[Video] Too much Empiricism kills you

post by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2023-10-19T05:08:09.149Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://youtu.be/vqHlPb18ROE?si=vf840i97GZwgxIjD

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Here is a video I made 2 months ago. It gives a mediocre at best explanation for an important foundational argument:

It is normally possible to make progress using empirical methods, as long as you can measure how good a particular change was. That holds even when you don't really understand <what you are doing/the systems you are building>. This explains why researchers can advance capabilities in ML even though they basically do not understand the internals of the current deep learning systems at all.

I also argue that any progress in understanding can be dangerous, because it often improves the frontier of things that can be effectively explored through empirical methods. A corollary of this is that mechanistic interpretability can make it easier to advance capabilities.

The argument generalizes very far.

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