One thing this leaves implicit is the counterfactual: in particular, I thought the point of the “Problems solve themselves” section was that if problems would be solved by default, then you can’t do good by thinking ahead. I wanted to make that clearer, which led to
we both **can** and **need to** think ahead in order to solve [the alignment problem].
Where “can” talks about feasibility, and “need to” talks about the counterfactual.
I can remove the “and **need to**” if you think this is wrong.
I’d prefer something like the weaker and less clear statement “we **can** think ahead, and it’s potentially valuable to do so even given the fact that people might try to figure this all out later”.
My interpretation was that the crux was
One thing this leaves implicit is the counterfactual: in particular, I thought the point of the “Problems solve themselves” section was that if problems would be solved by default, then you can’t do good by thinking ahead. I wanted to make that clearer, which led to
Where “can” talks about feasibility, and “need to” talks about the counterfactual.
I can remove the “and **need to**” if you think this is wrong.
I’d prefer something like the weaker and less clear statement “we **can** think ahead, and it’s potentially valuable to do so even given the fact that people might try to figure this all out later”.