Curated. This post represents a significant amount of research, looking into the question of whether an established area of literature might be informative to concerns about AI alignment. It looks at that literature, examines its relevance in light of the questions that have been discussed so far, and checks the conclusions with existing domain experts. Finally, it suggests further work that might provide useful insights to these kinds of questions.
I do have the concern that currently, the post relies a fair bit on the reader trusting the authors to have done a comprehensive search—the post mentions having done “extensive searching”, but besides the mention of consulting domain experts, does not elaborate on how that search process was carried out. This is a significant consideration since a large part of the post’s conclusions rely on negative results (there not being papers which examine the relevant assumptions). I would have appreciated seeing some kind of a description of the search strategy, similar in spirit to the search descriptions included in systematic reviews. This would have allowed readers to both reproduce the search steps, as well as notice any possible shortcomings that might have led to relevant literature being missed.
Nonetheless, this is an important contribution, and I’m very happy both to see this kind of work done, as well as it being written up in a clear form on LW.
Curated. This post represents a significant amount of research, looking into the question of whether an established area of literature might be informative to concerns about AI alignment. It looks at that literature, examines its relevance in light of the questions that have been discussed so far, and checks the conclusions with existing domain experts. Finally, it suggests further work that might provide useful insights to these kinds of questions.
I do have the concern that currently, the post relies a fair bit on the reader trusting the authors to have done a comprehensive search—the post mentions having done “extensive searching”, but besides the mention of consulting domain experts, does not elaborate on how that search process was carried out. This is a significant consideration since a large part of the post’s conclusions rely on negative results (there not being papers which examine the relevant assumptions). I would have appreciated seeing some kind of a description of the search strategy, similar in spirit to the search descriptions included in systematic reviews. This would have allowed readers to both reproduce the search steps, as well as notice any possible shortcomings that might have led to relevant literature being missed.
Nonetheless, this is an important contribution, and I’m very happy both to see this kind of work done, as well as it being written up in a clear form on LW.