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Hey, I remember your medical miracle post. I enjoyed it!

"Objectively" for me would translate to "biomarker" i.e., a bio-physical signal that predicts a clinical outcome. Note that for depression and many psychological issues this means that we find the biomarkers by asking people how they feel...but maybe this is ok because we do huge studies with good controls, and the biomarkers may take on a life of their own after they are identified.

I'm assuming you mean biomarkers for psychological / mental health outcomes specifically. This is spiritually pretty close to what my lab studies - ways to predict how TMS will affect individuals, and adjust it to make it work better in each person. Our philosophy - which I had to think about for a bit to even articulate, it's so baked into our thinking - is that the effects of an intervention will manifest most reliably in reactions to very simple cognitive tasks like vigilance, working memory, and so on. Most serious health issues impact your reaction times, accuracy, bias, etc. in subtle but statistically reliable ways. Measuring these with random sampling from a phone app and doing good statistics on the data is probably your best bet for objectively assessing interventions. Maybe that is what Quantified Mind does, I'm not sure?

The short answer is that if this were easy, it would already be popular, because we clearly need it. A lot of academic labs and industry people are trying to do this all the time. There is growing success, but it's slow growing and fraught with non-replicable work.

i think i agree that this does justified harm, but maybe for some subgroups or communities the justified harm is worth the benefits of such an event? our local rationality community has developed to a point where i think people are comfortable talking about "controversial" statements with their real faces on because the vibes are one where any attempt at cancellation instead of dialogue will be met with eyerolls and social exclusion but like, you know, it took a pretty long time and sustained effort for us to get here. (and maybe im wrong and there are people in the group with opinions they are still afraid to voice!)

im modelling this as something kind of like authentic relating - you're hacking the group's intimacy module and ratcheting up the feeling of closeness with a shortcut. it's not going to be as good as the genuine thing, but maybe it's a lot better than what one would have general access to. it's not everyone's thing, people with enough access to the genuine goods are likely to be like "wtf this is weird", sometimes it can go catastrophically wrong if the facilitator drops the ball... but despite all of that, for some people it's a good thing to do occasionally bc otherwise they will never get enough of that social nutrient naturally

Question 1:

I stay in the loop when my AGI is solving hard problems. Absolutely it will need persistent goals, new reasoning, and continuous learning to make progress. That changing mind opens up The alignment stability problem [LW · GW] as you note in your comment on the other thread. My job is making sure it's not going off the rails WRT my intent as it works. 

People will do this by default. Letting it run for any length of time without asking questions about what it's up to would be both very expensive, and beyond the bounds of patience and curiosity for almost any humans. I instructed it to cure cancer, but I'm going to keep asking it how it's planning to do that and what progress its making. My important job is asking it about its alignment continually as it learns and plans. I'm frequently asking if it's had ideas about scheming to get its (subgoal) accomlished (while of course re-iterating the standing instructions to tell me the whole truth relevant to my requests). Its alignmnt is my job, until it's so much smarter than me, and clearly understands my intent, to trust it to keep itself aligned.

Question 2:

Yes, instruction-following should be helpful-only. Giving a bunch of constraints on the instructions it will follow adds risk that it won't obey your instructions to shut down or amend its goals or its understanding of previous instructions. That's the principal advantage of corrigibility. Max Harms details this logic [LW · GW] in much more compelling detail.

Yes, this definitely opens up the prospect of misuse, and that is terrifying. But this is not only the safer early route, it's the one AGI project leaders will choose - because they're people who like power.

An org that's created instruction-following AGI would have it follow instructions only from one or a few top "principals". They would instruct it to follow a limited set of instructions from any users they license its instances to. Some of those users would try to jailbreak it to follow dangerous instructions.

And having even a few humans from different groupos (e.g., rival governments) fully in charge of real AGIs would be terrifying. Much more on this in [If we solve alignment, do we die anyway?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kLpFvEBisPagBLTtM/if-we-solve-alignment-do-we-die-anyway-1).

(Provisional current answer after that discussion: it becomes a tricky political negotiation. Who knows. But maybe. 

I favor this approach far above just giving a list of goals and side constraints and hoping they're not too badly interpreted. The reasoning in your post pretty much describes what I'm worried about - although there are also some less intuitive but logically sound misinterpretations of lots of goals that might come into play as the AGI becomes thoroughly superhuman and does more of its own thinking.

To your final observation:

Yes, some outcome-based RL is probably inevitable. o1 was probably trained that way, and others will follow. Let us hope it is not too much to overwhelm the non-instrumental training and the explicit goal of following instructions. And let us figure out how much is likely to be too much before we learn the hard way.

The bet is indeed on. See you back here in 2029 :)

I missed this until I finally got around to responding to your last post, which I'd put on my todo list.

I applaud your initiative and drive! I do think it's a tough pitch to try to leapfrog the fast progressive in deep networks. Nor do I think the alignment picture for those types of systems is nearly as bleak as Yudkowsky & the old school believe. But neither is it likely to be easy enough to leave to chance and those who don't fully grasp the seriousness of the problem. I've written about some of the most common Cruxes of disagreement on alignment difficulty [LW(p) · GW(p)].

So I'd suggest you would have better odds working within the ML framework that is happening with or without your help. I also think that even if you do produce a near-miraculous breakthrough in symbolic GOFAI, Deep Learning Systems Are Not Less Interpretable Than Logic/Probability/Etc [LW · GW].

OTOH, if you have a really insightful approach, and a good reason to think the result would be easier to align than language model agents, maybe pursuing that path makes sense, since no one else is doing exactly that. As I said in my comment on your last request for directions, I think there are higher-expected-value nearly-as-underserved routes to survival; namely, working on alignment for the LLM agents that are our most likely route to first AGIs at this point (focusing on different routes from aligning the base LLMs, which is common but inadequate).

I'm also happy to talk. Your devotion to the project is impressive, and a resource not to be wasted!

Took me a while to get back to this question. I didn't know the answer so I looked up some papers. The short answer is, knowing this requires long follow-up periods which studies are generally not good at so we don't have great answers. Definitely a significant number of people don't stay better.

The longer answer is, probably about half of people need some form of maintenance treatment to stay non-depressed for more than a year, but our view of this is very confounded. Some studies have used normal antidepressant medications for maintenance, and some studies have tried additional rounds of TMS, both of which work really well. Up to a third of patients experience "symptom worsening" meaning that after an initial improvement from TMS, their symptoms actually get worse than when they started, but apparently more TMS can fix this in most people? I wasn't completely sure what they were saying here. So yeah, it isn't great. A lot of people need maintenance of some kind. This could very well correlate with whether your depression is the "life circumstances" kind or the "intrinsic brain chemistry" kind, not that we have a great handle on differentiating those two either.

Furthermore, (1) there are a few modes of TMS therapy out there, including most notably the accelerated course, and there may be different relapse rates across these treatment modes. There is some handwaving that the accelerated course may be more effective in this regard but I don't think we know yet. And (2) another important issue with interpreting these data is that many of the studies are done on people who are treatment resistant, such as yourself. It's unclear how much the results translate to the general population of depressed people.

Overall this is probably not a very satisfying answer, I don't really have the specialist inside view on this one.

FYI the most targeted paper I found on this topic is the citation below. Note that it's from 2016. There is probably something more recent, I just didn't have more time to dig.

Sackeim, H. A. (2016). Acute continuation and maintenance treatment of major depressive episodes with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Brain Stimulation: Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research in Neuromodulation, 9(3), 313-319.

I don't think this distinction is robust enough to rely on as much of a defensive property. I think it's probably not that hard to think "I probably would have tried something in direction X, or direction Y", and then gather lots of bits about how well the clusters X and Y work.

Oh right.

Did you make any progress on choosing a course? My brief pitch is this: LLM agents are our most likely route to AGI, and particularly likely in short timelines. Aligning them is not the same as aligning the base LLMs. Yet almost no one is working on bridging that gap.

That's what I'm working on. More can be found in my user profile.

I do think this is high prospective impact. I'm not sure what you mean by low prospective risk. I think the work has good odds of being at least somewhat useful, since it's so neglected and it's pretty commonly agreed that language model agents (or foundation model agents or LLM cognitive architectures) are a pretty likely path to first AGI.

I'm happy to talk more. I meant to respond here sooner.

The recent rumors about slowed progress in large training runs have reduced my p(doom). More time to prepare for AGI raises our odds. This probably won't be a large delay. This is combined with the observation that inference-time compute does also scale results, but it probably doesn't scale them that fast - the graph released with o1 preview didn't include units on the cost/compute axis.

More than that, my p(doom) went steadily down as I kept contemplating instruction-following as the central alignment goal. I increasingly think it's the obvious thing to try once you're actually contemplating launching an AGI that could become smarter than you; and it's a huge benefit to any technical alignment scheme, since it offers the advantages of corrigibility, allowing you to correct some alignment errors.

More on that logic in Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI [LW · GW]