Not a problem. I share many of your frustrations about modesty epistemology and about most alignment research missing the point, so I sympathise with your wanting to express them.
On consequentialism: I imagine that it’s pretty frustrating to keep having people misunderstand such an important concept, so thanks for trying to convey it. I currently feel like I have a reasonable outline of what you mean (e.g. to the level where I could generate an analogy about as good as Nate’s laser analogy), but I still don’t know whether the reason you find it much more compelling than I do is because you understand the details and implications better, or because you have different intuitions about how to treat high-level abstractions (compared with the intuitions I describe here).
At some point when I have a few spare days, I might try to write down my own best understanding of the concept, and try generate some of those useful analogies and intuition pumps, in the hope that explaining it from a different angle will prove fruitful. Until then, other people who try to do so should feel free to bounce drafts off me.
Not a problem. I share many of your frustrations about modesty epistemology and about most alignment research missing the point, so I sympathise with your wanting to express them.
On consequentialism: I imagine that it’s pretty frustrating to keep having people misunderstand such an important concept, so thanks for trying to convey it. I currently feel like I have a reasonable outline of what you mean (e.g. to the level where I could generate an analogy about as good as Nate’s laser analogy), but I still don’t know whether the reason you find it much more compelling than I do is because you understand the details and implications better, or because you have different intuitions about how to treat high-level abstractions (compared with the intuitions I describe here).
At some point when I have a few spare days, I might try to write down my own best understanding of the concept, and try generate some of those useful analogies and intuition pumps, in the hope that explaining it from a different angle will prove fruitful. Until then, other people who try to do so should feel free to bounce drafts off me.