LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Remember that the top-level commenter here is currently a physicist, so it's not like the usefulness of their work would be going down by doing a useless MATS project :P

Yes it would! It would eat up motivation and energy and hope that they could have put towards actual research. And it would put them in a social context where they are pressured to orient themselves toward streetlighty research--not just during the program, but also afterward. Unless they have some special ability to have it not do that.

Without MATS: not currently doing anything directly useful (though maybe indirectly useful, e.g. gaining problem-solving skill). Could, if given $30k/year, start doing real AGI alignment thinking from scratch not from scratch, thereby scratching their "will you think in a way that unlocks understanding of strong minds" lottery ticket that each person gets.

With MATS: gotta apply to extension, write my LTFF grant. Which org should I apply to? Should I do linear probes software engineering? Or evals? Red teaming? CoT? Constitution? Hyperparamter gippity? Honeypot? Scaling supervision? Superalign, better than regular align? Detecting deception?

A different way to think about types of work is within current ML paradigms vs outside of them. If you believe that timelines are short (e.g. 5 years or less), it makes much more sense to work within current paradigms, otherwise there's very little chance your work will become adopted in time to matter. Mainstream AI, with all of its momentum, is not going to adopt a new paradigm overnight.

If I understand you correctly, there's a close (but not exact) correspondence between work I'd label in-paradigm and work you'd label as "streetlighting". On my model the reason to work in-paradigm is because that's where your work has a realistic chance to make a difference in this world.

I agree, though I think it would be a very ridiculous own-goal if e.g. GPT-4o decided to block a whistleblowing report about OpenAI because it was trained to serve OpenAI's interests. I think any model used by this kind of whistleblowing tool should be open-source (nothing fancy / more dangerous than what's already out there), run locally by the operators of the tool, and tested to make sure it doesn't block legitimate posts. 

My gut instinct is that this would have been a fantastic thing to create 2-4 years ago. My biggest hesitation is that the probability a tool like this decreases existential risk is proportional to the fraction of lab researchers who know about it and adoption can be a slow / hard thing to make happen. I still think that this kind of program could be incredibly valuable under the right circumstances so someone should probably be working on this.

Also, I have a very amateurish security question: if someone provides their work email to verify their authenticity with this tool, can their employer find out? For example, I wouldn't put it past OpenAI to check if an employee's email account got pinged by this tool and then to pressure / fire that employee. 

Since it's the FDA that's doing the regulating, they could pick the investigator. Completely ungameable.

Fantastic! Are lyrics available somewhere?

That sounds like it's relatively easy to game by the company who chooses the investigators.

I mostly agree, but it's a double-digit percent increase in bankruptcies which ends up being (from the post)

about 4bps (0.04%)/year of additional bankruptcies

Do you mean during the program? Sure, maybe the only MATS offers you can get are for projects you think aren't useful--I think some MATS projects are pretty useless (e.g. our dear OP's). But it's still an opportunity to argue with other people about the problems in the field and see whether anyone has good justifications for their prioritization. And you can stop doing the streetlight stuff afterwards if you want to.

Remember that the top-level commenter here is currently a physicist, so it's not like the usefulness of their work would be going down by doing a useless MATS project :P 

But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else. That is what 'addictive personality disorder' means.

Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc. 

I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can't gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts.

This post isn't quietly assuming something: it's loudly giving evidence that they will be much less harmed.