Kind of a delayed response, but: Could you clarify what you think is the relation between that post and mine? I think they are somehow sort of related, but not sure what you think the relation is. Are you just trying to say “this is sort of related”, or are you trying to say “the strategy stealing assumption and this defense-offense symmetry thesis is the same thing”?
In the latter case: I think they are not the same thing, neither in terms of their actual meaning nor their intended purpose:
Strategy-stealing assumption is (in the context of AI alignment): for any strategy that a misaligned AI can use to obtain influence/power/resources, humans can employ a similar strategy to obtain a similar amount of influence/power/resources.
This defense-offense symmetry thesis: In certain domains, in order to defend against an attacker, the defender need the same cognitive skills (knowledge, understanding, models, …) as the attacker (and possibly more).
These seem sort of related, but they are just very different claims, even depending on different ontologies/cocepts. One particularly simple-to-state difference is that the strategy-stealing argument is explicitly about symmetric games whereas the defense-offense symmetry is about a (specific kind of) asymmetric game, where there is a defender who first has some time to build defenses, and then an attacker who can respond to that and exploit any weaknesses. (and the strategy-stealing argument as applied to AI alignment is not literally symmetric, but semi-symmetric in the sense of the relation between inbeing kind of “linear”).
So yeah given this, could you say what you think the relation is?
“I think in the defense-offense case the actions available to both sides are approximately the same”
If attacker has the action “cause a 100% lethal global pandemic” and the defender has the task “prevent a 100% lethal global pandemic”, then clearly these are different problems, and it is a thesis, a thing to be argued for, that the latter requires largely the same skills/tech as the former (which is what this offense-defense symmetry thesis states).
If you build an OS that you’re trying to make safe against attacks, you might do e.g. what the seL4 microkernel team did and formally verify the OS to rule out large classes of attacks, and this is an entirely different kind of action than “find a vulnerability in the OS and develop an exploit to take control over it”.
“I wouldn’t say the strategy-stealing assumption is about a symmetric game”
Just to point out that the original strategy stealing argument assumes literal symmetry. I think the argument only works insofar as generalizing from literal symmetry doesn’t break this argument (to e.g. something more like linearity of the benefit of initial resources). I think you actually need something like symmetry in both instrumental goals, and “initial-resources-to-output map”.
The strategy-stealing argument as applied to defense-offense would say something like “whatever offense does to increase its resources / power is something that defense could also do to increase resources / power”.
Yes, but this is almost the opposite of what the offense-defense symmetry thesis is saying. Because it can both be true that 1. defender can steal attacker’s strategies, AND 2. defender alternatively has a bunch of much easier strategies available, by which it can defend against attacker and keep all the resources.
This DO-symmetry thesis says that 2 is NOT true, because all such strategies in fact also require the same kind of skills. The point of the DO-symmetry thesis is to make more explicit the argument that humans cannot defend against misaligned AI without their own aligned AI.
“This isn’t the same as your thesis.”
Ok I only read this after writing all of the above, so I thought you were implying they were the same (and was confused as to why you would imply this), and I’m guessing you actually just meant to say “these things are sort of vaguely related”.
Anyway, if I wanted to state what I think the relation is in a simple way I’d say that they give lower and upper bounds respectively on the capabilities needed from AI systems:
OD-symmetry thesis: We need our defensive AI to be at least as capable as any misaligned AI.
strategy-stealing: We don’t need our defensive AI to be any more capable.
I think probably both are not entirely right.