So I can see how that is a reasonable interpretation of what you were expressing. However, given the opening framing where you said you basically agreed with Eliezer’s pessimistic viewpoint that seems to dismiss most alignment research, I hope you can understand how I interpreted you saying “People haven’t tried very hard to find non-MIRI-ish approaches that might work” as dismissing ML-safety research like IRL,CIRL,etc.
I… think that makes more sense? Though Eliezer was saying the field’s progress overall was insufficient, not saying ‘decision theory good, ML bad’. He singled out eg Paul Christiano and Chris Olah as two of the field’s best researchers.
So I can see how that is a reasonable interpretation of what you were expressing. However, given the opening framing where you said you basically agreed with Eliezer’s pessimistic viewpoint that seems to dismiss most alignment research, I hope you can understand how I interpreted you saying “People haven’t tried very hard to find non-MIRI-ish approaches that might work” as dismissing ML-safety research like IRL,CIRL,etc.
I… think that makes more sense? Though Eliezer was saying the field’s progress overall was insufficient, not saying ‘decision theory good, ML bad’. He singled out eg Paul Christiano and Chris Olah as two of the field’s best researchers.
In any case, thanks for explaining!