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Top of the head like when I'm trying to frown too hard
distraction had no effect on identifying true propositions (55% success for uninterrupted presentations, vs. 58% when interrupted); but did affect identifying false propositions (55% success when uninterrupted, vs. 35% when interrupted)
If you are confused by these numbers (why so close to 50%? Why below 50%) it's because participants could pick four options (corresponding to true, false, don't know and never seen).
You can read the study, search for keyword "The Identification Test".
- I don't see what you mean by the grandfather problem.
- I don't care about the specifics of who spawns the far future generation; whether it's Alice or Bob I am only considering numbers here.
- Saving lives now has consequences for the far future insofar as current people are irrepleceable: if they die, no one will make more children to compensate, resulting in a lower total far future population. Some deaths are less impactful than others for the far future.
- That's an interesting way to think about it, but I'm not convinced; killing half the population does not reduce the chance of survival of humanity by half.
- In terms of individuals, only the last <.1% matter (not sure about the order of magnitude, but in any case it's small as a proportion of the total).
- It's probably more useful to think in terms of events (nuclear war, misaligned ASI -> prevent war, research alignment) or unsurvivable conditions (radiation, killer robots -> build bunker, have kill switch) that can prevent humanity from recovering from a catastrophe.
Yes, that's the first thing that was talked about in my group's discussion on longtermism. For the sake of the argument, we were asked to assume that the waste processing/burial choice amounted to a trade in lives all things considered... but the fact that any realistic scenario resembling this thought experiment would not be framed like that is the central part of my first counterargument.
I enjoy reading any kind of cogent fiction on LW, but this one is a bit too undeveloped for my tastes. Perhaps be more explicit about what Myrkina sees in the discussion which relates to our world?
You don't have to always spell earth-shattering revelations out loud (in fact it's best to let the readers reach the correct conclusion by themselves imo), but there needs to be enough narrative tension to make the conclusion inevitable; as it stands, it feels like I can just meh my way out of thinking more than 30s on what the revelation might be, the same way Tralith does.
Thanks, it does clarify, both on separating the instantiation of an empathy mechanism in the human brain vs in AI and on considering instantiation separately from the (evolutionary or training) process that leads to it.
I was under the impression that empathy explained by evolutionary psychology as a result of the need to cooperate with the fact that we already had all the apparatus to simulate other people (like Jan Kulveit's first proposition).
(This does not translate to machine empathy as far as I can tell.)
I notice that this impression is justified by basically nothing besides "everything is evolutionary psychology". Seeing that other people's intuitions about the topic are completely different is humbling; I guess emotions are not obvious.
So, I would appreciate if you could point out where the literature stands on the position you argue against, Jan Kulveit's or mine (or possibly something else).
Are all these takes just, like, our opinion, man, or is there strong supportive evidence for a comprehensive theory of empathy (or is there evidence for multiple competing theories)?
I do not find this post reassuring about your approach.
- Your plan is unsound; instead of a succession of events which need to go your way, I think you should aim for incremental marginal gains. There is no cost-effectiveness analysis, and the implicit theory of change is lacunar.
- Your press release is unreadable (poor formatting), and sounds like a conspiracy theory (catchy punchlines, ALL CAPS DEMANDS, alarmist vocabulary and unsubstantiated claims) ; I think it's likely to discredit safety movements and raise attention in counterproductive ways.
- The figures you quote are false (the median from AI Impacts is 5%) or knowingly misleading (the numbers from Existential risk from AI survey are far from robust and as you note, suffer from selection bias), so I think it's fair to call them lies.
- Your explanations for what you say in the press release sometimes don't make sense! You conflate AGI and self-modifying systems, your explanation for "eventually" does not match the sentence.
- Your arguments are based on wrong premises - it's easy to check that your facts such as "they are not following the scientific method" are plain wrong. It sounds like you're trying to smear OpenAI and Sam Altman as much as possible without consideration for whether what you're saying is true.
I am appalled to see this was not downvoted into oblivion! My best guess is that people feel that there are not enough efforts going towards stopping AI and did not read the post and the press release to check that you have good reason motivating your actions.
I agree with the broad idea, but I'm going to need a better implementation.
In particular, the 5 criteria you give are insufficient because the example you give scores well on them, and is still atrocious: if we decreed that "black people" was unacceptable and should be replaced by "black peoples", it would cause a lot of confusion on account of how similar the two terms are and how ineffective the change is.
The cascade happens because of a specific reason, and the change aims at resolving that reason. For example, "Jap" is used as a slur, and not saying it shows you don't mean to use a slur. For black people/s, I guess the reason would be something like not implying that there is a single black people, which only makes sense in the context of a specialized discussion.
I can't adhere to the criteria you proposed because they don't work, and I don't want to bother thinking that deep about every change of term on an everyday basis, so I'll keep on using intuition to choose when to solve respectability cascades for now.
For deciding when to trigger a respectability cascade, your criteria are interesting for having any sort of principled approach, but I'm still not sure they outperform unconstrained discussion on the subject (which I assume is the default alternative for anyone who cares enough about deliberately triggering respectability cascades to have read your post in the first place).
A lot of your AI-risk reason to support Harris seems to hinge on this, which I find very shaky. How wide are your confidence intervals here?
My own guesses are much more fuzzy. According to your argument, if my intuition was .2 vs .5, then it's an overwhelming case for Harris but I'm unfamiliar enough with the topic that it could easily be the reverse.
I would greatly appreciate more details on how you reach your numbers (and if they're vibes, reason whether to trust those vibes).
Alternatively, I feel like I should somehow discount the strength of the AI-risk reason based on how likely I think these numbers are to more or less hold true, but I don't know a principled way to do it.
Seems like you need to go beyond arguments of authority and stating your conclusions and instead go down to the object-level disagreements. You could say instead "Your argument for ~X is invalid because blah blah" and if Jacob says "Your argument for the invalidity of my argument for ~X is invalid because blah blah" then it's better than before because it's easier to evaluate argument validity than ground truth.
(And if that process continues ad infinitam, consider that someone who cannot evaluate the validity of the simplest arguments is not worth arguing with.)
It's thought-provoking.
Many people here identify as Bayesians, but are as confused as Saundra by the troll's questions, which indicates that they're missing something important.
It wasn't mine. I did grow up in a religious family, but becoming a rationalist came gradually, without sharp divide with my social network. I always figured people around me were making all sorts of logical mistakes though, and noticed very early deep flaws in what I was taught.
It's not. The paper is hype, the authors don't actually show that this could replace MLPs.
This is very interesting!
I did not expect that Chinese would be more optimistic about benefits than worried about risks and that they would rank it so low as an existential risk.
This is in contrast with posts I see on social media and articles showcasing safety institutes and discussing doomer opinions, which gave me the impression that Chinese academia was generally more concerned about AI risk and especially existential risk than the US.
I'm not sure how to reconcile this survey's results with my previous model. Was I just wrong and updating too much on anecdotal evidence?
How representative of policymakers and of influential scientists do you think these results are?
About the Christians around me: it is not explicitly considered rude, but it is a signal that you want to challenge their worldview, and if you are going to predictably ask that kind of question often, you won't be welcome in open discussions.
(You could do it once or twice for anecdotal evidence, but if you actually want to know whether many Christians believe in a literal snake, you'll have to do a survey.)
I disagree – I think that no such perturbations exist in general, rather than that we have simply not had any luck finding them.
I have seen one such perturbation. It was two images of two people, one which was clearly male and the other female, though I wasn't be able to tell any significant difference between the two images on 15s of trying to find one except for a slight difference in hue.
Unfortunately, I can't find this example again on a 10mn search. It was shared on Discord; the people in the image were white and freckled. I'll save it if I find it again.
The pyramids and Mexico and the pyramids in Egypt are related via architectural constraints and human psychology.
In practice, when people say "one in a million" in that kind of context, it's much higher than that. I haven't watched Dumb and Dumber, but I'd be surprised if Lloyd did not, actually, have a decent chance of ending together with Mary.
On one hand, we claim [dumb stuff using made up impossible numbers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument) and on the other hand, we dismiss those numbers and fall back on there's-a-chancism.
These two phenomena don't always perfectly compensate one another (as examples show in both posts), but common sense is more reliable that it may seem at first. (I'm not saying it's the correct approach nonetheless.)
Epistemic status: amateur, personal intuitions.
If this were the case, it makes sense to hold dogs (rather than their owners, or their breeding) responsible for aggressive or violent behaviour.
I'd consider whether punishing the dog would make the world better, or whether changing the system that led to its breeding, or providing incentives to the owner or any combination of other actions would be most effective.
Consequentialism is about considering the consequences of actions to judge them, but various people might wield this in various ways.
Implicitly, with this concept of responsibility, you're considering a deontological approach to bad behavior: punish the guilty (perhaps using consequentialism to determine who's guilty though that's unclear from your argumentation afaict).
In an idealized case, I care about whether the environment I evolve in (including other people's and other people's dogs' actions) is performing well only insofar as I can change it, or said otherwise, I care only about how I can perform better.
(Then, because the world is messy, and I need to account for coordination with other people whose intuitions might not match mine, and society's recommendations, and my own human impulses etc... My moral system is only an intuition pump for lack of satisfactory metaethics.)
I can imagine plausible mechanisms for how the first four backlash examples were a consequence of perceived power-seeking from AI safetyists, but I don't see one for e/acc. Does someone have one?
Alternatively, what reason do I have to expect that there is a causal relationship between safetyist power-seeking and e/acc even if I can't see one?
That's not interesting to read unless you say what your reasons are and they differ from other critics'. Perhaps not say it all in a comment, but at least a link to a post.
Interestingly, I think that one of the examples of proving too much on Wikipedia can itself be demolished by a proving too much argument, but I’m not going to say which one it is because I want to see if other people independently come to the same conclusion.
For those interested in the puzzle, here is the page Scott was linking to at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proving_too_much&oldid=542064614
The article was edited a few hours later, and subsequent conversation showed that Wikipedia editors came to the conclusion Scott hinted at, though the suspicious timing indicates that they probably did so on reading Scott's article rather than independently.
Another way to avoid the mistake is to notice that the implication is false, regardless of the premises.
In practice, people's beliefs are not deductively closed, and (in the context of a natural language argument) we treat propositional formulas as tools for computing truths rather than timeless statements.
it can double as a method for creating jelly donuts on demand
For those reading this years later, here's the comic that shows how to make ontologically necessary donuts.
I'd appreciate examples of the sticker shortcut fallacy with in-depth analysis of why they're wrong and how the information should have been communicated instead.
"Anyone thinks they're a reckless idiot" is far too easy a bar to reach for any public figure.
I do not know of major anti-Altman currents in my country, but considering surveys consistently show a majority of people worried about AI risk, a normal distribution of extremeness of opinion on the subject ensures there'll be many who do consider Sam Altman a reckless idiot (for good or bad reason - I expect a majority of them to consider Sam Altman to have any negative trait that comes to their attention because it is just that easy to have a narrow hateful opinion on a subject for a large portion of the population).
I have cancelled my subscription as well. I don't have much to add to the discussion, but I think signalling participation in the boycott will help conditional on the boycott having positive value.
Thanks for the information.
Consider though that for many people the price of the subscription is motivated by convenience of access and use.
It took me a second to see how your comment was related to the post so here it is for others:
Given this information, using the API preserves most of the benefits of access to SOTA AI (assuming away the convenience value) while destroying most of the value for OpenAI, which makes this a very effective intervention compared to cancelling the subscription entirely.
When I vote, I basically know the full effect this has on what is shown to other users or to myself.
Mindblowing moment: It has been a private pet peeve of mine that it was very unclear what policy I should follow for voting.
In practice, I vote mostly on vibes (and expect most people to), but given my own practices for browsing LW, I also considered alternative approaches.
- Voting in order to assign a specific score (weighted for inflation by time and author) to the post. Related uses: comparing karma of articles, finding desirable articles on a given topic.
- Voting in order to match an equivalent-value article. Related uses: same; perhaps effective as a community norm but more effortful.
- Voting up if the article is good, down if it's bad (after memetic/community/bias considerations) (regardless of current karma). Related uses: karma as indicator of community opinion.
In the end, making my votes consistent turned out to be too much effort in every case for extensive calculations, which is why I came back to vibes, amended by implicit considerations of consistent ways to vote.
I was trying to figure out ways to vote which would put me in a class of voters that marginally improved my personal browsing experience.
It never occurred to me to model the impact it would have on others and to optimize for their experience.
This sounds like an obviously better way to vote.
So for anyone who was in the same case as me, please optimize for others' browsing experience (or your own) directly rather than overcalculate decision-theoretic whatevers.
Not everything suboptimal, but suboptimal in a way that causes suffering on an astronomical scale (e.g. galactic dystopia, or dystopia that lasts for thousands of years, or dystopia with an extreme number of moral patients (e.g. uploads)).
I'm not sure what you mean by Ord, but I think it's reasonable to have a significant probability of S-risk from a Christiano-like failure.
I think you miss one important existential risk separate from extinction, which is having a lastingly suboptimal society. Like, systematic institutional inefficiency, and being unable to change anything because of disempowerment.
In that scenario, maybe humanity is still around because one of the things we can measure and optimize for is making sure a minimum amount of humans are alive, but the living conditions are undesirable.
I'm not sure either, but here's my current model:
Even though it looks pretty likely that AISC is an improvement on no-AISC, there are very few potential funders:
1) EA-adjacent caritative organizations.
2) People from AIS/rat communities.
Now, how to explain their decisions?
For the former, my guess would be a mix of not having heard of/received an application from AISC and preferring to optimize heavily towards top-rated charities. AISC's work is hard to quantify, as you can tell from the most upvoted comments, and that's a problem when you're looking for projects to invest because you need to avoid being criticized for that kind of choice if it turns out AISC is crackpotist/a waste of funds. The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics applies hard there for an opponent with a tooth against the organization.
For the latter, it depends a lot on individual people, but here are the possibilities that come to mind:
- Not wanting donate anything but feeling like having to, which leads to large donations to few projects when you feel like donating enough to break the status quo bias.
- Being especially mindful of one's finances and donating only to preferred charities, because of a personal attachment (again, not likely to pick AISC a priori) or because they're provably effective.
To answer 2), you can say why you don't donate to AISC? Your motivations are probably very similar to other potential donators here.
Follow this link to find it. The translation is made by me, and open to comments. Don't hesitate to suggest improvements.
It's not obvious at all to me, but it's certainly a plausible theory worth testing!
To whom it may concern, here's a translation of "Bold Orion" in French.
A lot of the argumentation in this post is plausible, but also, like, not very compelling?
Mostly the "frictionless" model of sexual/gender norms, and the examples associated: I can see why these situations are plausible (if at least because they're very present in my local culture) but I wouldn't be surprised if they are a bunch of social myth either, in which case the whole post is invalidated.
I appreciate the effort though; it's food for thought even if it doesn't tell me much about how to update based on the conclusion.
Epistemic status: Had a couple conversations on AI Plans with the founder, participated in the previous critique-a-thon. I've helped AI Plans a bit before, so I'm probably biased towards optimism.
Neglectedness: Very neglected. AI Plans wants to become a database of alignment plans which would allow quick evaluation of whether an approach is worth spending effort on, at least as a quick sanity check for outsiders. I can't believe it didn't exist before! Still very rough and unuseable for that purpose for now, but that's what the critique-a-thon is for: hopefully, as critiques accumulate and more votes are fed into the system, it will become more useful.
Tractability: High. It may be hard to make winning critiques, but considering the current state of AI Plans, it's very easy to make an improvement. If anything, you can filter out the obvious failures.
Impact: I'm not as confident here. If AI Plans works as intended, it could be very valuable to allocate funds more efficiently and save time by figuring out which approaches should be discarded. However, it's possible that it will just fail to gain steam and become a stillborn project. I've followed it for a couple months, and I've been positively surprised several times, so I'm pretty optimistic.
The bar to entry is pretty low; if you've been following AIS blogs or forums for several months, you probably have something to contribute. It's very unlikely you'll have a negative impact.
It may also be an opportunity for you to discuss with AIS-minded people and check your opinions on a practical problem; if you feel like an armchair safetyist and tired to be one, this is the occasion to level up.
Another way to think about it is that the engagement was very low in previous critique-a-thon so if you have a few hours to spare, you can make some easy money and fuzzies even if you're not sure about the value in utilons.
Thank you, this is incredibly interesting! Did you ever write up more on the subject? I'm excited to see how it relates to mesa-optimisation in particular.
In the finite case, where , then
Typo: I think you mean ?
I'm surprised to hear they're posting updates about CoEm.
At a conference held by Connor Leahy, I said that I thought it was very unlikely to work, and asked why they were interested in this research area, and he answered that they were not seriously invested in it.
We didn't develop the topic and it was several months ago, so it's possible that 1- I misremember or 2- they changed their minds 3- I appeared adversarial and he didn't feel like debating CoEm. (For example, maybe he actually said that CoEm didn't look promising and this changed recently?)
Still, anecdotal evidence is better than nothing, and I look forward to seeing OliviaJ compile a document to shed some light on it.
Nice! Is this on ai-plans already?
I invite you. You can send me this summary in private to avoid downvotes.
There's a whole part of the argument which is missing which is the framing of this as being about AI risk.
I've seen various propositions for why this happened, and the board being worried about AI risk is one of them but not the most plausible afaict.
In addition this is phrased similarly to technical problems like the corrigibility, which it is very much not about.
People who say "why can't you just turn it off" typically refer to literally turning off the AI if it appears to be dangerous, which this is not about. This is about turning off the AI company, not the AI.
1- I didn't know Executive Order could be repealed easily. Could you please develop?
2- Why is it good news? To me, this looks like a clear improvement on the previous status of regulations.
AlexNet dates back to 2012, I don't think previous work on AI can be compared to modern statistical AI.
Paul Christiano's foundational paper on RLHF dates back to 2017.
Arguably, all of agent foundations work turned out to be useless so far, so prosaic alignment work may be what Roko is taking as the beginning of AIS as a field.
The AI safety leaders currently see slow takeoff as humans gaining capabilities, and this is true; and also already happening, depending on your definition. But they are missing the mathematically provable fact that information processing capabilities of AI are heavily stacked towards a novel paradigm of powerful psychology research, which by default is dramatically widening the attack surface of the human mind.
I assume you do not have a mathematical proof of that, or you'd have mentioned it. What makes you think it is mathematically provable?
I would be very interested in reading more about the avenues of research dedicated to showing how AI can be used for psychological attacks from the perspective of AIS (I'd expect such research to be private by default due to infohazards).
I don't understand how the parts fit together. For example, what's the point of presenting the (t-,n)-AGI framework or the Four Background Claims?
I assume it's incomplete. It doesn't present the other 3 anchors mentioned, nor forecasting studies.