If I know that it was written by aligned people? I wouldn’t just be trying to evaluate it myself; I’d try to get a team together to implement it, and understanding it well enough to implement it would be the same process as verifying whatever remaining verifiable uncertainty was left about the origins, where most of that uncertainty is unverifiable because the putative hostile origin is plausibly also smart enough to sneak things past you.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. Let’s suppose that a copy of you spent however long it takes to write an honest textbook with the solution to alignment (let’s call it N Yudkowsky-years), and an evil copy of you spent N Yudkowsky-years writing a deceptive textbook trying to make you believe in a false solution to alignment, and you’re given one but not told which. How long would it take you to reach 90% confidence about which you’d been given? (You’re free to get a team together to run a bunch of experiments and implementations, I’m just asking that you measure the total work in units of years-of-work-done-by-people-as-competent-as-Yudkowsky. And I should specify some safety threshold too—like, in the process of reaching 90% confidence, incurring less than 10% chance of running an experiment which kills you.)
Get me to adopt a solution wrong in a particular direction, like a design that hands the universe over to them? I can maybe figure out the first time through who’s out to get me, if it’s 200 Yudkowsky-years. If it’s 200,000 Yudkowsky-years I think I’m just screwed.
Get me to make any lethal mistake at all? I don’t think I can get to 90% confidence period, or at least, not without spending an amount of Yudkowsky-time equivalent to the untrustworthy source.
If I know that it was written by aligned people? I wouldn’t just be trying to evaluate it myself; I’d try to get a team together to implement it, and understanding it well enough to implement it would be the same process as verifying whatever remaining verifiable uncertainty was left about the origins, where most of that uncertainty is unverifiable because the putative hostile origin is plausibly also smart enough to sneak things past you.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. Let’s suppose that a copy of you spent however long it takes to write an honest textbook with the solution to alignment (let’s call it N Yudkowsky-years), and an evil copy of you spent N Yudkowsky-years writing a deceptive textbook trying to make you believe in a false solution to alignment, and you’re given one but not told which. How long would it take you to reach 90% confidence about which you’d been given? (You’re free to get a team together to run a bunch of experiments and implementations, I’m just asking that you measure the total work in units of years-of-work-done-by-people-as-competent-as-Yudkowsky. And I should specify some safety threshold too—like, in the process of reaching 90% confidence, incurring less than 10% chance of running an experiment which kills you.)
Depends what the evil clones are trying to do.
Get me to adopt a solution wrong in a particular direction, like a design that hands the universe over to them? I can maybe figure out the first time through who’s out to get me, if it’s 200 Yudkowsky-years. If it’s 200,000 Yudkowsky-years I think I’m just screwed.
Get me to make any lethal mistake at all? I don’t think I can get to 90% confidence period, or at least, not without spending an amount of Yudkowsky-time equivalent to the untrustworthy source.