On blanket criticism and refutation

In his long post, Charbel-Raphaël's argues against theories of impacts of interpretability. I think it's a largely a good, well-argued post, and if the only thing you get out of it is reading that post, I'll be contributing to improving the discourse. There is other material with similar claims that I think are made with low context, and also I should say that I'm not very versed in the history and the various versions of the debate.

At the same time, I disagree with the take.

In this post I'm going to "go high" and debate strong, general forms of the criticism, rather than the more object-level subcomponents. Generalizing away from specifics, I think Charbel-Raphaël's post has three valid general reasons to doubt the usefulness of the interpretability paradigm. Below, I'll try to write out condensed but strong versions of them, and address [...]

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Outline:

(00:04) On blanket criticism and refutation

(02:43) The critiques

(02:51) First critique.

(05:51) Second critique

(09:04) Third critique

(11:58) Conclusion.

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 22nd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u3ZysuXEjkyHhefrk/against-blanket-arguments-against-interpretability

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Against blanket arguments against interpretability” by Dmitry Vaintrob

LessWrong (30+ Karma)