LessWrong (Curated & Popular) “Conceptual Rounding Errors” by Jan_Kulveit
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Mar 29, 2025 Join Jan Kulveit, author and thinker focused on cognitive biases, as he delves into 'Conceptual Rounding Errors.' He discusses how our minds can overly compress new ideas, leading us to miss nuanced differences from existing concepts. Jan reveals how this mechanism can hinder our understanding, especially in complex fields like AI alignment. He shares practical strategies for enhancing cognitive clarity and metacognitive awareness, ensuring we differentiate novelty from familiarity effectively.
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Conceptual Rounding Errors
- Conceptual rounding errors occur when our minds simplify new ideas to familiar ones, discarding crucial differences.
- This over-compression leads to misunderstandings, hindering progress in fields like AI safety.
AI Safety Example
- Different models of problems within AI (meso-optimizers, optimization demons, sub-agents, inner alignment) are often rounded to a single, locally salient frame.
- This simplification makes reasoning about these issues difficult, as seen in AI alignment research.
Combating Rounding Errors
- Increase metacognitive awareness by recognizing the "I know this" feeling as a potential rounding error.
- Actively decompress concepts by articulating differences, visualizing ideas, and remembering edge cases.