I don’t think your first five examples work exactly for “exercises” (they’re a pretty long spin-up process before you can even work on them, and I don’t know that I agree the feedback loops are even that good? i.e. you probably only get to design one tax-code-iteration per year?)
But I think looking for places with adversarial optimization pressure and figuring out how to make them more feedbackloop-able is a good place to go.
This also updated me that a place I might want to seek out alignment researchers are people with a background in at least two domains that involve this sort of adversarial pressure, so they’ll have an easier time triangulating “how does optimization apply in the domain of alignment?”.
Yeah I like this train of thought.
I don’t think your first five examples work exactly for “exercises” (they’re a pretty long spin-up process before you can even work on them, and I don’t know that I agree the feedback loops are even that good? i.e. you probably only get to design one tax-code-iteration per year?)
But I think looking for places with adversarial optimization pressure and figuring out how to make them more feedbackloop-able is a good place to go.
This also updated me that a place I might want to seek out alignment researchers are people with a background in at least two domains that involve this sort of adversarial pressure, so they’ll have an easier time triangulating “how does optimization apply in the domain of alignment?”.