One reason is that the Shoggoth will be able to use lots of CoT to think, whereas the Face never gets to do that—it just has to see what the Shoggoth did and then write an output. so the Face should be bad at reasoning/thinking/System2. This doesn’t by itself prevent the Face from being able to modify the correct solution to insert a backdoor, but it helps—modifying a correct solution to insert a backdoor is sometimes trivial but often difficult, difficult in the ‘you have to think about it for a bit’ sense, and in those cases the Face just won’t be able to do it.
Another reason is that the shoggoth and face will often need to coordinate to do the misaligned thing. E.g. even if the face is adept at inserting vulnerabilities, some proposed correct solutions will be easier to modify to insert vulnerabilities than others, and so both shoggoth and face will get higher scores if the shoggoth steers towards the solutions that are easier to modify to insert vulnerabilities. Moreover, by default it’s easier for the face if the shoggoth is transparent about this—if it says e.g. ‘OK here’s a draft solution but this seems like it might be difficult to modify to insert vulnerabilities, hold on let me think for a bit, … ok try this one instead, it has easily-modifiable-feature-X’ because that helps the Face do its job.
...I probably have other reasons which are just intuitions and hard to articulate right now, but thanks for the nudge, I’ll try to think about it more.
One thing that could happen is that the Shoggoth learns to do 100% and the Face just copy-pastes. Like, the Shoggoth writes a CoT that includes a ‘final answer’ and the Face becomes the extremely dumb function ‘take what’s labelled as final answer and regurgitate it.’ However, I don’t think this will happen, because it seems computationally inefficient. Seems like the more efficient thing would be for the Shoggoth to do all the reasoning up to the final answer and then stop, and then the Face to read all of that and synthesize the final answer.
One reason is that the Shoggoth will be able to use lots of CoT to think, whereas the Face never gets to do that—it just has to see what the Shoggoth did and then write an output. so the Face should be bad at reasoning/thinking/System2. This doesn’t by itself prevent the Face from being able to modify the correct solution to insert a backdoor, but it helps—modifying a correct solution to insert a backdoor is sometimes trivial but often difficult, difficult in the ‘you have to think about it for a bit’ sense, and in those cases the Face just won’t be able to do it.
Another reason is that the shoggoth and face will often need to coordinate to do the misaligned thing. E.g. even if the face is adept at inserting vulnerabilities, some proposed correct solutions will be easier to modify to insert vulnerabilities than others, and so both shoggoth and face will get higher scores if the shoggoth steers towards the solutions that are easier to modify to insert vulnerabilities. Moreover, by default it’s easier for the face if the shoggoth is transparent about this—if it says e.g. ‘OK here’s a draft solution but this seems like it might be difficult to modify to insert vulnerabilities, hold on let me think for a bit, … ok try this one instead, it has easily-modifiable-feature-X’ because that helps the Face do its job.
...I probably have other reasons which are just intuitions and hard to articulate right now, but thanks for the nudge, I’ll try to think about it more.
One thing that could happen is that the Shoggoth learns to do 100% and the Face just copy-pastes. Like, the Shoggoth writes a CoT that includes a ‘final answer’ and the Face becomes the extremely dumb function ‘take what’s labelled as final answer and regurgitate it.’ However, I don’t think this will happen, because it seems computationally inefficient. Seems like the more efficient thing would be for the Shoggoth to do all the reasoning up to the final answer and then stop, and then the Face to read all of that and synthesize the final answer.