1. 

4.4% of the US federal budget went into the space race at its peak.

This was surprising to me, until a friend pointed out that landing rockets on specific parts of the moon requires very similar technology to landing rockets in soviet cities.[1]

I wonder how much more enthusiastic the scientists working on Apollo were, with the convenient motivating story of “I’m working towards a great scientific endeavor” vs “I’m working to make sure we can kill millions if we want to”.

2.

The field of alignment seems to be increasingly dominated by interpretability. (and obedience[2])

This was surprising to me[3], until a friend pointed out that partially opening the black box of NNs is the kind of technology that would scaling labs find new unhobblings by noticing ways in which the internals of their models are being inefficient and having better tools to evaluate capabilities advances.[4]

I [...]

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Outline:

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(00:35) 2.

(01:20) 3.

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 21st, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h4wXMXneTPDEjJ7nv/a-rocket-interpretability-analogy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.