Posts
Comments
As I understand it, the Metaculus crowd forecast performs as well as it does (relative to individual predictors) in part because it gives greater weight to more recent predictions. If "superhuman" just means "superhumanly up-to-date on the news", it's less impressive for an AI to reach that level if it's also up-to-date on the news when its predictions are collected. (But to be confident that this point applies, I'd have to know the details of the research better.)
"Broekveg" should be "Broekweg"
partly as a result of other projects like the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (conducted by the Forecasting Research Institute), I now think of it as a data-point that “superforecasters as a whole generally come to lower numbers than I do on AI risk, even after engaging in some depth with the arguments.”
I participated in the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament and I disagree that most superforecasters in that tournament engaged in any depth with the arguments. I also disagree with the phrase "even after arguing about it" - barely any arguing happened, at least in my subgroup. I think much less effort went into these estimates than it would be natural to assume based on how the tournament has been written about by EAs, journalists, and so on.
Thanks, yes, this is a helpful type of feedback. We'll think about how to make that section make more sense without background knowledge. The site is aimed at all audiences, and this means we'll have to navigate tradeoffs about text leaving gaps in justifying claims vs. being too long vs. not having enough scope to be an overview. In this case, it does look like we could make the tradeoff on the side of adding a bit more text and links. Your point about the glossary sounds reasonable and I'll pass it along. (I guess the tradeoff there is people might see an unexplained term and not realize that an earlier instance of it had a glossary link.)
You're right that it's confusing, and we've been planning to change how collapsing and expanding works. I don't think specifics have been decided on yet; I'll pass your ideas along.
I don't think there should be "random" tabs, unless you mean the ones that appear from the "show more questions" option at the bottom. In some cases, the content of child questions may not relate in an obvious way to the content of their parent question. Is that what you mean? If questions are appearing despite not 1) being linked anywhere below "Related" in the doc corresponding to the question that was expanded, or 2) being left over from a different question that was expanded earlier, then I think that's a bug, and I'd be interested in an example.
Quoting from our Manifund application:
We have received around $46k from SHfHS and $54k from LTFF, both for running content writing fellowships. We have been offered a $75k speculation grant from Lightspeed Grants for an additional fellowship, and made a larger application to them for the dev team which has not been accepted. We have also recently made an application to Open Philanthropy.
EA Forum version (manually crossposting to make coauthorship work on both posts):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mHNoaNvpEuzzBEEfg/stampy-s-ai-safety-info-soft-launch
if there's interest in finding a place for a few people to cowork on this in Berkeley, please let me know
Thanks, I made a note on the doc for that entry and we'll update it.
Traffic is pretty low currently, but we've been improving the site during the distillation fellowships and we're hoping to make more of a real launch soon. And yes, people are working on a Stampy chatbot. (The current early prototype isn't finetuned on Stampy's Q&A but searches the alignment literature and passes things to a GPT context window.)
Yes, but we decided to reschedule it before making the announcement. Apologies to anyone who found the event in some other way and was planning on it being around the 11th; if Aug 25-27 doesn't work for you, note that there's still the option to participate early.
Since somebody was wondering if it's still possible to participate without having signed up through alignmentjam.com:
Yes, people are definitely still welcome to participate today and tomorrow, and are invited to head over to Discord to get up to speed.
Stampy's AI Safety Info is a little like that in that it has 1) pre-written answers, 2) a chatbot under very active development, and 3) a link to a Discord with people who are often willing to explain things. But it could probably be more like that in some ways, e.g. if more people who were willing to explain things were habitually in the Discord.
Also, I plan to post the new monthly basic AI safety questions open thread today (edit: here), which is also a little like that.
I tried to answer this here
Anonymous #7 asks:
I am familiar with the concept of a utility function, which assigns numbers to possible world states and considers larger numbers to be better. However, I am unsure how to apply this function in order to make decisions that take time into account. For example, we may be able to achieve a world with higher utility over a longer period of time, or a world with lower utility but in a shorter amount of time.
Anonymous #6 asks:
Why hasn't an alien superintelligence within our light cone already killed us?
Anonymous #5 asks:
How can programers build something and dont understand inner workings of it? Are they closer to biologists-cross-breeders than to car designers?
Anonymous #4 asks:
How large space of possible minds? How its size was calculated? Why is EY thinks that human-like minds are not fill most of this space? What are the evidence for it? What are the possible evidence against "giant Mind Design Space and human-like minds are tiny dot there"?
Anonymous #3 asks:
Can AIs be anything but utility maximisers? Most of the existing programs are something like finite-steps-executors (like Witcher 3 and calculator). So what's the difference?
I don't know why they think so, but here are some people speculating.
Anonymous #2 asks:
A footnote in 'Planning for AGI and beyond' says "Many of us think the safest quadrant in this two-by-two matrix is short timelines and slow takeoff speeds; shorter timelines seem more amenable to coordination" - why do shorter timelines seem more amenable to coordination?
Anonymous #1 asks:
This one is not technical: now that we live in a world in which people have access to systems like ChatGPT, how should I consider any of my career choices, primarily in the context of a computer technician? I'm not a hard-worker, and I consider that my intelligence is just a little above average, so I'm not going to pretend that I'm going to become a systems analyst or software engineer, but now code programming and content creation are starting to be automated more and more, so how should I update my decisions based on that?
Sure, this question is something that most can ask about their intellectual jobs, but I would like to see answers from people in this community; and particularly about a field in which, more than most, employers are going to expect any technician to stay up-to-date with these tools.
Here's a form you can use to send questions anonymously. I'll check for responses and post them as comments.
From 38:58 of the podcast:
So I do think that over time I have come to expect a bit more that things will hang around in a near human place and weird shit will happen as a result. And my failure review where I look back and ask — was that a predictable sort of mistake? I feel like it was to some extent maybe a case of — you’re always going to get capabilities in some order and it was much easier to visualize the endpoint where you have all the capabilities than where you have some of the capabilities. And therefore my visualizations were not dwelling enough on a space we’d predictably in retrospect have entered into later where things have some capabilities but not others and it’s weird. I do think that, in 2012, I would not have called that large language models were the way and the large language models are in some way more uncannily semi-human than what I would justly have predicted in 2012 knowing only what I knew then. But broadly speaking, yeah, I do feel like GPT-4 is already kind of hanging out for longer in a weird, near-human space than I was really visualizing. In part, that's because it's so incredibly hard to visualize or predict correctly in advance when it will happen, which is, in retrospect, a bias.
trevor has already mentioned the Stampy project, which is trying to do something very similar to what's described here and wishes to join forces.
Right now, Stampy just uses language models for semantic search, but the medium-term plan is to use them for text generation as well: people will be able to go to chat.stampy.ai or chat.aisafety.info, type in questions, and have a conversational agent respond. This would probably use a language model fine-tuned by the authors of Cyborgism (probably starting with a weak model as a trial, then increasingly strong ones as they become available), with primary fine-tuning on the alignment literature and hopefully secondary fine-tuning on Stampy content. A question asked in chat would be used to do an extractive search on the literature, then the results would be put into the LM's context window and it would generate a response.
Stampy welcomes volunteer developers to help with building the conversational agent and a front end for it, as well as volunteers to help write content.
There's another issue where "P(doom)" can be read either as the probability that a bad outcome will happen, or the probability that a bad outcome is inevitable. I think the former is usually what's meant, but if "P(doom)" means "the probability that we're doomed", then that suggests the latter as a distracting alternative interpretation.
How Hard is Artificial Intelligence? Evolutionary Arguments and Selection Effects
In terms of "and those people who care will be broad and varied and trying their hands at making movies and doing varied kinds of science and engineering research and learning all about the world while keeping their eyes open for clues about the AI risk conundrum, and being ready to act when a hopeful possibility comes up" we're doing less well compared to my 2008 hopes. I want to know why and how to unblock it.
I think to the extent that people are failing to be interesting in all the ways you'd hoped they would be, it's because being interesting in those ways seems to them to have greater costs than benefits. If you want people to see the benefits of being interesting as outweighing the costs, you should make arguments to help them improve their causal models of the costs, and to improve their causal models of the benefits, and to compare the latter to the former. (E.g., what's the causal pathway by which an hour of thinking about Egyptology or repairing motorcycles or writing fanfic ends up having, not just positive expected usefulness, but higher expected usefulness at the margin than an hour of thinking about AI risk?) But you haven't seemed very interested in explicitly building out this kind of argument, and I don't understand why that isn't at the top of your list of strategies to try.
As far as I know, this is the standard position. See also this FAQ entry. A lot of people sloppily say "the universe" when they mean the observable part of the universe, and that's what's causing the confusion.
I have also talked with folks who’ve thought a lot about safety and who honestly think that existential risk is lower if we have AI soon (before humanity can harm itself in other ways), for example.
It seems hard to make the numbers come out that way. E.g. suppose human-level AGI in 2030 would cause a 60% chance of existential disaster and a 40% chance of existential disaster becoming impossible, and human-level AGI in 2050 would cause a 50% chance of existential disaster and a 50% chance of existential disaster becoming impossible. Then to be indifferent about AI timelines, conditional on human-level AGI in 2050, you'd have to expect a 1/5 probability of existential disaster from other causes in the 2030-2050 period. (That way, with human-level AGI in 2050, you'd have a 1/2 * 4/5 = 40% chance of surviving, just like with human-level AGI in 2030.) I don't really know of non-AI risks in the ballpark of 10% per decade.
(My guess at MIRI people's model is more like 99% chance of existential disaster from human-level AGI in 2030 and 90% in 2050, in which case indifference would require a 90% chance of some other existential disaster in 2030-2050, to cut 10% chance of survival down to 1%.)
"Safewashing" would be more directly parallel to "greenwashing" and sounds less awkward to my ears than "safetywashing", but on the other hand the relevant ideas are more often called "AI safety" than "safe AI", so I'm not sure if it's a better or worse term.
Yes, my experience of "nobody listened 20 years ago when the case for caring about AI risk was already overwhelmingly strong and urgent" doesn't put strong bounds on how much I should anticipate that people will care about AI risk in the future, and this is important; but it puts stronger bounds on how much I should anticipate that people will care about counterintuitive aspects of AI risk that haven't yet undergone a slow process of climbing in mainstream respectability, even if the case for caring about those aspects is overwhelmingly strong and urgent (except insofar as LessWrong culture has instilled a general appreciation for things that have overwhelmingly strong and urgent cases for caring about them), and this is also important.
- after a tech company singularity,
I think this was meant to read "2. after AGI,"
Note that the full 2021 MIRI conversations are also available (in robot voice) in the Nonlinear Library archive.
- AXRP (the AI X-risk research podcast)
- The Alignment Newsletter Podcast
- Many entries on the Nonlinear Library
- Maybe Towards Data Science
edit: also FLI's AI alignment podcast
As I see it, "rationalist" already refers to a person who thinks rationality is particularly important, not necessarily a person who is rational, like how "libertarian" refers to a person who thinks freedom is particularly important, not necessarily a person who is free. Then literally speaking "aspiring rationalist" refers to a person who aspires to think rationality is particularly important, not to a person who aspires to be rational. Using "aspiring rationalist" to refer to people who aspire to attain rationality encourages people to misinterpret self-identified rationalists as claiming to have attained rationality. Saying something like "person who aspires to rationality" instead of "aspiring rationalist" is a little more awkward, but it respects the literal meaning of words, and I think that's important.
Great report. I found the high decision-worthiness vignette especially interesting.
I haven't read it closely yet, so people should feel free to be like "just read the report more closely and the answers are in there", but here are some confusions and questions that have been on my mind when trying to understand these things:
Has anyone thought about this in terms of a "consequence indication assumption" that's like the self-indication assumption but normalizes by the probability of producing paths from selves to cared-about consequences instead of the probability of producing selves? Maybe this is discussed in the anthropic decision theory sequence and I should just catch up on that?
I wonder how uncertainty about the cosmological future would affect grabby aliens conclusions. In particular, I think not very long ago it was thought plausible that the affectable universe is unbounded, in which case there could be worlds where aliens were almost arbitrarily rare that still had high decision-worthiness. (Faster than light travel seems like it would have similar implications.)
SIA and SSA mean something different now than when Bostrom originally defined them, right? Modern SIA is Bostrom's SIA+SSA and modern SSA is Bostrom's (not SIA)+SSA? Joe Carlsmith talked about this, but it would be good if there were a short comment somewhere that just explained the change of definition, so people can link it whenever it comes up in the future. (edit: ah, just noticed footnote 13)
SIA doomsday is a very different thing than the regular doomsday argument, despite the name, right? The former is about being unlikely to colonize the universe, the latter is about being unlikely to have a high number of observers? A strong great filter that lies in our future seems like it would require enough revisions to our world model to make SIA doom basically a variant of the simulation argument, i.e. the best explanation of our ability to colonize the stars not being real would be the stars themselves not being real. Many other weird hypotheses seem like they'd become more likely than the naive world view under SIA doom reasoning. E.g., maybe there are 10^50 human civilizations on Earth, but they're all out of phase and can't affect each other, but they can still see the same sun and stars. Anyway, I guess this problem doesn't turn up in the "high decision-worthiness" or "consequence indication assumption" formulation.
My impression (based on using Metaculus a lot) is that, while questions like this may give you a reasonable ballpark estimate and it's great that they exist, they're nowhere close to being efficient enough for it to mean much when they fail to move. As a proxy for the amount of mental effort that goes into it, there's only been three comments on the linked question in the last month. I've been complaining about people calling Metaculus a "prediction market" because if people think it's a prediction market then they'll assume there's a point to be made like "if you can tell that the prediction is inefficient, then why aren't you rich, at least in play money?" But the estimate you're seeing is just a recency-weighted median of the predictions of everyone who presses the button, not weighted by past predictive record, and not weighted by willingness-to-bet, because there's no buying or selling and everyone makes only one prediction. It's basically a poll of people who are trying to get good results (in terms of Brier/log score and Metaculus points) on their answers.
Metaculus (unlike Manifold) is not a market and does not use play money except in the same sense that Tetris score is play money.
I don't understand why people are calling Metaculus a prediction market. There's no buying or selling going on, even in play money. There's a score, but score doesn't affect the community estimate, which is just a median of all user predictions weighted by recency. I think it ends up doing pretty well, but calling it a market (which it doesn't call itself) will give readers a mistaken impression of how it works.
It took a minute to "click" for me that the green up marks and red down marks corresponded to each other in four opposed pairs, and that the Truth/Aim/Clarity numbers also corresponded to these axes. Possibly this is because I went straight to the thread after quickly skimming the OP, but most threads won't have the OP to explain things anyway. So my impression is it should be less opaque somehow. I do like having votes convey a lot more information than up/down. I wonder if it would be best to hide the new features under some sort of "advanced options" interface.
"Seeks truth" and "seeks conflict" aren't always opposites. For example, it's common for comments to seek harmony instead of either truth or conflict.
If there's going to be a small number of emojis, they should probably be very different colors, like red/yellow/blue/green.
Are there online spaces that talk about the same stuff LW talks about (AI futurism, technical rationality, and so on), with reasonably high quality standards, but more conversational-oriented and less soapbox-oriented, and maybe with less respectability signaling? I often find myself wanting to talk about things discussed here but feeling overconstrained by things like knowing that comments are permanent and having to anticipate objections instead of taking them as they come.
"imprisoned"?
I tend to want to split "value drift" into "change in the mapping from (possible beliefs about logical and empirical questions) to (implied values)" and "change in beliefs about logical and empirical questions", instead of lumping both into "change in values".
This seems to be missing what I see as the strongest argument for "utopia": most of what we think of as "bad values" in humans comes from objective mistakes in reasoning about the world and about moral philosophy, rather than from a part of us that is orthogonal to such reasoning in a paperclip-maximizer-like way, and future reflection can be expected to correct those mistakes.
"Problematic dynamics happened at Leverage" and "Leverage influenced EA Summit/Global" don't imply "Problematic dynamics at Leverage influenced EA Summit/Global" if EA Summit/Global had their own filters against problematic influences. (If such filters failed, it should be possible to point out where.)
Your posts seem to be about what happens if you filter out considerations that don't go your way. Obviously, yes, that way you can get distortion without saying anything false. But the proposal here is to avoid certain topics and be fully honest about which topics are being avoided. This doesn't create even a single bit of distortion. A blank canvas is not a distorted map. People can get their maps elsewhere, as they already do on many subjects, and as they will keep having to do regardless, simply because some filtering is inevitable beneath the eye of Sauron. (Distortions caused by misestimation of filtering are going to exist whether the filter has 40% strength or 30% strength. The way to minimize them is to focus on estimating correctly. A 100% strength filter is actually relatively easy to correctly estimate. And having the appearance of a forthright debate creates perverse incentives for people to distort their beliefs so they can have something inoffensive to be forthright about.)
The people going after Steve Hsu almost entirely don't care whether LW hosts Bell Curve reviews. If adjusting allowable topic space gets us 1 util and causes 2 utils of damage distributed evenly across 99 Sargons and one Steve Hsu, that's only 0.02 Hsu utils lost, which seems like a good trade.
I don't have a lot of verbal energy and find the "competing grandstanding walls of text" style of discussion draining, and I don't think the arguments I'm making are actually landing for some reason, and I'm on the verge of tapping out. Generating and posting an IM chat log could be a lot more productive. But people all seem pretty set in their opinions, so it could just be a waste of energy.
due to the mechanisms described in "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies" and "Dark Side Epistemology"
I'm not advocating lying. I'm advocating locally preferring to avoid subjects that force people to either lie or alienate people into preferring lies, or both. In the possible world where The Bell Curve is mostly true, not talking about it on LessWrong will not create a trail of false claims that have to be rationalized. It will create a trail of no claims. LessWrongers might fill their opinion vacuum with false claims from elsewhere, or with true claims, but either way, this is no different from what they already do about lots of subjects, and does not compromise anyone's epistemic integrity.
"Offensive things" isn't a category determined primarily by the interaction of LessWrong and people of the sneer. These groups exist in a wider society that they're signaling to. It sounds like your reasoning is "if we don't post about the Bell Curve, they'll just start taking offense to technological forecasting, and we'll be back where we started but with a more restricted topic space". But doing so would make the sneerers look stupid, because society, for better or worse, considers The Bell Curve to be offensive and does not consider technological forecasting to be offensive.