A lot of the mech interp stuff has seemed to me like a different kind of voodoo: the Integer Quantum Hall Effect? Overloading the term “Superposition” in a weird analogy not governed by serious group representation theory and some clear symmetry? You guys are reaching. And I’ve read all the papers. Spot the postdoc who decided to get paid.

But there is one thing in particular that I’ll acknowledge as a great insight and the beginnings of a very plausible research agenda: bounded near orthogonal vector spaces are wildly counterintuitive in high dimensions and there are existing results around it that create scope for rigor [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Lindenstraus...

Superposition code is a well known concept in information theory - I think there is certainly more to the story then described in the current works, but it does feel like they are going in the right direction

Where are you seeing the integer quantum Hall effect mentioned? Or are you bringing it up rather than responding to it being brought up elsewhere? I don’t understand what the connection between IQHE and these SAE interpretability approaches is supposed to be.