(About half a year ago I had a thought along the lines of “gosh, it would be good for interp research if people doing interp were at least somewhat familiar with philosophy of mind … not that it would necessarily teach them anything object-level useful for the kind of research they’re doing but at least it would show them which chains of thought are blind alleys because they seem to be repeating some of the same mistakes as 20th century philosophers” (I don’t remember what mistakes exactly but I think something to do with representations). Well, perhaps not just philosophy of mind.)
(Context: https://x.com/davidad/status/1885812088880148905 , i.e. some papers just got published that strongly question whether SAEs learn anything meaningful, just like the dead salmon study questioned the value of much of fMRI research.)
(About half a year ago I had a thought along the lines of “gosh, it would be good for interp research if people doing interp were at least somewhat familiar with philosophy of mind … not that it would necessarily teach them anything object-level useful for the kind of research they’re doing but at least it would show them which chains of thought are blind alleys because they seem to be repeating some of the same mistakes as 20th century philosophers” (I don’t remember what mistakes exactly but I think something to do with representations). Well, perhaps not just philosophy of mind.)