unfortunately I wasn’t able to include a table of contents
on the greaterwrong version of the EA forum, there’s an automatically generated TOC. So that’s an option for people who would strongly prefer a TOC
I have been feeling the siren song of agent-based models recently (I think it seems a natural move in a lot of cases, because we are actually modelling agents), but your criticisms of them reminded me that they often don’t pay for their complexity in better predictions. It seems quite a general and useful point, and perhaps could be extracted to a standalone post, if you had the time and inclination.
I know it wasn’t a major area of focus for you, but do you have a vague impression of when randomisation might be a big win purely by reducing costs of evaluation? One particular case where it might be useful is funders where disbursement is bottlenecked by evaluation capacity. Do you have any pointers for useful places to start research on the idea?
Paul Christiano has a notion of competitiveness, which seems relevant. Directions and desiderata for AI control seems to be the the place it’s stated most clearly.
The following quote (emphasis in the original) is one of the reasons he gives for desiring competitiveness, and seems to be in the same ballpark as the reason you gave: