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”.
I think your summary of crux three is slightly wrong: I didn’t say that we need to think about it ahead of time, I just said that we can.
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”.