Spoiler alert! When I first read Eliot's Four Quartets a couple years ago it felt like pure wisdom. A perfect description of human condition. But it was very abstract. The poetic allusions were pointing in the right directions, without ever saying it aloud. For some reason, today I started asking GPT-3 DaVinci for explanations of the last couple of verses. Almost all (like 23 out of 25) were really good. But then I asked: "Explain why the condition of complete simplicity costs not less than everything:

Self-deception has always been an issue for me and I think for many others as well. My current understanding of how it arises is that society creates external incentives for a certain set of beliefs, which are accepted and publicly endorsed, but in practice they are not followed. Or, it can be the self-image created by the person, but the reinforcement from society is still important, because it makes it much more difficult to adapt it. Either because it's unrealistically hard to act on such beliefs, or because it's simply enough to act "as if".

I've been looking into the AI alignment problem last couple of days and came up with the following summary of what problems there are and why. Also, I'd prefer using the umbrella name of Human alignment problem, as AI alignment is just a subset of it. The problem is that we don't know what we want.