Sounds like to the extent that you do have time/energy for theory, you might want to strategically reallocate your attention a bit? I get that you think a bunch of people are wrong and you’re worried about the consequences of that, but diminishing returns is a thing, and you could be too certain yourself (that MIRI concerns are definitely wrong).
And then empirical versus theory, how much do you worry about architectural changes obsoleting your empirical work? I noticed for example that in image generation GAN was recently replaced by latent diffusion, which probably made a lot of efforts to “control” GAN-based image generation useless.
That aside, “heads down empirical work” only makes sense if you picked a good general direction before putting your head down. Should it not worry people that shard theory researchers do not seem to have engaged with (or better yet, preemptively addressed) basic concerns/objections about their approach?
Sounds like to the extent that you do have time/energy for theory, you might want to strategically reallocate your attention a bit? I get that you think a bunch of people are wrong and you’re worried about the consequences of that, but diminishing returns is a thing, and you could be too certain yourself (that MIRI concerns are definitely wrong).
And then empirical versus theory, how much do you worry about architectural changes obsoleting your empirical work? I noticed for example that in image generation GAN was recently replaced by latent diffusion, which probably made a lot of efforts to “control” GAN-based image generation useless.
That aside, “heads down empirical work” only makes sense if you picked a good general direction before putting your head down. Should it not worry people that shard theory researchers do not seem to have engaged with (or better yet, preemptively addressed) basic concerns/objections about their approach?