LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yeah, many people, like the majority of users on this forum, have decided to not build AGI.

Not to build AGI yet. 
Many of us would love to build it as soon as we can be confident we have a realistic and mature plan for alignment, but that's a problem that's so absurdly challenging that even if aliens landed tomorrow and handed us the "secret to Friendly AI", we would have a hell of a time trying to validate that it actually was the real thing.

If one is faced with a math problem where you could be staring at the answer and know no way to unambiguously verify said answer, you are likely not capable of solving the problem until you somehow close the inferential distance separating you from understanding. Assuming the problem is solvable at all.

It says to reapply every two hours but I... do not do that 😅 I put it on in the morning and would reapply if I was spending time outside. I don't know how important the "every 2 hours" thing is

How long does the Elta MD sunscreen last?

I think all criticism, all shaming, all guilt tripping, all punishments and rewards directed at children - is for the purpose of driving them to do certain actions. If your children do what you think is right, there's no need to do much of anything.

A more general and correct statement would be "Pain is for the sake of change, and all change is painful". But that change is for the sake of actions. I don't think that's too much of a simplification to be useful.

I think regret, too, is connected here. And there's certainly times when it seems like pain is the problem rather than an attempt to solve it, but I think that's a misunderstanding. And while chronic pain does reduce agency, it's a constant pain and a constant reduction of agency (not cumulative). The pain persists until the problem is solved, even if the problem does not get worse. So it's the body telling the brain "Hey, do something about this, the importance is 50 units of pain", then you will do anything to solve it as long there's a path with less than 50 units of pain which leads to a solution.

The pain does limit agency, but not because it's a real limitation. It's an artificial one that the body creates to prevent you from damaging yourself. So all important agency is still possible. If the estimated consequences of avoiding the task is more painful than doing the task, you do it. But it's again the body is just estimating the cost/benefit of tasks and choosing the optimal action by making it the least painful action.

My explanation and yours are almost identical, but there's some important differences. In my view, 
suffering is good, not bad. I really don't want humanity to misunderstand this one fact, it has already had profound negative consequences. It's phantom damage created to avoid real damage. An agent which is unable to feel physical pain and exhaustion would destroy itself, therefore physical pain and exhaustion are valuable and not problems to be solved. Emotions like suffering, exhaustion, annoyance, etc. function the same as physical pain, and once they get over a certain threshold they coerce you into taking an action. Physical pain comes from nerves, but emotional pain comes from your interpretation of reality. Your brain relies on you to tell what ought to be painful (so if you overestimate risk, it just believes you). And you don't get to choose all your goals yourself, your brain wants you to fulfill your needs (prioritized by the hierarchy of needs). In short, the brain makes inaction painful, while keeping actions that it deems risky painful, and then messes with the weights/thresholds according to need. Just like with hunger (not eating is painful, but if all you have is stale or even moldy bread, then you need to be very hungry before you eat, and you will eat iff pain(hunger)>pain(eating the bread)).

An increase in power/agency feels a lot like happiness though, even according to Nietzsche who I'm not confident to argue against, so I get why you'd basically think that opposite of happiness is the opposite of agency (sorry if this summary does injustice to your point)

There's a lot of overlap between alignment researchers and the EA community, so I'm wondering how that was handled.

Agree that there is inherent/unavoidable overlap. As noted in the post, we were generally cautious about excluding participants from either sample for reasons you mention and also found that the key results we present here are robust to these kinds of changes in the filtration of either dataset (you can see and explore this for yourself here). 

With this being said, we did ask in both the EA and the alignment survey to indicate the extent to which they are involved in alignment—note the significance of the difference here:

From alignment survey:

From EA survey:

This question/result serves both as a good filtering criterion for cleanly separating out EAs from alignment researchers and also gives a pretty strong evidence that we are drawing on completely different samples across these surveys (likely because we sourced the data for each survey through completely distinct channels).

Regarding the support for various cause areas, I'm pretty sure that you'll find the support for AI Safety/Long-Termism/X-risk is higher among those most involved in EA than among those least involved. Part of this may be because of the number of jobs available in this cause area.

Interesting—I just tried to test this. It is a bit hard to find a variable in the EA dataset that would cleanly correspond to higher vs. lower overall involvement, but we can filter by number of years one has been involved involved in EA, and there is no level-of-experience threshold I could find where there are statistically significant differences in EAs' views on how promising AI x-risk is. (Note that years of experience in EA may not be the best proxy for what you are asking, but is likely the best we've got to tackle this specific question.)

Blue is >1 year experience, red is <1 year experience:

Blue is >2 years experience, red is <2 years experience:

Thoughtdump on why I'm interested in computational mechanics:

• one concrete application to natural abstractions from here [LW · GW]: tl;dr, belief structures generally seem to be fractal shaped. one major part of natural abstractions is trying to find the correspondence between structures in the environment and concepts used by the mind. so if we can do the inverse of what adam and paul did, i.e. 'discover' fractal structures from activations and figure out what stochastic process they might correspond to in the environment, that would be cool
  • ... but i was initially interested in reading compmech stuff not with a particular alignment relevant thread in mind but rather because it seemed broadly similar in directions to natural abstractions.
• re: how my focus would differ from my impression of current compmech work done in academia: academia seems faaaaaar less focused on actually trying out epsilon reconstruction in real world noisy data. CSSR is an example of a reconstruction algorithm. apparently people did compmech stuff on real-world data, don't know how good, but effort-wise far too less invested compared to theory work
  • would be interested in these reconstruction algorithms, eg what are the bottlenecks to scaling them up, etc.
• tangent: epsilon transducers seem cool. if the reconstruction algorithm is good, a prototypical example i'm thinking of is something like: pick some input-output region within a model, and literally try to discover the hmm model reconstructing it? of course it's gonna be unwieldly large. but, to shift the thread in the direction of bright-eyed theorizing ...
• the foundational Calculi of Emergence paper talked about the possibility of hierarchical epsilon machines, where you do epsilon machines on top of epsilon machines and for simple examples where you can analytically do this, you get wild things like coming up with more and more compact representations of stochastic processes (eg data stream -> tree -> markov model -> stack automata -> ... ?)
  • this ... sounds like natural abstractions in its wildest dreams? literally point at some raw datastream and automatically build hierarchical abstractions that get more compact as you go up
  • haha but alas, (almost) no development afaik since the original paper. seems cool
• and also more tangentially, compmech seemed to have a lot to talk about providing interesting semantics to various information measures aka True Names [LW · GW], so another angle i was interested in was to learn about them.
  • eg crutchfield talks a lot about developing a right notion of information flow - obvious usefulness in eg formalizing boundaries?
  • many other information measures from compmech with suggestive semantics—cryptic order? gauge information? synchronization order? check ruro1 and ruro2 for more.

citric acid and a polymer

Random error:

Exponential Takeoff:

AI's capabilities grow exponentially, like an economy or pandemic.

(Oddly, this scenario often gets called "Slow Takeoff"! It's slow compared to "FOOM".)

Actually, this isn't how people (in the AI safety community) generally use the term slow takeoff.

Quoting from the blog post by Paul:

Futurists have argued for years about whether the development of AGI will look more like a breakthrough within a small group (“fast takeoff”), or a continuous acceleration distributed across the broader economy or a large firm (“slow takeoff”).

[...]

(Note: this is not a post about whether an intelligence explosion will occur. That seems very likely to me. Quantitatively I expect it to go along these lines. So e.g. while I disagree with many of the claims and assumptions in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, I don’t disagree with the central thesis or with most of the arguments.)

Slow takeoff still can involve a singularity (aka an intelligence explosion).

The terms "fast/slow takeoff" are somewhat bad because they are often used to discuss two different questions:

• How long does it take from the point where AI is seriously useful/important (e.g. results in 5% additional GDP growth per year in the US) to go to AIs which are much smarter than humans? (What people would normally think of as fast vs slow.)
• Is takeoff discontinuous vs continuous?

And this explainer introduces a third idea:

• Is takeoff exponential or does it have a singularity (hyperbolic growth)?

Done and fixed the accidental pronoun.

While I want people to support PauseAI

the small movement that PauseAI builds now will be the foundation which bootstraps this larger movement in the future

Is one of the main points of my post. If you support PauseAI today you may unleash a force which you cannot control tomorrow.