Evolution did a surprising good job at aligning humans...to social status

Some possible examples of misgeneralization of status :

1. arguing with people on Internet forums
2. becoming really good at some obscure hobby
3. playing the hero in a computer RPG (role-playing game)

Not sure how much I believe this myself, but Jacob cannell has an interesting take that social status isn't a "base drive" either, but is basically a proxy for "empowerment", influence over future states of the world. If that's true it's perhaps not so surprising that we're still well-aligned, since "empowerment" is in some sense always being selected for by reality.

I disagree with “natural selection got the concept of "social status" into us” or that status-seeking behavior is tied to “having an intuitive "status" concept”.

For example, if Bob wants to be a movie star, then from the outside you and I can say that Bob is status-seeking, but it probably doesn’t feel like that to Bob; in fact Bob might not know what the word “status” means, and Bob might be totally oblivious to the existence of any connection between his desire to be a movie star and Alice’s desire to be a classical musician and Carol’s desire to eat at the cool kids table in middle school.

I think “status seeking” is a mish-mosh of a bunch of different things but I think an important one is very roughly “it’s intrinsically motivating to believe that other people like me”. (More discussion in §2.2.2 [LW · GW] & §2.6.1 here [LW · GW] and hopefully more in future posts.) I think it’s possible for the genome to build “it’s intrinsically motivating to believe that other people like me” into the brain whereas it would not be analogously possible for the genome to build “it’s intrinsically motivating to have a high inclusive genetic fitness” into the brain. There are many reasons that the latter is not realistic, not least of which is that inclusive genetic fitness is only observable in hindsight, after you’re dead.

This seems like good news about alignment.

To me it sounds like alignment will do a good job of aligning AIs to money. Which might be ok in the short run, but bad in the longer run.

It seems like Evolution did not "try" to have humans aligned to status. It might have been a proxy for inclusive genetic fitness, but if so, I would not say that evolution "succeeded" at aligning humans. My guess is it's not a great proxy for inclusive genetic fitness in the modern environment (my guess is it's weakly correlated with reproductive success, but clearly not as strongly as the relative importance that humans assign to it would indicate if it was a good proxy for inclusive genetic fitness).

Of course, my guess is after the fact, for any system that has undergone some level of self-reflection and was put under selection that causes it to want coherent things, you will be able to identify some patterns in its goals. The difficult part in aligning AIs is in being able to choose what those patterns are, not being able to cohere some patterns at the end of it. My guess is with any AI system, if we were to survive and got to observe it as its made its way to coherence, we would be able to find some robust patterns in its goals (my guess is in the case of LLMs something related to predicting text, but who knows), but that doesn't give me much solace in the AI treating me well, or sharing my goal. 

Status is a way to have power. Aligning an agent to be power-maximizing is qualitatively different from what we want from AI which we want to align to care about our own ends.

Seems like the main difference is that you're "counting up" with status and "counting down" with genetic fitness.

There's partial overlap between people's reproductive interests and their motivations, and you and others have emphasized places where there's a mismatch, but there are also (for example) plenty of people who plan their lives around having & raising kids. 

There's partial overlap between status and people's motivations, and this post emphasizes places where they match up, but there are also (for example) plenty of people who put tons of effort into leveling up their videogame characters, or affiliating-at-a-distance with Taylor Swift or LeBron James, with minimal real-world benefit to themselves.

And it's easier to count up lots of things as status-related if you're using a vague concept of status which can encompass all sorts of status-related behaviors, including (e.g.) both status-seeking and status-affiliation. "Inclusive genetic fitness" is a nice precise concept so it can be clear when individuals fail to aim for it even when acting on adaptations that are directly involved in reproduction & raising offspring.

Why do you highlight status among bazilliion other things that generalized too, like romantic love, curiosity, altruism?

I don't think that everybody has the built in drive to seek "high social status", as defined by the culture they are born into or any specific aspect of it that can be made to seem attractive.  I know people who just think its an annoying waste of time.  Or like myself spent half my life chasing it then found inner empowerment and came to find the proxy of high status was a waste of time and quit chasing.

Maybe related, I do think we all generally tend to seek "signalling" and in some cases spend great energy doing it.  I admit I sometimes do, but it's not signalling high status, its just signalling chill and contentedness. I have observed some kind of signalling in pretty much every adult I have witnessed, though its hard to say for sure, its more my assumption of their deepest motivation.  The strength of the drive isn't always strong for some people or its just very temporary.  There are likely much stronger drivers (e,g, avoiding obvious suffering).  Signalling perhaps helps us attract others who align with us and form "tribes", so it can be worth the energy.

“[optimization process] did kind of shockingly well aligning humans to [a random goal that the optimization process wasn’t aiming for (and that’s not reproducible with a higher bandwidth optimization such as gradient descent over a neural network’s parameters)]”

Nope, if your optimization process is able to crystallize some goals into an agent, it’s not some surprising success, unless you picked these goals. If an agent starts to want paperclips in a coherent way and then every training step makes it even better at wanting and pursuing paperclips, your training process isn’t “surprisingly successful” at aligning the agent with making paperclips.

This makes me way less confident about the standard "evolution failed at alignment" story.

If people become more optimistic, because they see some goals in an agent, and say the optimization process was able to successfully optimize for that, but they don’t have evidence of the optimization process having tried to target the goals they observe, they’re just clearly doing something wrong.

Evolutionary physiology is a thing! It is simply invalid to say “[a physiological property of humans that is the result of evolution] existing in humans now is a surprising success of evolution at aligning humans”.

Maybe our culture fits our status-seeking surprisingly well because our culture was designed around it.

We design institutions to channel and utilize our status-seeking instincts. We put people in status conscious groups like schools, platoons, or companies. There we have ceremonies and titles that draw our attention to status.

And this works! Ask yourself, is it more effective to educate a child individually or in a group of peers? The latter. Is it easier to lead a solitary soldier or a whole squad? The latter. Do people seek a promotion or a pay rise? Both, probably. The fact is, that people are easier to guide when in large groups, and easier to motivate with status symbols.

From this perspective, our culture and inclination for seeking status have developed in tandem, making it challenging to determine which influences the other more. However, it appears that culture progresses more rapidly than genes, suggesting that culture conforms to our genes, rather than the reverse.

Another perspective: Sometimes our status seeking is nonfunctional and therefore nonaligned. For example we also waste a lot of effort on status, which seems like a nonfunctional drive. People will compete for high status professions like musician, streamer, celebrity and most will fail, which makes it seem like an unwise investment of time. This seems misaligned, as it's not adaptive.

It seems that a huge part of "human behaviour is explained by status seeking" is just post hoc proclaiming that whatever humans do is status seeking [LW · GW]. 

Suppose you want to predict whether a given man will go hang out with friends or work more on a project. How does the idea of status seeking helps? When we already know that the human chose friends we say, yes of course, he get more status around his friend group by spending more time with them, improving their bonds and having good friends is a marker of status in its own right. Likewise, when we know that the man chose work, we can say that this is behaviour that leads towards promotion and more money and influence inside the company which is a marker of high status. But when we want to predict beforehand... I don't think it really helps.

How are you telling the difference between "evolution aligned humans to this thing that generalized really well across the distributional shift of technological civilization" vs. "evolution aligned humans to this thing, which then was distorted / replaced / cut down / added to by the distributional shift of technological civilization"?

Agree. This connects to why I think that the standard argument for evolutionary misalignment is wrong [LW · GW]: it's meaningless to say that evolution has failed to align humans with inclusive fitness, because fitness is not any one constant thing. Rather, what evolution can do is to align humans with drives that in specific circumstances promote fitness. And if we look at how well the drives we've actually been given generalize, we find that they have largely continued to generalize quite well [LW(p) · GW(p)], implying that while there's likely to still be a left turn [? · GW], it may very well be much milder than is commonly implied.

So humans are "aligned" if humans have any kind of values? That's not how alignment is usually used.

The only metric natural selection is “optimizing” for is inclusive genetic fitness. It did not “try” to align humans with social status, and in many cases people care about social status to the detriment of their inclusive genetic fitness. This is a failure of alignment, not a success.

Less wrong obsesses about status to an incredibly unhealthy degree.

edit: removed sarcastic meme format.