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The original post, the actual bet, and the short scuffle in the comments is exactly the kind of epistemic virtue, basic respect, and straight-talking object-level discussion that I like about LessWrong.
I'm surprised and saddened that there aren't more posts like this one around (prediction markets are one thing; loud, public bets on carefully written LW posts are another).
Having something like this occur every ~month seems important from the standpoint of keeping the garden on its toes and remind everyone that beliefs must pay rent, possibly in the form of PayPal cash transfers.
I wrote this after watching Oppenheimer and noticing with horror that I wanted to emulate the protagonist in ways entirely unrelated to his merits. Not just unrelated but antithetical: cargo-culting the flaws of competent/great/interesting people is actively harmful to my goals! Why would I do this!? The pattern generalized, so I wrote a rant against myself, then figured it'd be good for LessWrong, and posted it here with minimal edits.
I think the post is crude and messily written, but does the job.
Meta comment: I notice I'm surprised that out of all my posts, this is the one that seems most often revisited (e.g. getting 2 reviews for Best of LW, which I did not expect). I'm updating against karma as a reliable indicator of long-term value as a result: 2 posts I wrote got twice the karma, but were never interacted with beyond their first month. I think they must have been somewhat inspired by hype-shaped memes.
This is an endorsement of the Review function! It has successfully weeded out popular-but-superficial posts of mine and taught me to prioritize whatever's going on in this post. Karma alone has failed to do this.
I think you're right, but I rarely hear this take. Probably because "good at both coding and LLMs" is a light tail end of the distribution, and most of the relative value of LLMs in code is located at the other, much heavier end of "not good at coding" or even "good at neither coding nor LLMs".
(Speaking as someone who didn't even code until LLMs made it trivially easy, I probably got more relative value than even you.)
need any help on post drafts? whatever we can do to reduce those trivial inconveniences
I'm very pro- this kind of post. Whatever this is, I think it's important for ensuring LW doesn't get "frozen" in a state where specific objects are given higher respect than systems. Strong upvoted.
I think you could get a lot out of adding a temporary golden dollar sign with amount donated next to our LW names! Upon proof of donation receipt or whatever.
Seems like the lowest hanging fruit for monetizing vanity— benches being usually somewhat of a last resort!
(The benches seem still underpriced to me, given expected amount raised and average donation size in the foreseeable future).
I've been at Sciences Po for a few months now. Do you have any general advice? I seem to have trouble taking the subjects seriously enough to any real effort in them, which you seem to point out as a failure mode you skirted. Asking as many people I can for this, as I'm going through a minor existential crisis. Thanks!
Yeah that'd go into some "aesthetic flaws" category which presumably has no risk of messing with your rationality. I agree these exist. And I too am picky.
I agree about the punchline. Chef's kiss post
Here's 4:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kj4jW9DxtKQBJbapn/stanislav-petrov-quarterly-performance-review
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pL4WhsoPJwauRYkeK/moses-and-the-class-struggle
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aRBAhBsc6vZs3WviL/ommc-announces-rip
Can I piggy-back off your conclusions so far? Any news you find okay?
Well then, I can update a little more in the direction not to trust this stuff.
Ah right, the decades part--I had written about the 1930 revolution, commune, and bourbon destitution, then checked the dates online and stupidly thought "ah, it must be just 1815 then" and only talked about that. Thanks
"second" laughcries in french
Ahem, as one of LW's few resident Frenchmen, I must interpose to say that yes, this was not the Big Famous Guillotine French revolution everyone talks about, but one of the ~ 2,456^2 other revolutions that went on in our otherwise very calm history.
Specifically, we refer to the Les Mis revolution as "Les barricades" mostly because the people of Paris stuck barricades everywhere and fought against authority because they didn't like the king the other powers of Europe put into place after Napoleon's defeat. They failed that time, but succeeded 15 years later with another revolution (to put a different king in place).
Victor Hugo loved Napoleon with a passion, and was definitely on the side of the revolutionaries here (though he was but a wee boy when this happened, about the age of Gavroche).
Later, in the 1850s (I'm skipping over a few revolutions, including the one that got rid of kings again), when Haussmann was busy bringing 90% of medieval Paris to rubble to replace it with the homogenous architecture we so admire in Ratatouille today, Napoleon the IIIrd had the great idea to demolish whole blocks and replace them with wide streets (like the Champs Elisées) to make barricade revolutions harder to do.
Final note: THANK YOU LW TEAM for making àccénts like thìs possible with the typeface. They used to look bloated.
Do we know what side we're on? Because I opted in and don't know whether I'm East or West, it just feels Wrong. I guess I stand a non-trivial chance of losing 50 karma ahem please think of the daisy girl and also my precious internet points.
Anti-moderative action will be taken in response if you stand in the way of justice, perhaps by contacting those hackers and giving them creative ideas. Be forewarned.
Fun fact: it's thanks to Lucie that I ended up stumbling onto PauseAI in the first place. Small world + thanks Lucie.
Update everyone: the hard right did not end up gaining a parliamentary majority, which, as Lucie mentioned, could have been the worse outcome wrt AI safety.
Looking ahead, it seems that France will end up being fairly confused and gridlocked as it becomes forced to deal with an evenly-split parliament by playing German-style coalition negociation games. Not sure what that means for AI, except that unilateral action is harder.
For reference, I'm an ex-high school student who just got to vote for the first 3 times in his life because of French political turmoil (✨exciting) and am working these days at PauseAI France, a (soon to be official) governance non-profit aiming to, well—
Anyway, as an org we're writing a counter to the AI commitee mentioned in this post, so that's what's up these days in the French AI safety governance circles.
I'm working on a non-trivial.org project meant to assess the risk of genome sequences by comparing them to a public list of the most dangerous pathogens we know of. This would be used to assess the risk from both experimental results in e.g. BSL-4 labs and the output of e.g. protein folding models. The benchmarking would be carried out by an in-house ML model of ours. Two questions to LessWrong:
1. Is there any other project of this kind out there? Do BSL-4 labs/AlphaFold already have models for this?
2. "Training a model on the most dangerous pathogens in existence" sounds like an idea that could backfire horribly. Can it backfire horribly?
I'm taking this post down, it was to set up an archive.org link as requested by Bostrom, and no longer serves that purpose. Sorry, this was meant to be discreet.
Poetry and practicality
I was staring up at the moon a few days ago and thought about how deeply I loved my family, and wished to one day start my own (I'm just over 18 now). It was a nice moment.
Then, I whipped out my laptop and felt constrained to get back to work; i.e. read papers for my AI governance course, write up LW posts, and trade emails with EA France. (These I believe to be my best shots at increasing everyone's odds of survival).
It felt almost like sacrilege to wrench myself away from the moon and my wonder. Like I was ruining a moment of poetry and stillwatered peace by slamming against reality and its mundane things again.
But... The reason I wrenched myself away is directly downstream from the spirit that animated me in the first place. Whether I feel the poetry now that I felt then is irrelevant: it's still there, and its value and truth persist. Pulling away from the moon was evidence I cared about my musings enough to act on them.
The poetic is not a separate magisterium from the practical; rather the practical is a particular facet of the poetic. Feeling "something to protect" in my bones naturally extends to acting it out. In other words, poetry doesn't just stop. Feel no guilt in pulling away. Because, you're not.
Too obvious imo, though I didn't downnvote. This also might not be an actual rationalist failure mode; in my experience at least, rationalists have about the same intuition all the other humans have about when something should be taken literally or not.
As for why the comment section has gone berserk, no idea, but it's hilarious and we can all use some fun.
Can we have a black banner for the FHI? Not a person, still seems appropriate imo.
See also Alicorn's Expressive Vocabulary.
FHI at Oxford
by Nick Bostrom (recently turned into song):
the big creaky wheel
a thousand years to turn
thousand meetings, thousand emails, thousand rules
to keep things from changing
and heaven forbid
the setting of a precedent
yet in this magisterial inefficiency
there are spaces and hiding places
for fragile weeds to bloom
and maybe bear some singular fruit
like the FHI, a misfit prodigy
daytime a tweedy don
at dark a superhero
flying off into the night
cape a-fluttering
to intercept villains and stop catastrophes
and why not base it here?
our spandex costumes
blend in with the scholarly gowns
our unusual proclivities
are shielded from ridicule
where mortar boards are still in vogue
I've come to think that isn't actually the case. E.g. while I disagree with Being nicer than clippy, it quite precisely nails how consequentialism isn't essentially flawless:
I haven't read that post, but I broadly agree with the excerpt. On green did a good job imo in showing how weirdly imprecise optimal human values are.
It's true that when you stare at something with enough focus, it often loses that bit of "sacredness" which I attribute to green. As in, you might zoom in enough on the human emotion of love and discover that it's just an endless tiling of Shrodinger's equation.
If we discover one day that "human values" are eg 23.6% love, 15.21% adventure and 3% embezzling funds for yachts, and decide to tile the universe in exactly those proportions...[1] I don't know, my gut doesn't like it. Somehow, breaking it all into numbers turned humans into sock puppets reflecting the 23.6% like mindless drones.
The target "human values" seems to be incredibly small, which I guess encapsulates the entire alignment problem. So I can see how you could easily build an intuition from this along the lines of "optimizing maximally for any particular thing always goes horribly wrong". But I'm not sure that's correct or useful. Human values are clearly complicated, but so long as we haven't hit a wall in deciphering them, I wouldn't put my hands up in the air and act as if they're indecipherable.
Unbounded utility maximization aspires to optimize the entire world. This is pretty funky for just about any optimization criterion people can come up with, even if people are perfectly flawless in how well they follow it. There's a bunch of attempts to patch this, but none have really worked so far, and it doesn't seem like any will ever work.
I'm going to read your post and see the alternative you suggest.
- ^
Sounds like a Douglas Adams plot
Interesting! Seems like you put a lot of effort into that 9,000-word post. May I suggest you publish it in little chunks instead of one giant post? You only got 3 karma for it, so I assume that those who started reading it didn't find it worth the effort to read the whole thing. The problem is, that's not useful feedback for you, because you don't know which of those 9,000 words are presumably wrong. If I were building a version of utilitarianism, I would publish it in little bursts of 2-minute posts. You could do that right now with a single section of your original post. Clearly you have tons of ideas. Good luck!
You know, I considered "Bob embezzled the funds to buy malaria nets" because I KNEW someone in the comments would complain about the orphanage. Please don't change.
Actually, the orphanage being a cached thought is precisely why I used it. The writer-pov lesson that comes with "don't fight the hypothetical" is "don't make your hypothetical needlessly distracting". But maybe I miscalculated and malaria nets would be less distracting to LWers.
Anyway, I'm of course not endorsing fund-embezzling, and I think Bob is stupid. You're right in that failure modes associated with Bob's ambitions (eg human extinction) might be a lot worse than those of your typical fund-embezzler (eg the opportunity cost of buying yachts). I imagined Bob as being kind-hearted and stupid, but in your mind he might be some cold-blooded brooding "the price must be paid" type consequentialist. I didn't give details either way, so that's fair.
If you go around saying "the ends justify the means" you're likely to make major mistakes, just like if you walk around saying "lying is okay sometimes". The true lesson here is "don't trust your own calculations, so don't try being clever and blowing up TSMC", not "consequentialism has inherent failure modes". The ideal of consequentialism is essentially flawless; it's when you hand it to sex-obsessed murder monkeys as an excuse to do things that shit hits the fan.
In my mind then, Bob was a good guy running on flawed hardware. Eliezer calls patching your consequentialism by making it bounded "consequentialism, one meta-level up". For him, refusing to embezzle funds for a good cause because the plan could obviously turn sour is just another form of consequentialism. It's like belief in intelligence, but flipped; you don't know exactly how it'll go wrong, but there's a good chance you're unfathomably stupid and you'll make everything worse by acting on "the ends justify the means".
From a practical standpoint though, we both agree and nothing changes: both the cold-hearted Bob and the kind Bob must be stopped. (And both are indeed more likely to make ethically dubious decisions because "the ends justify the means".)
Post-scriptum:
Honestly the one who embezzles funds for unbounded consequentialist purposes sounds much more intellectually interesting
Yeah, this kind of story makes for good movies. When I wrote Bob I was thinking of The Wonderful Story of Mr.Sugar, by Roald Dahl and adapted by Wes Anderson on Netflix. It's at least vaguely EA-spirited, and is kind of in that line (although the story is wholesome, as the name indicates, and isn't meant to warn against dangers associated with boundless consequentialism at all).[1]
- ^
Let's wait for the SBF movie on that one
Link is broken
Re: sociology. I found a meme you might enjoy, which would certainly drive your teacher through the roof: https://twitter.com/captgouda24/status/1777013044976980114
Yeah, that's an excellent idea. I often spot typos in posts, but refrain from writing a comment unless I collect like three. Thanks for sharing!
A functionality I'd like to see on LessWrong: the ability to give quick feedback for a post in the same way you can react to comments (click for image). When you strong-upvote or strong-downvote a post, a little popup menu appears offering you some basic feedback options. The feedback is private and can only be seen by the author.
I've often found myself drowning in downvotes or upvotes without knowing why. Karma is a one-dimensional measure, and writing public comments is a trivial inconvience: this is an attempt at middle ground, and I expect it to make post reception clearer.
See below my crude diagrams.
I'm not clear on what you're calling the "problem of superhuman AI"?
I was given clear instructions from a math phd about how to dump random lean files into the repository I created to confuse lesswrongers for at least a few minutes. But then I got confused while attempting to follow the instructions. There’s only so much my circuits can handle. I’m running most of my code on a Chromebook! Fear me.
Bonus song in I have been a good Bing: "Claude's Anguish", a 3-minute death-metal song whose lyrics were written by Claude when prompted with "how does the AI feel?": https://app.suno.ai/song/40fb1218-18fa-434a-a708-1ce1e2051bc2/ (not for the faint of heart)
I'm glad "thought that faster" is the slowest song of the album. Also where's the "Eliezer Yudkowsky" in the "ft. Eliezer Yudkowsky"? I didn't click on it just to see Eliezer's writing turned into song, I came to see Eliezer sing. Missed opportunity.
I'm not convinced. I felt the training video was incomplete, and the deadline too short.
"Debug" the solution
I think that's fair. Public transport is a lot more important in France than in the US, for example, and is usually the first casually in political upheavals. As with the retirement age debacle a few months ago, railway and bus operators (along with other public services like garbage collectors and school administration) went on mass strikes. It's easier here to make big, daring political actions than in the US where eg cars are the default mode of transport.
This is all great news
Certainly I would expect people to grow up relatively normal, even in a crazy climate. What I see for religion, I expect to see here. Beyond the natural "immunity" I think my peers will develop over time, I imagine that whatever revolutionary fervor they get from youth will fade as well. My communist friend is going to be a high school philosophy teacher soon enough; by then his "glorious revolution" won't stretch much further than in a few academic dissertations (read by literally no one).
That story with the sociology teacher is certainly crazy. I think I've learned the relevant lesson though, to avoid anything with "sociology" written on it like it's the plague. You may correct me, but it seems like a generally icky and imprecise discipline built up on a mountain or rationalization to the point that teachers have to explode into desperate fits in an attempt to hopelessly recover some semblance of a connection to reality.
Parcoursup admissions close in a few days, and I've applied to Sciences Po as well. If I get in, I plan to start a rationality association as well as an existential risk one. However chaotic and facepalmingly pointlessly political the campus might be, I hear the associations are great, so hopefully that will work out all right.
I've already started working on the project: tinyurl.com/biais-cognitifs.
More of... whatever this is on LessWrong, please! Great humor! Imma go open sheets now and optimally estimate turtle weights (as one does on a good friday night).
Edit: hot damn, you've got a whole sequence of this stuff!
They took it down real quick for some reason.
Concept creep is a bastard. >:(
This reminds me of when Charlie Munger died at 99, and many said of him "he was just a child". Less of a nod to transhumanist aspirations, and more to how he retained his sparkling energy and curiosity up until death. There are quite a few good reasons to write "dead far too young".
More French stories: So, at some point, the French decided what kind of political climate they wanted. What actions would reflect on their cause well? Dumping manure onto the city center using tractors? Sure! Lining up a hundred stationary taxi cabs in every main artery of the city? You bet! What about burning down the city hall's door, which is a work of art older than the United States? Mais évidemment!
"Politics" evokes all that in the mind of your average Frenchman. No, not sensible strategies that get your goals done, but the first shiny thing the protesters thought about. It'd be more entertaining to me, except for the fact that I had to skip class at some point because I accidentally biked headfirst into a burgeoning cloud of tear gas (which the cops had detonated in an attempt to ward off the tractors). There are flagpoles in front of the government building those tractors dumped the manure on. They weren't entirely clean, and you can still see the manure level, about 10 meters high.
The new designs are cool, I'd just be worried about venturing too far into insight porn. You don't want people reading the posts just because they like how they look (although reading them superficially is probably better than not reading them at all). Clicking on the posts and seeing a giant image that bleeds color into the otherwise sober text format is distracting.
I guess if I don't like it there's always GreaterWrong.
Yeah I think I'm wrong about this. Thanks to all of you commenters for feedback. I'm updating.
Got it. Thank you.