It seems that certain thermodynamic phenomena are highly relevant to alignment. From Paul Christiano's rebuttal to a recent seminal paper:
In fact, it appears that thousands of words may have been written on this topic, from which many lesser researchers have bounced off.
Seeing that Paul Christiano and John Swentworth have spent countless hours investigating this important topic, it's importance is quite evident. In order to free up their time for other strategies like ELK, I am launching a new EA-funded initiative:
Our initial staff consists of myself and 10 Mechanical Turk workers, who shall be tasked with data gathering. For seed funding, we are requesting a modest sum of $50M. Given that Paul's time is worth $20 trillion per hour, this seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Our initial research agenda consists of investigating the space of designs with a complex number of hoses. Further, we have reason to believe that regularizing by the complexity of the stupidest argument for a given design leads to good inductive bias properties. Our work may even have direct implications for other alignment agendas, as it shares structure with many important problems.
Furthermore, building infrastructure for practical engineering projects is of great value, even if air conditioners aren't quite mechanistically identical to AGI.
You can support our work by loudly advertising your loyalty to the 1-hose or 2-hose camp.