Regarding the point about most alignment work not really addressing the core issue: I think that a lot of this work could potentially be valuable nonetheless. People can take inspiration from all kinds of things and I think there is often value in picking something that you can get a grasp on, then using the lessons from that to tackle something more complex. Of course, it’s very easy for people to spend all of their time focusing on irrelevant toy problems and never get around to making any progress on the real problem. Plus there are costs with adding more voices into the conversation as it can be tricky for people to distinguish the signal from the noise.
Regarding the point about most alignment work not really addressing the core issue: I think that a lot of this work could potentially be valuable nonetheless. People can take inspiration from all kinds of things and I think there is often value in picking something that you can get a grasp on, then using the lessons from that to tackle something more complex. Of course, it’s very easy for people to spend all of their time focusing on irrelevant toy problems and never get around to making any progress on the real problem. Plus there are costs with adding more voices into the conversation as it can be tricky for people to distinguish the signal from the noise.