This post really helped me make concrete some of the admittedly gut reaction type concerns/questions/misunderstandings I had about alignment research, thank you. I have a few thoughts after reading:
(1) I wonder how different some of these epistemic strategies are from everyday normal scientific research in practice. I do experimental neuroscience and I would argue that we also are not even really sure what the "right" questions are (in a local sense, as in, what experiment should I do next), and so we are in a state where we kinda fumble around using whate...
It's great to see someone working on this subject. I'd like to point you to Jim Crutchfield's work, in case you aren't familiar with it, where he proposes a "calculii of emergence" wherein you start with a dynamical system and via a procedure of teasing out the equivalence classes of how the past constrains the future, can show that you get the "computational structure" or "causal structure" or "abstract structure" (all loaded terms, I know, but there's math behind it), of the system. It's a compressed symbolic representation of what the dynamical system i...
That is a fair summary.