Difference between revisions of "Goalpost for usefulness of HRAD work"
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When thinking about the question of "How useful is [[HRAD]] work?", what standards/goalposts should we use? There's a pattern I see where: | When thinking about the question of "How useful is [[HRAD]] work?", what standards/goalposts should we use? There's a pattern I see where: | ||
| − | * people advocating [[HRAD]] research bring up historical cases like Turing, Shannon, etc. where formalization worked well | + | * people advocating [[HRAD]] research bring up historical cases like Turing, Shannon, etc. where formalization worked well. There is also the [[deconfusion research]] framing, where just understanding what's going on better is a form of progress. |
* people arguing against HRAD research talk about how "complete axiomatic descriptions" haven't been useful so far in AI, and how they aren't used to describe machine learning systems | * people arguing against HRAD research talk about how "complete axiomatic descriptions" haven't been useful so far in AI, and how they aren't used to describe machine learning systems | ||
Revision as of 07:19, 27 May 2020
When thinking about the question of "How useful is HRAD work?", what standards/goalposts should we use? There's a pattern I see where:
- people advocating HRAD research bring up historical cases like Turing, Shannon, etc. where formalization worked well. There is also the deconfusion research framing, where just understanding what's going on better is a form of progress.
- people arguing against HRAD research talk about how "complete axiomatic descriptions" haven't been useful so far in AI, and how they aren't used to describe machine learning systems
It seems like there's a question of what is the relevant goalpost, for deciding whether HRAD work is useful.
- will early advanced AI systems be understandable in terms of HRAD's formalisms? [1]
- how convincing historical examples are (e.g. Shannon, Turing, Bayes, Pearl, Kolmogorov, null-terminated strings in C [4], [5] [6], Eliezer also brings up the Shannon vs Poe chess example) See also selection effect for successful formalizations.
