(disclaimer that I talked to Sasha before he put up this post) but as a ‘random EA person’ I did find reading this clarifying.
It’s not that I believed that “orthogonality thesis the reason why AGI safety is an important cause area”, but that I had never thought about the distinction between “no known law relating intelligence and motivations” and “near-0 statistical correlation between intelligence and motivations”.
If I’d otherwise been prompted to think about it, I’d probably have arrived at the former, but I think the latter was rattling around inside my system 1 because the term “orthogonality” brings to mind orthogonal vectors.
(disclaimer that I talked to Sasha before he put up this post) but as a ‘random EA person’ I did find reading this clarifying.
It’s not that I believed that “orthogonality thesis the reason why AGI safety is an important cause area”, but that I had never thought about the distinction between “no known law relating intelligence and motivations” and “near-0 statistical correlation between intelligence and motivations”.
If I’d otherwise been prompted to think about it, I’d probably have arrived at the former, but I think the latter was rattling around inside my system 1 because the term “orthogonality” brings to mind orthogonal vectors.