IMO, a textbook would either overlook big chunks of the field or look more like an enumeration of approaches than a unified resource.
Textbooks that cover a number of different approaches without taking a position on which one is the best are pretty much the standard in many fields. (I recall struggling with it in some undergraduate psychology courses, as previous schooling didn’t prepare me for a textbook that would cover three mutually exclusive theories and present compelling evidence in favor of each. Before moving on and presenting three mutually exclusive theories about some other phenomenon on the very next page.)
Fair enough. I think my real issue with an AI Alignment textbook is that for me a textbook presents relatively foundational and well established ideas and theories (maybe multiple ones), whereas I feel that AI Alignment is basically only state-of-the-art exploration, and that we have very few things that should actually be put into a textbook right now.
But I could change my mind if you have an example of what should be included in such an AI Alignment textbook.
Textbooks that cover a number of different approaches without taking a position on which one is the best are pretty much the standard in many fields. (I recall struggling with it in some undergraduate psychology courses, as previous schooling didn’t prepare me for a textbook that would cover three mutually exclusive theories and present compelling evidence in favor of each. Before moving on and presenting three mutually exclusive theories about some other phenomenon on the very next page.)
Fair enough. I think my real issue with an AI Alignment textbook is that for me a textbook presents relatively foundational and well established ideas and theories (maybe multiple ones), whereas I feel that AI Alignment is basically only state-of-the-art exploration, and that we have very few things that should actually be put into a textbook right now.
But I could change my mind if you have an example of what should be included in such an AI Alignment textbook.