Here is someone who has attempted to grapple with the intellectual content of your ideas and your response is “This is kinda long.”? I shouldn’t be that surprised because, IIRC, you said something similar in response to Zack Davis’ essays on the Map and Territory distinction, but that’s ancillary and AI is core to your memeplex.
I have heard repeated claims that people don’t engage with the alignment communities’ ideas (recent example from yesterday). But here is someone who did the work. Please explain why your response here does not cause people to believe there’s no reason to engage with your ideas because you will brush them off. Yes, nutpicking e/accs on Twitter is much easier and probably more hedonic, but they’re not convincible and Quinton here is.
I would agree with this if Eliezer had never properly engaged with critics, but he’s done that extensively. I don’t think there should be a norm that you have to engage with everyone, and “ok choose one point, I’ll respond to that” seems like better than not engaging with it at all. (Would you have been more enraged if he hadn’t commented anything?)
The problem is that the even if the model of Quintin Pope is wrong, there is other evidence that contradicts the AI doom premise that Eliezer ignores, and in this I believe it is a confirmation bias at work here.
Also, any issues with Quintin Pope’s model is going to be subtle, not obvious, and it’s a real difference to argue against good arguments + bad arguments from only bad arguments.
The problem is that the even if the model of Quintin Pope is wrong, there is other evidence that contradicts the AI doom premise that Eliezer ignores, and in this I believe it is a confirmation bias at work here.
I think that this is a statement Eliezer does not believe is true, and which the conversations in the MIRI conversations sequence failed to convince him of. Which is the point: since Eliezer has already engaged in extensive back-and-forth with critics of his broad view (including the likes of Paul Christiano, Richard Ngo, Rohin Shah, etc), there is actually not much continued expected update to be found in engaging with someone else who posts a criticism of his view. Do you think otherwise?
What I was talking about is that Eliezer (And arguably the entire MIRI-sphere) ignored evidence that AI safety could actually work and doesn’t need entirely new paradigms, and one of the best examples of empirical work is the Pretraining from Human Feedback.
The big improvements compared to other methods are:
It can avoid deceptive alignment because it gives a simple goal that’s myopic, completely negating the incentives for deceptively aligned AI.
It cannot affect the distribution it’s trained on, since it’s purely offline learning, meaning we can enforce an IID assumption, and enforce a Cartesian boundary, completely avoiding embedded agency. It cannot hack the distribution it has, unlike online learning, meaning it can’t unboundedly Goodhart the values we instill.
Increasing the data set aligns it more and more, essentially meaning we can trust the AI to be aligned as it grows more capable, and improves it’s alignment.
Now I don’t blame Eliezer for ignoring this piece specifically too much, as I think it didn’t attract much attention.
But the reason I’m mentioning this is that this is evidence against the worldview of Eliezer and a lot of pessimists who believe empirical evidence doesn’t work for the alignment field, and Eliezer and a lot of pessimists seem to systematically ignore evidence that harms their case.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “avoid embedded agency”? I don’t understand how one avoids it. Any solution that avoids having to worry about it in your AGI will fall apart once it becomes a deployed superintelligence.
I think there’s a double meaning to the word “Alignment” where people now use it to refer to making LLMs say nice things and assume that this extrapolates to aligning the goals of agentic systems. The former is only a subproblem of the latter. When you say “Increasing the data set aligns it more and more, essentially meaning we can trust the AI to be aligned as it grows more capable, and improves it’s alignment” I question if we really have evidence that this relationship will hold indefinitely.
One of the issues with embedded agency is that you can’t reliably take advantage of the IID assumption, and in particular you can’t hold data fixed. You also have the issue of potentially having the AI hacking the process, given it’s embeddedness, since there isn’t a way before Pretraining from Human Feedback to translate Cartesian boundaries, or at least a subset of boundaries into the embedded universe.
The point here is we don’t have to solve the problem, as it’s only a problem if we let the AI control the updating process like online training.
Instead, we give the AI a data set, and offline train it so that it learns what alignment looks like before we give it general capabilities.
In particular, we can create a Cartesian boundary between IID and OOD inputs that work in an embedded setting, and the AI has no control over the data set of human values, meaning it can’t gradient or reward hack the humans into having different values, or unboundedly Goodhart human values, which would undermine the project. This is another Cartesian boundary, though this one is the boundary between an AI’s values, and a human’s values, and the AI can’t hack the human values if it’s offline trained.
I think there’s a double meaning to the word “Alignment” where people now use it to refer to making LLMs say nice things and assume that this extrapolates to aligning the goals of agentic systems.
I disagree, and I think I can explain why. The important point of the tests in the Pretraining from Human Feedback paper, and the AI saying nice things, is that they show that we can align AI to any goal we want, so if we can reliably shift it towards niceness, than we have techniques to align our agents/simulators.
The important point of the tests in the Pretraining from Human Feedback paper, and the AI saying nice things, is that they show that we can align AI to any goal we want
I don’t see how the bolded follows from the unbolded, sorry. Could you explain in more detail how you reached this conclusion?
The point is that similar techniques can be used to align them, since both (or arguably all goals) are both functionally arbitrary in what we pick, and important for us.
One major point I did elide is the amount of power seeking involved, since in the niceness goal, there’s almost no power seeking involved, unlike the existential risk concerns we have.
But in some of the tests for alignment in Pretraining from Human Feedback, they showed that they can make models avoid taking certain power seeking actions, like getting personal identifying information.
In essence, it’s at least some evidence that as AI gets more capable, that we can make sure that power seeking actions can be avoided if it’s misaligned with human interests.
The first part here makes sense, you’re saying you can train it in such a fashion that it avoids the issues of embedded agency during training (among other things) and then guarantee that the alignment will hold in deployment (when it must be an embedded agent almost by definition)
The second part I think I think I disagree with. Does the paper really “show that we can align AI to any goal we want”? That seems like an extremely strong statement.
Actually this sort of highlights what I mean by the dual use of ‘alignment’ here. You were talking about aligning a model with human values that will end up being deployed (and being an embedded agent) but then we’re using ‘align’ to refer to language model outputs.
The second part I think I think I disagree with. Does the paper really “show that we can align AI to any goal we want”? That seems like an extremely strong statement.
Yes, though admittedly I’m making some inferences here.
The point is that similar techniques can be used to align them, since both (or arguably all goals) are both functionally arbitrary in what we pick, and important for us.
One major point I did elide is the amount of power seeking involved, since in the niceness goal, there’s almost no power seeking involved, unlike the existential risk concerns we have.
But in some of the tests for alignment in Pretraining from Human Feedback, they showed that they can make models avoid taking certain power seeking actions, like getting personal identifying information.
In essence, it’s at least some evidence that as AI gets more capable, that we can make sure that power seeking actions can be avoided if it’s misaligned with human interests.
I believe our disagreement stems from the fact that I am skeptical of the idea that statements made about contemporary language models can be extrapolated to apply to all existentially risky AI systems.
I definitely agree that some version of this is the crux, at least on how well we can generalize the result, since I think it does more generally apply than just contemporary language models, and I suspect it applies to almost all AI that can use Pretraining from Human Feedback, which is offline training, so the crux is really how much can we expect a alignment technique to generalize and scale
I agree that Eliezer shouldn’t have to respond to everything, and that he is well engaged with his critics. I would in fact have preferred it if he had simply said nothing at all, in this particular case. Probably, deep down, I prefer that for some complicated social reasons but I don’t think they’re antisocial reasons and have more to do with the (fixable) rudeness inherent in the way he replied.
I also agree that the comment came across as rude. I mostly give Eliezer a pass for this kind of rudeness because he’s wound up in the genuinely awkward position of being a well-known intellectual figure (at least in these circles), which creates a natural asymmetry between him and (most of) his critics.
I’m open to being convinced that I’m making a mistake here, but at present my view is that comments primarily concerning how Eliezer’s response tugs at the social fabric (including the upthread reply from iceman) are generally unproductive.
(Quentin, to his credit, responded by directly answering Eliezer’s question, and indeed the resulting (short) thread seems to have resulted in some clarification. I have a lot more respect for that kind of object-level response, than I do for responses along the lines of iceman’s reply.)
I’m open to being convinced that I’m making a mistake here, but at present my view is that comments primarily concerning how Eliezer’s responses tug at the social fabric (including the original response from iceman) are usually not productive.
That’s reasonable and I generally agree. I’m not sure what to think about Eliezer’s comment atm except that it upsets me when it maybe shouldn’t, and that I also understand the awkward position he’s in. I definitely don’t want to derail the discussion, here.
I think we should index lesswrong/sequences/etc and combine it with GPT-3. This way we can query it and find out if someone has already answered a (similar) question.
Choosing to engage with an unscripted unrehearsed off-the-cuff podcast intended to introduce ideas to a lay audience, continues to be a surprising concept to me. To grapple with the intellectual content of my ideas, consider picking one item from “A List of Lethalities” and engaging with that.
16.Even if you train really hard on an exact loss function, that doesn’t thereby create an explicit internal representation of the loss function inside an AI that then continues to pursue that exact loss function in distribution-shifted environments. Humans don’t explicitly pursue inclusive genetic fitness; outer optimization even on a very exact, very simple loss function doesn’t produce inner optimization in that direction. This happens in practice in real life, it is what happened in the only case we know about…
and explained why I didn’t think we should put much weight on the evolution analogy when thinking about AI.
In the 7 months since I made that post, it’s had < 5% of the comments engagement that this post has gotten in a day.
In the 7 months since I made that post, it’s had < 5% of the comments engagement that this post has gotten in a day.
Popular and off-the-cuff presentations often get discussed because it is fun to talk about how the off-the-cuff presentation has various flaws. Most comments get generated by demon threads and scissor statements, sadly. We’ve done some things to combat that, and definitely not all threads with lots of comments are the result of people being slightly triggered and misunderstanding each other, but a quite substantial fraction are.
“Humans don’t explicitly pursue inclusive genetic fitness; outer optimization even on a very exact, very simple loss function doesn’t produce inner optimization in that direction. This happens in practice in real life, it is what happened in the only case we know about, and it seems to me that there are deep theoretical reasons to expect it to happen again”
I imagine (edit: wrongly) it was less “choosing” and more “he encountered the podcast first because it has a vastly larger audience, and had thoughts about it.”
I also doubt “just engage with X” was an available action. The podcast transcript doesn’t mention List of Lethalities, LessWrong, or the Sequences, so how is a listener supposed to find it?
I also hate it when people don’t engage with the strongest form of my work, and wouldn’t consider myself obligated to respond if they engaged with a weaker form (or if they engaged with the strongest one, barring additional obligation). But I think this is just what happens when someone goes on a podcast aimed at audiences that don’t already know them.
I agree with this heuristic in general, but will observe Quintin’s first post here was over two years ago and he commented on A List of Lethalities; I do think it’d be fair for him to respond with “what do you think this post was?”.
Vaniver is right. Note that I did specifically describe myself as an “alignment insider” at the start of this post. I’ve read A List of Lethalities and lots of other writing by Yudkowsky. Though the post I’d cite in response to the “you’re not engaging with the strongest forms of my argument” claim would be the one where I pretty much did what Yudkowsky suggests:
To grapple with the intellectual content of my ideas, consider picking one item from “A List of Lethalities” and engaging with that.
16.Even if you train really hard on an exact loss function, that doesn’t thereby create an explicit internal representation of the loss function inside an AI that then continues to pursue that exact loss function in distribution-shifted environments. Humans don’t explicitly pursue inclusive genetic fitness; outer optimization even on a very exact, very simple loss function doesn’t produce inner optimization in that direction. This happens in practice in real life, it is what happened in the only case we know about…
and then argues that we shouldn’t use evolution as our central example of an “outer optimization criteria versus inner formed values” outcome.
You can also see my comment here for some of what led me to write about the podcast specifically.
The comment enrages me too, but the reasons you have given seem like post-justification. The real reason why it’s enraging is that it rudely and dramatically implies that Eliezer’s time is much more valuable than the OP’s, and that it’s up to OP to summarize them for him. If he actually wanted to ask OP what the strongest point was he should have just DMed him instead of engineering this public spectacle.
I want people to not discuss things in DMs, and discuss things publicly more. I also don’t think this is embarrassing for Quintin, or at all a public spectacle.
The real reason why it’s enraging is that it rudely and dramatically implies that Eliezer’s time is much more valuable than the OP’s
It does imply that, but it’s likely true that Eliezer’s time is more valuable (or at least in more demand) than OP’s. I also don’t think Eliezer (or anyone else) should have to spend all that much effort worrying about if what they’re about to say might possibly come off as impolite or uncordial.
If he actually wanted to ask OP what the strongest point was he should have just DMed him instead of engineering this public spectacle.
I don’t agree here. Commenting publicly opens the floor up for anyone to summarize the post or to submit what they think is the strongest point. I think it’s actually less pressure on Quintin this way.
I think that both of you are correct: Eliezer should have DMed Quintin Pope instead, and Eliezer hasn’t noticed that actual arguments were given, and that it sounds like an excuse to ignore disconfirming evidence.
This crystallizes a thought I had about Eliezer: Eliezer has increasingly terrible epistemics on AI doom, and a person should ignore Eliezer’s arguments, since they won’t ever update towards optimism, even if it’s warranted, and has real issues engaging people he doesn’t share his views and don’t give bad arguments.
This response is enraging.
Here is someone who has attempted to grapple with the intellectual content of your ideas and your response is “This is kinda long.”? I shouldn’t be that surprised because, IIRC, you said something similar in response to Zack Davis’ essays on the Map and Territory distinction, but that’s ancillary and AI is core to your memeplex.
I have heard repeated claims that people don’t engage with the alignment communities’ ideas (recent example from yesterday). But here is someone who did the work. Please explain why your response here does not cause people to believe there’s no reason to engage with your ideas because you will brush them off. Yes, nutpicking e/accs on Twitter is much easier and probably more hedonic, but they’re not convincible and Quinton here is.
I would agree with this if Eliezer had never properly engaged with critics, but he’s done that extensively. I don’t think there should be a norm that you have to engage with everyone, and “ok choose one point, I’ll respond to that” seems like better than not engaging with it at all. (Would you have been more enraged if he hadn’t commented anything?)
The problem is that the even if the model of Quintin Pope is wrong, there is other evidence that contradicts the AI doom premise that Eliezer ignores, and in this I believe it is a confirmation bias at work here.
Also, any issues with Quintin Pope’s model is going to be subtle, not obvious, and it’s a real difference to argue against good arguments + bad arguments from only bad arguments.
I think that this is a statement Eliezer does not believe is true, and which the conversations in the MIRI conversations sequence failed to convince him of. Which is the point: since Eliezer has already engaged in extensive back-and-forth with critics of his broad view (including the likes of Paul Christiano, Richard Ngo, Rohin Shah, etc), there is actually not much continued expected update to be found in engaging with someone else who posts a criticism of his view. Do you think otherwise?
What I was talking about is that Eliezer (And arguably the entire MIRI-sphere) ignored evidence that AI safety could actually work and doesn’t need entirely new paradigms, and one of the best examples of empirical work is the Pretraining from Human Feedback.
The big improvements compared to other methods are:
It can avoid deceptive alignment because it gives a simple goal that’s myopic, completely negating the incentives for deceptively aligned AI.
It cannot affect the distribution it’s trained on, since it’s purely offline learning, meaning we can enforce an IID assumption, and enforce a Cartesian boundary, completely avoiding embedded agency. It cannot hack the distribution it has, unlike online learning, meaning it can’t unboundedly Goodhart the values we instill.
Increasing the data set aligns it more and more, essentially meaning we can trust the AI to be aligned as it grows more capable, and improves it’s alignment.
The goal found has a small capabilities tax.
There’s a post on it I’ll link here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8F4dXYriqbsom46x5/pretraining-language-models-with-human-preferences
Now I don’t blame Eliezer for ignoring this piece specifically too much, as I think it didn’t attract much attention.
But the reason I’m mentioning this is that this is evidence against the worldview of Eliezer and a lot of pessimists who believe empirical evidence doesn’t work for the alignment field, and Eliezer and a lot of pessimists seem to systematically ignore evidence that harms their case.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “avoid embedded agency”? I don’t understand how one avoids it. Any solution that avoids having to worry about it in your AGI will fall apart once it becomes a deployed superintelligence.
I think there’s a double meaning to the word “Alignment” where people now use it to refer to making LLMs say nice things and assume that this extrapolates to aligning the goals of agentic systems. The former is only a subproblem of the latter. When you say “Increasing the data set aligns it more and more, essentially meaning we can trust the AI to be aligned as it grows more capable, and improves it’s alignment” I question if we really have evidence that this relationship will hold indefinitely.
One of the issues with embedded agency is that you can’t reliably take advantage of the IID assumption, and in particular you can’t hold data fixed. You also have the issue of potentially having the AI hacking the process, given it’s embeddedness, since there isn’t a way before Pretraining from Human Feedback to translate Cartesian boundaries, or at least a subset of boundaries into the embedded universe.
The point here is we don’t have to solve the problem, as it’s only a problem if we let the AI control the updating process like online training.
Instead, we give the AI a data set, and offline train it so that it learns what alignment looks like before we give it general capabilities.
In particular, we can create a Cartesian boundary between IID and OOD inputs that work in an embedded setting, and the AI has no control over the data set of human values, meaning it can’t gradient or reward hack the humans into having different values, or unboundedly Goodhart human values, which would undermine the project. This is another Cartesian boundary, though this one is the boundary between an AI’s values, and a human’s values, and the AI can’t hack the human values if it’s offline trained.
I disagree, and I think I can explain why. The important point of the tests in the Pretraining from Human Feedback paper, and the AI saying nice things, is that they show that we can align AI to any goal we want, so if we can reliably shift it towards niceness, than we have techniques to align our agents/simulators.
I don’t see how the bolded follows from the unbolded, sorry. Could you explain in more detail how you reached this conclusion?
The point is that similar techniques can be used to align them, since both (or arguably all goals) are both functionally arbitrary in what we pick, and important for us.
One major point I did elide is the amount of power seeking involved, since in the niceness goal, there’s almost no power seeking involved, unlike the existential risk concerns we have.
But in some of the tests for alignment in Pretraining from Human Feedback, they showed that they can make models avoid taking certain power seeking actions, like getting personal identifying information.
In essence, it’s at least some evidence that as AI gets more capable, that we can make sure that power seeking actions can be avoided if it’s misaligned with human interests.
The first part here makes sense, you’re saying you can train it in such a fashion that it avoids the issues of embedded agency during training (among other things) and then guarantee that the alignment will hold in deployment (when it must be an embedded agent almost by definition)
The second part I think I think I disagree with. Does the paper really “show that we can align AI to any goal we want”? That seems like an extremely strong statement.
Actually this sort of highlights what I mean by the dual use of ‘alignment’ here. You were talking about aligning a model with human values that will end up being deployed (and being an embedded agent) but then we’re using ‘align’ to refer to language model outputs.
Yes, though admittedly I’m making some inferences here.
The point is that similar techniques can be used to align them, since both (or arguably all goals) are both functionally arbitrary in what we pick, and important for us.
One major point I did elide is the amount of power seeking involved, since in the niceness goal, there’s almost no power seeking involved, unlike the existential risk concerns we have.
But in some of the tests for alignment in Pretraining from Human Feedback, they showed that they can make models avoid taking certain power seeking actions, like getting personal identifying information.
In essence, it’s at least some evidence that as AI gets more capable, that we can make sure that power seeking actions can be avoided if it’s misaligned with human interests.
I believe our disagreement stems from the fact that I am skeptical of the idea that statements made about contemporary language models can be extrapolated to apply to all existentially risky AI systems.
I definitely agree that some version of this is the crux, at least on how well we can generalize the result, since I think it does more generally apply than just contemporary language models, and I suspect it applies to almost all AI that can use Pretraining from Human Feedback, which is offline training, so the crux is really how much can we expect a alignment technique to generalize and scale
I agree that Eliezer shouldn’t have to respond to everything, and that he is well engaged with his critics. I would in fact have preferred it if he had simply said nothing at all, in this particular case. Probably, deep down, I prefer that for some complicated social reasons but I don’t think they’re antisocial reasons and have more to do with the (fixable) rudeness inherent in the way he replied.
I also agree that the comment came across as rude. I mostly give Eliezer a pass for this kind of rudeness because he’s wound up in the genuinely awkward position of being a well-known intellectual figure (at least in these circles), which creates a natural asymmetry between him and (most of) his critics.
I’m open to being convinced that I’m making a mistake here, but at present my view is that comments primarily concerning how Eliezer’s response tugs at the social fabric (including the upthread reply from iceman) are generally unproductive.
(Quentin, to his credit, responded by directly answering Eliezer’s question, and indeed the resulting (short) thread seems to have resulted in some clarification. I have a lot more respect for that kind of object-level response, than I do for responses along the lines of iceman’s reply.)
That’s reasonable and I generally agree. I’m not sure what to think about Eliezer’s comment atm except that it upsets me when it maybe shouldn’t, and that I also understand the awkward position he’s in. I definitely don’t want to derail the discussion, here.
I think we should index lesswrong/sequences/etc and combine it with GPT-3. This way we can query it and find out if someone has already answered a (similar) question.
Choosing to engage with an unscripted unrehearsed off-the-cuff podcast intended to introduce ideas to a lay audience, continues to be a surprising concept to me. To grapple with the intellectual content of my ideas, consider picking one item from “A List of Lethalities” and engaging with that.
I actually did exactly this in a previous post, Evolution is a bad analogy for AGI: inner alignment, where I quoted number 16 from A List of Lethalities:
and explained why I didn’t think we should put much weight on the evolution analogy when thinking about AI.
In the 7 months since I made that post, it’s had < 5% of the comments engagement that this post has gotten in a day.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Popular and off-the-cuff presentations often get discussed because it is fun to talk about how the off-the-cuff presentation has various flaws. Most comments get generated by demon threads and scissor statements, sadly. We’ve done some things to combat that, and definitely not all threads with lots of comments are the result of people being slightly triggered and misunderstanding each other, but a quite substantial fraction are.
Are this visible at the typical user level?
Here are some of my disagreements with List of Lethalities. I’ll quote item one:
I imagine (edit: wrongly) it was less “choosing” and more “he encountered the podcast first because it has a vastly larger audience, and had thoughts about it.”
I also doubt “just engage with X” was an available action. The podcast transcript doesn’t mention List of Lethalities, LessWrong, or the Sequences, so how is a listener supposed to find it?
I also hate it when people don’t engage with the strongest form of my work, and wouldn’t consider myself obligated to respond if they engaged with a weaker form (or if they engaged with the strongest one, barring additional obligation). But I think this is just what happens when someone goes on a podcast aimed at audiences that don’t already know them.
I agree with this heuristic in general, but will observe Quintin’s first post here was over two years ago and he commented on A List of Lethalities; I do think it’d be fair for him to respond with “what do you think this post was?”.
Vaniver is right. Note that I did specifically describe myself as an “alignment insider” at the start of this post. I’ve read A List of Lethalities and lots of other writing by Yudkowsky. Though the post I’d cite in response to the “you’re not engaging with the strongest forms of my argument” claim would be the one where I pretty much did what Yudkowsky suggests:
My post Evolution is a bad analogy for AGI: inner alignment specifically addresses List of Lethalities point 16:
and then argues that we shouldn’t use evolution as our central example of an “outer optimization criteria versus inner formed values” outcome.
You can also see my comment here for some of what led me to write about the podcast specifically.
Oh yeah in that case both the complaint and the grumpiness seems much more reasonable.
The comment enrages me too, but the reasons you have given seem like post-justification. The real reason why it’s enraging is that it rudely and dramatically implies that Eliezer’s time is much more valuable than the OP’s, and that it’s up to OP to summarize them for him. If he actually wanted to ask OP what the strongest point was he should have just DMed him instead of engineering this public spectacle.
I want people to not discuss things in DMs, and discuss things publicly more. I also don’t think this is embarrassing for Quintin, or at all a public spectacle.
It does imply that, but it’s likely true that Eliezer’s time is more valuable (or at least in more demand) than OP’s. I also don’t think Eliezer (or anyone else) should have to spend all that much effort worrying about if what they’re about to say might possibly come off as impolite or uncordial.
I don’t agree here. Commenting publicly opens the floor up for anyone to summarize the post or to submit what they think is the strongest point. I think it’s actually less pressure on Quintin this way.
I think that both of you are correct: Eliezer should have DMed Quintin Pope instead, and Eliezer hasn’t noticed that actual arguments were given, and that it sounds like an excuse to ignore disconfirming evidence.
This crystallizes a thought I had about Eliezer: Eliezer has increasingly terrible epistemics on AI doom, and a person should ignore Eliezer’s arguments, since they won’t ever update towards optimism, even if it’s warranted, and has real issues engaging people he doesn’t share his views and don’t give bad arguments.
I have attempted to respond to the whole post over here.