before wasting a bunch of time on them. Sometimes you can even start outlining solutions that turn a bunch of seemingly-crucial considerations into red herring considerations.
For example, it might seem like “what is the right system of ethics” is a crucial consideration for AI alignment (after all, you need to know ethics to write down a utility function), but once you decide to instead aim to design algorithms that allow you to build AI systems for any task you have in mind, that turns into a red herring consideration.
Here’s an example where I argue that, for a specific question, anthropics is a red herring consideration (thus avoiding the question of whether to use SSA or SIA).
You’ve heard of crucial considerations, but have you heard of red herring considerations?
These are considerations that intuitively sound like they could matter a whole lot, but actually no matter how the consideration turns out it doesn’t affect anything decision-relevant.
To solve a problem quickly, it’s important to identify red herring considerations before wasting a bunch of time on them. Sometimes you can even start outlining solutions that turn a bunch of seemingly-crucial considerations into red herring considerations.
For example, it might seem like “what is the right system of ethics” is a crucial consideration for AI alignment (after all, you need to know ethics to write down a utility function), but once you decide to instead aim to design algorithms that allow you to build AI systems for any task you have in mind, that turns into a red herring consideration.
Here’s an example where I argue that, for a specific question, anthropics is a red herring consideration (thus avoiding the question of whether to use SSA or SIA).
Alternate names: sham considerations? insignificant considerations?