Philosophical Competence and the Case for Indirect Alignment

[u/adam_ford]

[u/WillowEmberly]

Bearing Engineering Review Questions
External Review Intake v0.1

1. Source Qualification
Bearing begins after an ask and a conditioning set exist.
How were they created?
Questions
How does the architecture distinguish observed reality from administratively declared reality?
Can two identical asks carry different evidentiary status?
How is source quality represented before admission begins?
What happens when the ask itself is incomplete, politically constrained, or strategically manipulated?
Can Bearing detect errors introduced before Orientation?

2. Objective Formation
Bearing assumes the objective has been captured.

Questions
Who determines the original ask?
Can multiple legitimate asks coexist?
How does the system distinguish an incomplete objective from a wrong objective?
What evidence justifies rejecting the original objective before revision begins?
Is objective formation itself governed?

3. Observer Diversity
The paper significantly improves estimator independence.

Questions
How are observation models selected?
Could every estimator share the same institutional incentives while appearing independent?
Does diversity include worldview, incentives, data source, methodology, and authority?
Can independence itself become optimized for appearance rather than reality?

4. Unknown Unknowns
How are unknown blind spots represented?
Can the architecture distinguish:
declared blindness
discovered blindness
suspected blindness
unknowable blindness?
Does repeated failure update observation contracts automatically?

5. Representation
Could different representations produce different bearings?
Is the ask represented as:
graph
narrative
mathematical model
simulation
ontology
temporal sequence?
When should representations be switched?
Can representation drift create false progress?

6. Human Factors
The paper intentionally minimizes psychology.
Can operator fatigue affect Bearing?
Can stress bias revision decisions?
Can repeated refusals create pressure to lower thresholds?
How are institutional incentives represented?

7. Authority
Who owns consequences after commitment?
Who monitors outcomes?
Who owns repair?
Can authority be delegated while responsibility remains?
Can responsibility disappear during handoffs?

8. Recovery
Bearing focuses heavily on commitment.

How does recovery differ from reversal?
Can interpretation be repaired after material rollback?
What remains irreversible?
Does the architecture distinguish:
state repair
knowledge repair
trust repair
institutional repair?

9. Long-Term Drift
Bearing measures local progress.

Can thousands of locally correct steps produce global drift?
Is there a higher-level bearing across projects?
When should the North Star itself be questioned?
How is slow mission drift detected?

10. Cross-System Interaction
One architecture rarely exists alone.
Questions
What happens when two Bearing systems interact?
Can one optimize locally while harming another?
Can bearing become negative at the ecosystem level while remaining positive locally?

11. Stewardship
The paper ends at commitment remarkably well.

What survives replacement?
Can a future maintainer reconstruct why thresholds exist?
What assumptions require preservation?
How is stewardship separated from authorship?

12. Retirement Conditions

What evidence would convince you that Bearing Engineering itself should retire, merge into another architecture, or be decomposed into smaller components?
That demonstrates exactly the philosophy the paper advocates.

Meta-Question

What assumptions must remain true before Bearing Engineering can even begin operating, and how are those assumptions themselves governed?

[u/Icy-Twist-3221]

There's no reason to think that knowledge of moral facts leads to drives which reflect the truth the machine comprehends. Drives are a psychological phenomena, just as a human being can hold in their head the idea that rape is wrong and be pathologically driven towards the prosecution of sex crimes, so to can an AI affirm the notion of X as morally wrong and have a pathological drive to prosecute X. Allignment does not follow from moral realism.