Great question! Definitely not. The video series is way, way less technical than the problem set. The problem set is for people who want to understand the nitty gritty details of IB, and the video series is for those who want a broad overview of what the heck IB even is and how it fits into the alignment research landscape.
In fact, I’d say it would benefit you to go through the video series first to get a high-level conceptual overview of how IB can help with alignment. This understanding will help motivate the problem set. Without this conceptual grounding, the problem set can feel like just a big abstract math problem set disconnected from alignment.
That said, if you aren’t in for watching a long video series, there’s a much more brief (but way less thorough) conceptual description of how IB can help with alignment in the conclusion of the problem set. You could read that first and then work the problems.
For those of us who may want to go through the problem set ourselves—would watching these videos be spoiling ourselves?
Great question! Definitely not. The video series is way, way less technical than the problem set. The problem set is for people who want to understand the nitty gritty details of IB, and the video series is for those who want a broad overview of what the heck IB even is and how it fits into the alignment research landscape.
In fact, I’d say it would benefit you to go through the video series first to get a high-level conceptual overview of how IB can help with alignment. This understanding will help motivate the problem set. Without this conceptual grounding, the problem set can feel like just a big abstract math problem set disconnected from alignment.
That said, if you aren’t in for watching a long video series, there’s a much more brief (but way less thorough) conceptual description of how IB can help with alignment in the conclusion of the problem set. You could read that first and then work the problems.