it feels like there are two broad classes of things that can happen during runtime:
I agree this sort of thing is something you could mean by the “likelihood of mesa optimization”. As I said in the grandparent:
this paper should be ~zero evidence in favor of [mesa optimization in the task learning sense].
In practice, when people say they “updated in favor of mesa optimization”, they refer to evidence that says approximately nothing about what is “happening at runtime”; therefore I infer that they cannot be talking about mesa optimization in the sense you mean.
I agree this sort of thing is something you could mean by the “likelihood of mesa optimization”. As I said in the grandparent:
In practice, when people say they “updated in favor of mesa optimization”, they refer to evidence that says approximately nothing about what is “happening at runtime”; therefore I infer that they cannot be talking about mesa optimization in the sense you mean.