I would love to see more stories of this form, and think that writing stories like this is a good area of research to be pursuing for its own sake that could help inform strategy at Open Phil and elsewhere. With that said, I don’t think I’d advise everyone who is trying to do technical AI alignment to determine what questions they’re going to pursue based on an exercise like this—doing this can be very laborious, and the technical research route it makes the most sense for you to pursue will probably be affected by a lot of considerations not captured in the exercise, such as your existing background, your native research intuitions and aesthetic (which can often determine what approaches you’ll be able to find any purchase on), what mentorship opportunities you have available to you and what your potential mentors are interested in, etc.
I would love to see more stories of this form, and think that writing stories like this is a good area of research to be pursuing for its own sake that could help inform strategy at Open Phil and elsewhere. With that said, I don’t think I’d advise everyone who is trying to do technical AI alignment to determine what questions they’re going to pursue based on an exercise like this—doing this can be very laborious, and the technical research route it makes the most sense for you to pursue will probably be affected by a lot of considerations not captured in the exercise, such as your existing background, your native research intuitions and aesthetic (which can often determine what approaches you’ll be able to find any purchase on), what mentorship opportunities you have available to you and what your potential mentors are interested in, etc.