sudo's Shortform

A long time ago, I worked on an idea I called "Context Gems." A friend asked me to make a short, publicly accessible writeup for it. This is a really rough writeup of the idea, based on some old notes I had lying around.

Context Gems was an attempt at coming up with a theoretical way of safely eliciting superhuman capabilities from an AI. It was a fairly direct off-shoot of e.g. OSNR [LW · GW] I later heard it was similar to some ideas Paul Christiano had a long time ago, like imitative generalization/learning the prior.

The goal is to get effective cognitive labor out of a superintelligent but possibly misaligned AI model without causing catastrophe. One insight is that if for a given goal, we want to achieve this goal while receiving a minimum amount of input/information from the superintelligent model. (Another way to phrase this is that we want to maximize the density of "helpful" information in the model's outputs, to reduce its opportunities for hijacking the human operators).

Our setup is to train/use a strong (possibly superhuman) model to generate short strings ("context gems"). We intend these strings to contain some insight about the problem domain. To verify the usefulness of these short strings, we feed them into context of weaker model, which we can assess on some benchmarks. We may "reward" the strong model based on the performance of the weak model on some problem domain.

I had Claude make me a flow-chart.

If the gems do dramatically improve the performance of the weak model, then perhaps they contain some true insight about the problem domain. Then, if the strings are sufficiently short, we might be able to expose the string to humans without causing catastrophe, hopefully resulting in similar performance improvements for humans.

Some things we might think about:

• What should be true of these "context gems"? Perhaps we want them to be short. Are there other restrictions we want to put on them?
• What are the right problem domains to select?
• If you were an adversarial/misaligned superintelligence, how might you attempt to take over the world given such a setup?
• What sort of information might actually go into these context gems?
• I'd also be interested in any empirical evidence that such a setup would work.

What can be used to auth will be used to auth

One of the symptoms of our society's deep security inadequacy is the widespread usage of unsecure forms of authentication.

It's bad enough that there are systems which authenticate you using your birthday, SSN, or mother's maiden name by spec.

Fooling bad authentication is also an incredibly common vector for social engineering. 

Anything you might have, which others seem unlikely to have (but which you may not immediately see a reason to keep secret), could be accepted by someone you implicitly trust as "authentication."

This includes:

• Company/industry jargon
• Company swag
• Certain biographical information about yourself (including information you could easily Google)
• Knowing how certain internal numbering or naming systems work (hotels seemingly assume only guests know how the rooms are numbered!)

Conventional advice directed at young people seem shockingly bad. I sat down to generate a list of anti-advice.

The anti-advice are things that I wish I was told in high school, but that are essentially negations of conventional advice.

You may not agree with the advice given here. In fact, they are deliberately controversial. They may also not be good advice. YMMV.

• When picking between colleges, do care a lot about getting into a prestigious/selective university. Your future employers often care too.
• Care significantly less about nebulous “college fit.” Whether you’ll enjoy a particular college is determined mainly by 1, the location, and 2, the quality of your peers
• Do not study hard and conscientiously. Instead, use your creativity to find absurd arbitrages. Internalize Thiel's main talking points and find an unusual path to victory.
• Refuse to do anything that people tell you will give you "important life skills." Certainly do not take unskilled part time work unless you need to. Instead, focus intently on developing skills that generate surplus economic value.
• If you are at all interested in a career in software (and even if you're not), get a “real” software job as quickly as possible. Real means you are mentored by a software engineer who is better at software engineering than you.
• If you’re doing things right, your school may threaten you with all manners of disciplinary action. This is mostly a sign that you’re being sufficiently ambitious.
• Do not generically seek the advice of your elders. When offered unsolicited advice, rarely take it to heart. Instead, actively seek the advice of elders who are either exceptional or unusually insightful.

Signalling Considered Harmful.

I want to write an essay about how we so dramatically overvalue signalling that it might be good to completely taboo it for oneself. 

I think LW folks often underestimate the importance of serendipity, especially for pre-paradigmatic fields like AI Alignment.

You want people learning functional programming and compiler design and writing kernels and playing around with new things, instead of just learning the innards of ML models and reading other people’s alignment research.

You even want people to go very deep into tangential things, and become expert kernel designers or embedded systems engineers. This is how people become capable.

People really should try to not have depression. Depression is bad for your productivity. Being depressed for eg a year means you lose a year of time, AND it might be bad for your IQ too.

A lot of EAs get depressed or have gotten depressed. This is bad. We should intervene early to stop it.

I think that there should be someone EAs reach out to when they’re depressed (maybe this is Julia Wise?), and then they get told the ways they’re probably right and wrong so their brain can update a bit, and a reasonable action plan to get them on therapy or meds or whatever.

Sometimes when you purchase an item, the cashier will randomly ask you if you’d like additional related items. For example, when purchasing a hamburger, you may be asked if you’d like fries.

It is usually a horrible idea to agree to these add-ons, since the cashier does not inform you of the price. I would like fries for free, but not for $100, and not even for $5.

The cashier’s decision to withhold pricing information from you should be evidence that you do not, in fact, want to agree to the deal.

Did some math today, and remembered what I love about it. Being able to just learn, without the pressure and anxiety of school, is so wonderfully joyful. I'm going back to basics, and making sure that I understand absolutely everything.

I'm feeling very excited about my future. I'm going to learn so much. I'm going to have so much fun. I'm going to get so good.

When I first started college, I set myself the goal of looking, by now, like an absolute wizard to me from a year ago. To be advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic.

A year in, I now can do things that I couldn't have done a year ago. I'm more lucid, I'm more skilled, I'm more capable, and I'm mature than I was a year ago. I think I did it.

I'm setting myself the same goal again. I'm so excited to hit it out of the park.

Recently my alignment orientation has basically been “design stackable tools on top or around AI systems which produce pressure toward increased alignment.”
 

I think it’s a pretty productive avenue that’s 1) harder to get lost in, and 2) might be eventually sufficient for alignment.

I was watching some clips of Aaron Gwin's (American professional mountain bike racer) riding recently. Reflecting on how amazing humans are. How good we can get, with training and discipline.

It takes a certain degree of maturity and thought to see that a lot of advice from high profile advice-givers are bad.

It could be valuable to do point-by-point critiques of popular advice by high profile technologists. 

Enlightened: 

Terminal goal -> Instrumental goal -> Planning -> Execution

Buffoonery:

Terminal goal -> Instrumental goal -> Planning -> wait what did [insert famous person] do? Guess I need to get a PhD.

There's something really tyrannical about externally imposed KPIs.

I can't stop thinking about my GPA even if I make a conscious choice to stop optimizing for it.

Choosing to not optimize for it actually made it worse. A lower number is louder in my mind.

There's something about a number being used for sorting that completely short circuits my brain, and makes me agonize over it.