Design a series of puzzles and challenges as a learning tool for alignment beginners, that when solved, progressively reveal more advanced concepts and tools. The goal is for participants to stumble upon a lucky solution while trying to solve these puzzles in these novel frames.
Highly on board with this idea. I’m thinking about writing a post about the game Foldit, which researchers came up with that reimagined protein folding as an online puzzle game. The game had thousands of players and the project was wildly successful—not just once, but many times. Thousands of ordinary people who knew nothing about biology or biochemistry sharing their creative ideas with each other vastly outstripped the researchers and algorithms at the time.
If anything like this could be done with alignment where we could effectively get thousands of weak alignment researchers, I’d put a lot of hope on it.
It depends at what rate the chance can be decreased. If it takes 50 years to shrink it from 1% to 0.1%, then with all the people that would die in that time, I’d probably be willing to risk it.
As of right now, even the most optimistic experts I’ve seen put p(doom) at much higher than 1% - far into the range where I vote to hit pause.