tlevin's Shortform

As having gone to Lighthaven, does this still feel marginally worth it at Lighthaven where we mostly tried to make it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations? I can see the case for music here, but like, I do think music makes it harder to talk to people (especially on the louder end) and that does seem like a substantial cost to me.

I agree music has this effect, but I think the Fence is mostly because it also hugely influences the mood of the gathering, i.e. of the type and correlatedness of people's emotional states.

(Music also has some costs, although I think most of these aren't actually due to the music itself and can be avoided with proper acoustical treatment. E.g. people sometimes perceive music as too loud because the emitted volume is literally too high, but ime people often say this when the noise is actually overwhelming for other reasons, like echo (insofar as walls/floor/ceiling are near/hard/parallel), or bass traps/standing waves (such that the peak amplitude of the perceived wave is above the painfully loud limit, even though the average amplitude is fine; in the worst cases, this can result in barely being able to hear the music while simultaneously perceiving it as painfully loud!)

Other factors also to consider:

1.

Gatherings with generous alcohol drinking tend to have louder music because alcohol relaxes the inner ear muscles, resulting in less vibration being conveyed, resulting in sound dampening. So anyone drinking alcohol experiences lower sound volumes. This means that a comfortable volume for a drunk person is quite a bit higher than for a sober person. Which is a fact that can be quite unpleasant if you are the designated driver! I always try to remember to bring earplugs if I'm going to be a designated driver for a group going out drinking.

If you are drinking less than the average amount of alcohol at a social gathering, chances are your opinion of the music will be that it is too loud.

2. The intent of the social gathering in some cases is to facilitate good conversations. In such a case the person managing the music (host or DJ) should be thoughtful of this, and aim for a 'coffee shop' vibe with quiet background music and places to go in the venue where the music dwindles away.

In the alternate case, where the intent of the party is to facilitate social connection and/or flirtation and/or fun dancing... then the host / DJ may be actively pushing the music loud to discourage any but the most minimal conversation, trying to get people to drink alcohol and dance rather than talk, and at most have brief simple 1-1 conversations. A dance club is an example of a place deliberately aiming for this end of the spectrum.

So, in designing a social gathering, these factors are definitely something to keep in mind. What are the goals of the gathering? How much, if any, alcohol will the guests be drinking? If you have put someone in charge of controlling the music, are they on the same page about this? Or are they someone who is used to controlling music in a way appropriate to dance hall style scenarios and will default to that?

In regards to intellectual discussion focused gatherings, I do actually think that there can be a place for gatherings of people in which only a small subset of people talk... but I agree this shouldn't be the default. The scenario where I think this makes sense is something more like a debate club or mini lecture with people taking turns to ask questions or challenge assumptions of the lecturer. This is less a social gathering and more an educational type experience, but can certainly be something on the borderlands between coffeeshop-style small group conversation and formal academic setting. Rousing debates and speeches or mini lectures around topics that the group finds interesting, relevant, and important can be both an educational experience and a fun social experience to perform or watch. I think this is something that needs more planning and structure to go well, and which people should be aware is intended and what rules the audience will be expected to follow in regards to interruptions, etc.

Unfortunately different people have different levels of hearing ability, so you're not setting the conversation size at the same level for all participants. If you set the volume too high, you may well be excluding some people from the space entirely.

I think that people mostly put music on in these settings as a way to avoid awkward silences and to create the impression that the room is more active than it is, whilst people are arriving. If this is true, then it serves no great purpose once people have arrived and are engaged in conversation.

Another important consideration is sound-damping. I've been in venues where there's no music playing and the conversations are happening between 3 -5 people but everyone is shouting to be heard above the crowd, and it's incredibly difficult for someone with hearing damage to participate at all. This is primarily a result of hard, echoey walls and very few soft furnishings. 

I think there's something to be said for having different areas with different noise levels, allowing people to choose what they're comfortable with, and observing where they go.

which is usually unpleasant for the observers

It seems to me that this claim has a lot to overcome, given that the observers could walk away at any time.

does not facilitate close interactions that easily lead to getting to know people.

Is that a goal? I've never been much of a partygoer, but if I want to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody and get to know them, a party is about the last place I'd think about going. Too many annoying interruptions.

The function it plays is to stop the party-destroying phenomenon of big group conversations.

It may do that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the function. You could equally well guess that its function was to exclude people who don't like loud music, since it also does that.

this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don't like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).

One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards - the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can't read people's body language from across the room - and instead there needs to be an emotive radius from webcam / face-tracking needs to be larger than the sound radius. Or you can have a trad UI with "rooms" of very small size that you have to join to talk. tricky to get that kind of app right though since irl there's a fluid boundary between in and out of a convo and a binary demarcation would be subtly unpleasant.

Another idea is to find alternative ways to sound isolate in meatspace. Other people have talked about architectural approaches like in Lighthaven. Or imagine a party where everyone had to wear earplugs. sound falls off with the square of distance and you can calculate out how many decibles you need to deafen everyone by to get the group sizes you want. Or a party with a rule that you have to plug your ears when you aren't actively in a conversation. 
Or you could lay out some hula hoops with space between them and the rule is you can only talk within the hula hoop with other people in it, and you can't listen in on someone else's hula hoop convo. have to plug your ears as you walk around. Better get real comfortable with your friends! Maybe secretly you can move the hoops around to combine into bigger groups if you are really motivated. Or with way more effort, you could similarly do a bed fort building competition.
These are very cheap experiments!

These are plausible concerns, but I don't think they match what I see as a longtime DC person.  

We know that the legislative branch is less productive in the US than it has been in any modern period, and fewer bills get passed (many different metrics for this, but one is https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CONGRESS/PRODUCTIVITY/egpbabmkwvq/) .  Those bills that do get passed tend to be bigger swings as a result -- either a) transformative legislation (e.g., Obamacare, Trump tax cuts and COVID super-relief, Biden Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS) or b) big omnibus "must-pass" bills like FAA reauthorization, into which many small proposals get added in. 

I also disagree with the claim that policymakers focus on credibility and consensus generally, except perhaps in the executive branch to some degree.  (You want many executive actions to be noncontroversial "faithfully executing the laws" stuff, but I don't see that as "policymaking" in the sense you describe it.)

In either of those, it seems like the current legislative "meta" favors bigger policy asks, not small wins, and I'm having trouble of thinking of anyone I know who's impactful in DC who has adopted the opposite strategy.  What are examples of the small wins that you're thinking of as being the current meta?

Agree with lots of this– a few misc thoughts [hastily written]:

1. I think the Overton Window frame ends up getting people to focus too much on the dimension "how radical is my ask"– in practice, things are usually much more complicated than this. In my opinion, a preferable frame is something like "who is my target audience and what might they find helpful." If you're talking to someone who makes it clear that they will not support X, it's silly to keep on talking about X. But I think the "target audience first" approach ends up helping people reason in a more sophisticated way about what kinds of ideas are worth bringing up. As an example, in my experience so far, many policymakers are curious to learn more about intelligence explosion scenarios and misalignment scenarios (the more "radical" and "speculative" threat models). 
2. I don't think it's clear that the more effective actors in DC tend to be those who look for small wins. Outside of the AIS community, there sure do seem to be a lot of successful organizations that take hard-line positions and (presumably) get a lot of their power/influence from the ideological purity that they possess & communicate. Whether or not these organizations end up having more or less influence than the more "centrist" groups is, in my view, not a settled question & probably varies a lot by domain. In AI safety in particular, I think my main claim is something like "pretty much no group– whether radical or centrist– has had tangible wins. When I look at the small set of tangible wins, it seems like the groups involved were across the spectrum of "reasonableness."
3. The more I interact with policymakers, the more I'm updating toward something like "poisoning the well doesn't come from having radical beliefs– poisoning the well comes from lamer things like being dumb or uninformed, wasting peoples' time, not understanding how the political process works, not having tangible things you want someone to do, explaining ideas poorly, being rude or disrespectful, etc." I've asked ~20-40 policymakers (outside of the AIS bubble) things like "what sorts of things annoy you about meetings" or "what tends to make meetings feel like a waste of your time", and no one ever says "people come in with ideas that are too radical." The closest thing I've heard is people saying that they dislike it when groups fail to understand why things aren't able to happen (like, someone comes in thinking their idea is great, but then they fail to understand that their idea needs approval from committee A and appropriations person B and then they're upset about why things are moving slowly). It seems to me like many policy folks (especially staffers and exec branch subject experts) are genuinely interested in learning more about the beliefs and worldviews that have been prematurely labeled as "radical" or "unreasonable" (or perhaps such labels were appropriate before chatGPT but no longer are).
4. A reminder that those who are opposed to regulation have strong incentives to make it seem like basically-any-regulation is radical/unreasonable. An extremely common tactic is for industry and its allies to make common-sense regulation seem radical/crazy/authoritarian & argue that actually the people proposing strong policies are just making everyone look bad & argue that actually we should all rally behind [insert thing that isn't a real policy.] (I admit this argument is a bit general, and indeed I've made it before, so I won't harp on it here. Also I don't think this is what Trevor is doing– it is indeed possible to raise serious discussions about "poisoning the well" even if one believes that the cultural and economic incentives disproportionately elevate such points).
5. In the context of AI safety, it seems to me like the most high-influence Overton Window moves have been positive– and in fact I would go as far as to say strongly positive. Examples that come to mind include the CAIS statement, FLI pause letter, Hinton leaving Google, Bengio's writings/speeches about rogue AI & loss of control, Ian Hogarth's piece about the race to god-like AI, and even Yudkowsky's TIME article. 
6. I think some of our judgments here depend on underlying threat models and an underlying sense of optimism vs. pessimism. If one things that labs making voluntary agreements/promises and NIST contributing to the development of voluntary standards are quite excellent ways to reduce AI risk, then the groups that have helped make this happen deserve a lot of credit. If one thinks that much more is needed to meaningfully reduce xrisk, then the groups that are raising awareness about the nature of the problem, making high-quality arguments about threat models, and advocating for stronger policies deserve a lot of credit.

I agree that more research on this could be useful. But I think it would be most valuable to focus less on "is X in the Overton Window" and more on "is X written/explained well and does it seem to have clear implications for the target stakeholders?" 

Recently, John Wentworth wrote [LW · GW]:

Ingroup losing status? Few things are more prone to distorted perception than that.

And I think this makes sense (e.g. Simler's Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole which you've probably read), if you define "AI Safety" as "people who think that superintelligence is serious business or will be some day".

The psych dynamic that I find helpful to point out here is Yud's Is That Your True Rejection [LW · GW] post from ~16 years ago. A person who hears about superintelligence for the first time will often respond to their double-take at the concept by spamming random justifications for why that's not a problem (which, notably, feels like legitimate reasoning to that person, even though it's not). An AI-safety-minded person becomes wary of being effectively attacked by high-status people immediately turning into what is basically a weaponized justification machine, and develops a deep drive wanting that not to happen. Then justifications ensue for wanting that to happen less frequently in the world, because deep down humans really don't want their social status to be put at risk (via denunciation) on a regular basis like that. These sorts of deep drives are pretty opaque to us humans but their real world consequences are very strong.

Something that seems more helpful than playing whack-a-mole whenever this issue comes up is having more people in AI policy putting more time into improving perspective. I don't see shorter paths to increasing the number of people-prepared-to-handle-unexpected-complexity than giving people a broader and more general thinking capacity for thoughtfully reacting to the sorts of complex curveballs that you get in the real world. Rationalist fiction like HPMOR is great for this, as well as others e.g. Three Worlds Collide [? · GW], Unsong, Worth the Candle, Worm (list of top rated ones here [LW · GW]). With the caveat, of course, that doing well in the real world is less like the bite-sized easy-to-understand events in ratfic, and more like spotting errors in the methodology section of a study or making money playing poker. 

I think, given the circumstances, it's plausibly very valuable e.g. for people already spending much of their free time on social media or watching stuff like The Office, Garfield reruns, WWI and Cold War documentaries, etc, to only spend ~90% as much time doing that and refocusing ~10% to ratfic instead, and maybe see if they can find it in themselves to want to shift more of their leisure time to that sort of passive/ambient/automatic self-improvement productivity.

I'm not a decel, but the way this stuff often is resolved is that there are crazy people that aren't taken seriously by the managerial class but that are very loud and make obnoxious asks. Think the evangelicals against abortion or the Columbia protestors.

Then there is some elite, part of the managerial class, that makes reasonable policy claims. For Abortion, this is Mitch McConnel, being disciplined over a long period of time in choosing the correct judges.  For Palestine, this is Blinken and his State Department bureaucracy. 

The problem with decels is that theoretically they are part of the managerial class themselves. Or at least, they act like they are. They call themselves rationalists, read Eliezer and Scott Alexander, and what not. But the problem is that it's very hard for an uninterested third party to take seriously these Overton Window bogous claims from people that were supposed to be measured, part of the managerial class. 

You need to split. There are the crazy ones that people don't take seriously, but will move the managerial class. And there are the serious people that EA Money will send to D.C. to work at Blumenthal's office. This person needs to make small policy requests that will sabotage IA, without looking so. And slowly, you get policy wins and you can sabotage the whole effort.

And the flip side is that it's very important that a model capable of kicking off that kind of dash to superhuman capabilities not get stolen/exfiltrated, such that you don't wind up with multiple actors facing enormous competitive tradeoffs to rush through this process.

Is it? My sense is the race dynamics get worse if you are worried that your competitor has access to a potentially pivotal model but you can't verify that because you can't steal it. My guess is the best equilibrium is major nations being able to access competing models. 

Also, at least given present compute requirements, a smaller actor stealing a model is not that dangerous, since you need to invest hundreds of millions into compute to use the model for dangerous actions, which is hard to do secretly (though to what degree dangerous inference will cost a lot is something I am quite confused about). 

In general I am not super confident here, but I at least really don't know what the sign of hardening models against exfiltration with regards to race dynamics is.