See, that people are shocked by this is the problem. The whole field of AI has proceeded as alchemy, not science.

Some of this is because "the Bitter Lesson" type experience, but some of this is because of the idea that "we're making machines to do things we don't know how to do" bakes in inscrutability into the very definition of the field.

I was excited about the "Neural Networks Are Already Clean" piece not because alignment, which I don't think much about as a non-EA, but simply because we can do better engineering with whiteboxes than blackboxes. Now, here we are, doing it.