LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Update: I have now cross-referenced every single email for accuracy, cleaned up and clarified the thread structure, and added subject lines and date stamps wherever they were available. I now feel comfortable with people quoting anything in here without checking the original source (unless you are trying to understand the exact thread structure of who was CC'd and when, which was a bit harder to compress into a linear format).

Or get some other work out of these systems such that you greatly reduce risk going forward.

Chat, do we think Solomonoff Daemons are exponentially dense? 

Some doomers have very strong intuitions that doom is almost assured for almost any kind of building AI. Yudkowsky likes to say that alignment is about hitting a tiny part of values space in a vast universe of deeply alien values. 

Is there a way to make this more formal? Is there a formal model in which some kind of solomonoff daemon/ mesa-optimizer/ gremlins in the machine start popping up all over the place as the cognitive power of the agent is scaled up?

For reference, @habryka has now posted them here [LW · GW].

I thought the part you quoted was quite concerning, also in the context of what comes afterwards: 

Hiatus: Sam told Greg and Ilya he needs to step away for 10 days to think. Needs to figure out how much he can trust them and how much he wants to work with them. Said he will come back after that and figure out how much time he wants to spend.

Sure, the email by Sutskever and Brockman gave some nonviolent communication vibes and maybe it isn't "the professional thing" to air one's feelings and perceived mistakes like that, but they seemed genuine in what they wrote and they raised incredibly important concerns that are difficult in nature to bring up. Also, with hindsight especially, it seems like they had valid reasons to be concerned about Altman's power-seeking tendencies!

When someone expresses legitimate-given-the-situation concerns about your alignment and your reaction is to basically gaslight them into thinking they did something wrong for finding it hard to trust you, and then you make it seem like you are the poor victim who needs 10 days off of work to figure out whether you can still trust them, that feels messed up! (It's also a bit hypocritical because the whole "I need 10 days to figure out if I can still trust you for thinking I like being CEO a bit too much," seems childish too.) 

(Of course, these emails are just snapshots and we might be missing things that happened in between via other channels of communication, including in-person talks.)

Also, I find it interesting that they (Sutskever and Brockman) criticized Musk just as much as Altman (if I understood their email correctly), so this should make it easier for Altman to react with grace. I guess given Musk's own annoyed reaction, maybe Altman was calling the others' email childish to side with Musks's dismissive reaction to that same email.

Lastly, this email thread made me wonder what happened between Brockman and Sutskever in the meantime, since it now seems like Brockman no longer holds the same concerns about Altman even though recent events seem to have given a lot of new fire to them.

As we assume that coin tosses are quantum, and I will be killed if (I didn't guess pi) or (coin toss is not heads) there is always a branch with 1/128 measure where all coins are heads, and they are more probable than surviving via some errors in the setup. 

All hell breaks loose" refers here to a hypothetical ability to manipulate perceived probability—that is, magic. The idea is that I can manipulate such probability by changing my measure.

One way to do this is described in Yudkowsky's " The Anthropic Trilemma [LW · GW]," where an observer temporarily boosts their measure by increasing the number of their copies in an uploaded computer.

I described a similar idea in "Magic by forgetting [LW · GW]," where the observer boosts their measure by forgetting some information and thus becoming similar to a larger group of observers.

Hidden variables also appear depending on the order in which I make copies: if each copy is made from subsequent copies, the original will have a 0.5 probability, the first copy 0.25, the next 0.125, and so on.

"Anthropic shadow" appear only because the number of observers changes in different branches. 

 

In other cases, or for other reasons, they might be instead set up to demand results, and evaluate primarily based on results.

Why might it be set up like that? Seems potentially quite irrational. Veering into motivated reasoning territory here imo [LW · GW]

FWIW, my best guess is the document contains fewer errors than having a human copy-paste things and stitch it together. The errors have a different nature to them, and so it makes sense to flag them, but like, I started out with copy-pasting and OCR, and that did not actually have an overall lower error rate.

I'm less confident in this position since I put on a disagree emoji, but my reason is because it's much easier to control an AIs data sources for training than it is for humans, which means it's quite easy in theory (but might be difficult in practice, which worries me) to censor just enough data such that the model doesn't even think that it's likely in a simulation that doesn't add up to normality.

I seem to have gotten a "Why?" on this.

The reason is that checking things yourself is a really, really basic, essential standard of discourse^[1]. Errors propagate, and the only way to avoid them propagating is not to propagate them.

If this was created using some standard LLM UI, it would have come with some boilerplate "don't use this without checking it" warning^[2]. But it was used without checking it... with another "don't use without checking" warning. By whatever logic allows that, the next person should be able to use the material, including quoting or summarizing it, without checking either, so long as they include their own warning. The warnings should be able to keep propagating forever.

... but the real consequences of that are a game of telphone:

1. An error can get propagated until somebody forgets the warning, or just plain doesn't feel like including the warning, and then you have false claims of fact circulating with no warning at all. Or the warning deteriorates into "sources claim that", or "there are rumors that", or something equally vague that can't be checked.
2. Even if the warning doesn't get lost or removed, tracing back to sources gets harder with each step in the chain.
3. Many readers will end up remembering whatever they took out of the material, including that it came from a "careful" source (because, hey, they were careful to remind you to check up on them)... but forget that they were told it hadn't been checked, or underestimate the importance of that.
4. If multiple people propagate an error, people start seeing it in more than one "independent" source, which really makes them start to think it must be true. It can become "common knowledge", at least in some circles, and those circles can be surprisingly large.

That pollution of common knowledge is the big problem.

The pollution tends to be even worse because whatever factoid or quote will often get "simplified", or "summarized", or stripped of context, or "punched up" at each step. That mutation is itself exacerbated by people not checking references, because if you check references at least you'll often end up mutating the version from a step or two back, instead of building even higher on top of the latest round of errors.

All of this is especially likely to happen when "personalities" or politics are involved. And even more likely to happen when people feel a sense of urgency about "getting this out there as soon as possible". Everybody in the chain is going to feel that same sense of urgency.

I have seen situations like that created very intentionally in certain political debates (on multiple different topics, all unrelated to anything Less Wrong generally cares about). You get deep chains of references that don't quite support what they're claimed to support, spawning "widely known facts" that eventually, if you do the work, turn out to be exaggerations of admitted wild guesses from people who really didn't have any information at all. People will even intentionally add links to the chain to give others plausible deniability. I don't think there's anything intentional here, but there's a reason that some people do it intentionally. It works. And you can get away with it if the local culture isn't demanding rigorous care and checking up at every step.

You can also see this sort of thing as an attempt to claim social prestige for a minimal contribution. After all, it would have been possible to just post the link, or post the link and suggest that everybody get their AI to summarize it. But the main issue is that spreading unverified rumors causes widespread epistemic harm.