LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'm a bit torn regarding the "predicting how others react to what you say or do, and adjust accordingly" part. On the one hand this is very normal and human and makes sense. It's kind of predictive empathy in a way. On the other hand, thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic. If I knew another person would think that way and plan exactly how they interacted with me, I would find that quite off-putting. But maybe the solution is just "don't overdo it", and/or "only use it in ways the other person would likely consent to" (such as avoiding to accidentally say something hurtful).

Fixed! That specific response had a very weird thread structure, so makes sense the AI I used got confused. Plausible something else was missing, though I think I've now read through all the original PDFs and didn't see anything new.

I haven't heard of any such corrupt deals with OpenAI or Anthropic concerning governmental oversight over AI technology on the scale that would make me worried. Do you have any links to articles about government employees (who are responsible for oversight) recently signing secret contracts with OpenAI or Anthropic that would prohibit them from giving real feedback on a big enough scale to make it concerning?

I will try to provide another similar analogy. Let's say that a King got tired of his people dying from diseases, so he decided to try a novel method of vaccination.

However, some people were really concerned about that. As far as they were concerned, the default outcome of injecting viruses into the bodies of people is death. And the King wants to vaccinate everyone, so these people create a council of great and worthy thinkers who after thinking for a while come up with a list of reasons why vaccines are going to doom everyone.

However, some other great and worthy thinkers (let's call them "hopefuls") come to the council and give reasons to think that aforementioned reasons are mistaken. Maybe they have done their own research, which seems to vindicate King's plan or at least undermine council's arguments.

And now imagine that King comes down from the castle points his finger at hopefuls' giving arguments for why the arguments proposed by the council is wrong and says "yeah, basically this" and then turns around and goes back to the castle. To me it seems like King's official endorsement of the arguments proposed by hopefuls doesn't really change the ethicality of the situation, as long as King is acting according to hopefuls' plan.

Furthermore, imagine if the one of the hopefuls who come to argue with the council was actually an undercover King. And he gave exactly the same arguments as people before him. This still IMO doesn't change the ethicality of the situation.

First I heard of it was from an anesthesiologist who was very happy with how it is the only way to get to full anesthesia without depressing the patient's heart rate, so for senior patients it was really the only option. In retrospect, his enthusiasm about it does seem suspicious, but we were surrounded by professors and I don't think he was lying.

FYI it seems like this (important-seeming) email is missing, though the surrounding emails in the exchange seem to be present. (So maybe some other ones are missing too.)

I'm having a hard time following this argument. To be clear, I'm saying that while certain people were in regulatory bodies in the US & UK govts, they actively had secret legal contracts to not criticize the leading industry player, else (prseumably) they could be sued for damages. This is not a past shady deals, this is about current people during their current tenure having been corrupted.

Completeness theorem states that consistent countable FO theory has a model. Compactness theorem states that FO theory has a model iff every finite subset of FO theory has a model. Both theorems are provable in ZFC.

Therefore:

Consistent(ZFC) <-> all finite subsets of ZFC have a model ->

not Consistent(ZFC) <-> some finite subsets of ZFC don't have a model ->

some finite subsets of ZFC + not Consistent(ZFC) don't have a model <->

not Consistent(ZFC + not Consistent(ZFC)),

proven in ZFC + not Consistent(ZFC)

If my π-guess is wrong, my only chance to survive is getting all-heads.

Your other chance for survival is that whatever means are used to kill you somehow does not succeed due to quantuum effects. And this is what QI+path-based identity approach actually predicts. The universe isn't going to reotroactively change the digit of pi, but neither it's going to influence the probability of the coin tosses due to the fact that someone may die. QI influence will trigger only at the moment of your death, turning it into near death. And then for the next attempt. And for the next one. Potentially locking you in a state of eternal torture.

However, abandoning SSSA also has a serious theoretical cost:

If observed probabilities have a hidden subjective dimension (because of path-dependency), all hell breaks loose. If we agree that probabilities of being a copy are distributed not in a state-dependent way, but in a path-dependent way, we agree that there is a 'hidden variable' in self-locating probabilities. This hidden variable does not play a role in our π experiment but appears in other thought experiments where the order of making copies is defined.

I fail to see this cost. Yes, we agree that there is an additional variable. Namely, my causal history. It's not necessary hidden but can as well be. So what? What is so hellbreaking about it? This is exactly how probability theory works in every other case. Why should it have a special case for conscious experience?

If there are two bags one with 1 red ball and another with 1000 blue balls and then the coin is tossed and based on the outcome I'm either getting a ball from the first or the second bag, I'm expecting to receive red ball with 50% chance. I'm not supposed to assume out of nowhere that every ball have to have equal probabilities to be given, therefore postulate a ball-shadow that will modify the fairness of the coin.

I'm sorry, I'm confused about something here, I'll back up briefly and then respond to your point.

My model is:

• The vast majority of people who've seriously thought about it believe we don't know how to solve the alignment problem.
• More fundamentally, there's a sense in which we "basically don't know what we're doing" with regards to AI. People talk about "agents" and "goals" and "intentions" but we're kind of like at the phlogiston theory of heat or vitalism theory of life. We don't get it. We have no equations, we have no theory, we're just like "man these systems can really write and make pretty pictures" like we used to say "I don't get it but some things are hot and some things are cold". Science was tried, found hard, engineering was tried, found easy, and now we're only doing that. [LW · GW]
• Many/most folks who've given it serious thought are pretty confident that the default outcome is doom (omnicide or permanent disempowerment), though it may be way kinda worse (e.g. eternal torture) or slightly better (e.g. we get to keep earth), due to intuitive arguments about instrumental goals and selecting on minds in the way machine learning works. (This framing is a bit local, in that not every scientist in the world would quite know what I'm referring to here.)
• People are working hard and fast to build these AIs anyway because it's a profitable industry.

This literally spells the end of humanity (barring the eternal torture option or the grounded on earth option).

Back to your comment: some people are building AGI and knowingly threatening all of our lives. I propose they should show up and explain themselves. 

A natural question is "Why should they talk with you Ben? You're just one of the 8 billion people whose lives they're threatening."

That is why I am further suggesting they talk with many of the great and worthy thinkers who are of the position this is clearly bad, like Hinton, Bengio, Russell, Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc.

I am reading you say something like "But as long as someone is defending their behavior, they don't need to show up to defend it themselves."

This lands with me like we are two lowly peasants, who are talking about how the King has mistreated us due to how the royal guards often beat us up and rape the women. I'm saying "I would like the King to answer for himself" and I'm hearing you say "But I know a guy in the next pub who thinks the King is making good choices with his powers. If you can argue with him, I don't see why the King needs to come down himself." I would like to have the people who are wielding the power defend themselves.

Again, this is not me proposing business norms, it's me saying "the people who are taking the action that looks like it kills us, I want those people in particular to show up and explain themselves".