LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yeah but if something is in the general circulation (bloodstream), then it’s going everywhere in the body. I don’t think there’s any way to specifically direct it.

…Except in the time domain, to a limited extent. For example, in rats, tonic oxytocin in the bloodstream controls natriuresis, while pulsed oxytocin in the bloodstream controls lactation and birth. The kidney puts a low-pass filter on its oxytocin detection system, and the mammary glands & uterus put a high-pass filter, so to speak.

Yeah. Though as a counterpoint, something I picked up from IIRC Scott Alexander or Marginal Revolution is that the FDA is not great about accepting foreign clinical trials, or demands that they always be supplemented by trials of Americans, or similar.

This is especially useful when pursuing several subgoals in parallel, as forward-checking a combination of moves is combinatorially costly--better to have the agent's parallel actions constrained to nice parts of the space.

If I were a singleton AGI, but not such a Jupiter brain that I could deal with the combinatorial explosion of directly jointly-optimizing every motion of every robot, I would presumably set up an internal “free market” with spot-prices for iron ore and robot-hours and everything else. Then I would iteratively cycle through all my decision-points and see if there are ways to “make money” locally, and then update virtual “prices” accordingly.

In fact, I think there’s probably a theorem that says that the optimal solution of a complex resource allocation problem is isomorphic to a system where things have prices. (Something to do with Lagrange multipliers? Shrug.)

(Fun fact: In the human world, propagating prices within firms—e.g. if the couch is taking up 4m² of the 4000m² floor space at the warehouse, then that couch is “charged” 0.1% of the warehouse upkeep costs, etc.—is very rarely done but leads directly to much better decisions and massive overall profit increases! See here [LW(p) · GW(p)].)  

Externalities are not an issue in this virtual “economy” because I can “privatize” everything—e.g. I can invent fungible allowances to pollute the atmosphere in thus-and-such way etc. This is all just a calculation trick happening in my own head, so there aren’t coordination problems or redistribution concerns or information asymmetries or anything like that. Since I understand everything (even if I can’t juggle it all in my head simultaneously), I’ll notice if there’s some relevant new unpriced externality and promptly give it a price.

So then (this conception of) corrigibility would correspond to something like “abiding by this particular system of (virtual) property rights”. (Including all the weird “property rights” like purchasing allowances to emit noise or heat or run conscious minds or whatever, and including participating in the enterprise of discovering new unpriced externalities.) Do you agree?

EDIT 3/5/24: In the comments for Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom, Evan Hubinger agreed that one cannot validly make counting arguments over functions. However, he also claimed that his counting arguments "always" have been counting parameterizations, and/or actually having to do with the Solomonoff prior over bitstrings.

As one of Evan's co-authors on the mesa-optimization paper from 2019 I can confirm this. I don't recall ever thinking seriously about a counting argument over functions. 

Who’s track record of AI predictions would you like to see evaluated?

Whoever has the best track record :)

Yes. Current AI policy is like people in a crowded room fighting over who gets to hold a bomb. It's more important to defuse the bomb than it is to prevent someone you dislike from holding it.

That said, we're currently not near any satisfactory solutions to corrigibility. And I do think it would be better for the world if were easier (by some combination of technical factors and societal factors) to build AI that works for the good of all humanity than to build equally-smart AI that follows the orders of a single person. So yes, we should focus research and policy effort toward making that happen, if we can.

And if we were in that world already, then I agree releasing all the technical details of an AI that follows the orders of a single person would be bad.

There are 3 people. Each person announces an integer. The smallest unique integer wins: e.g. if your opponents both pick 1, you win with any number. If all 3 pick the same number, the winner is picked randomly

Question: what’s the Nash equilibrium?

(I assume this is meant to be natural numbers or positive ints? Otherwise I don't think there is a nash equilibrium.)

Good question!

I have gained a lot of emotion handling skill. This lets me be calmer and kinder to my wife and my son and other people. It also means I suffer less because I can more easily detect negative thoughts and feelings and (to some extent) disengage from them rather than feed them.

I am also slowly getting better at actively cultivating positive/happy/pleasant mind states.

It seems like you're assuming people won't build AGI if they don't have reliable ways to control it, or else that sovereign (uncontrolled) AGI would be likely the be friendly to humanity. Both seem unlikely at this point, to me. It's hard to tell when your alignment plan is good enough, and humans are foolishly optimistic about new projects, so they'll probably build AGI with or without a solid alignment plan.

So I'd say any and all solutions to corrigibility/control should be published.

Also, almost any solution to alignment in general could probably be used for control as well. And probably would be. See

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NvKrqoQgJkZJmcuD/instruction-following-agi-is-easier-and-more-likely-than [LW · GW]

And

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/587AsXewhzcFBDesH/intent-alignment-as-a-stepping-stone-to-value-alignment [LW · GW]

pro-DEI-requirements in clinical trials, so that drug companies have to have a certain number of various groups in their trial population

If this is motivated by accounting for biological diversity that might translate into different responses to a drug, then this feels like a very non-central case of DEI at best and I would expect it's not what a majority of people think of when they hear/think "DEI".