Audio note: this article contains 59 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
Summary: Both our (UK AISI's) debate safety case sketch and Anthropic's research agenda point at systematic human error as a weak point for debate. This post talks through how one might strengthen a debate protocol to partially mitigate this.
** Not too many errors in unknown places**
The complexity theory models of debate assume some expensive verifier machine <span>M</span> with access to a human oracle, such that
- If we ran <span>M</span> in full, we’d get a safe answer
- <span>M</span> is too expensive to run in full, meaning we need some interactive proof protocol (something like debate) to skip steps
Typically, <span>M</span> is some recursive tree computation, where for simplicity we can think of human oracle queries as occurring at the leaves [...]
Outline:
(00:39) Not too many errors in unknown places
(04:01) A protocol that handles an \varepsilon-fraction of errors
(05:26) What distribution do we measure errors against?
(06:43) Cross-examination-like protocols
(08:27) Collaborate with us
First published:
May 14th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EgRJtwQurNzz8CEfJ/dodging-systematic-human-errors-in-scalable-oversight)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO).
