Posts
Comments
I recently found a 2-hour interview with Mo Gawdat titled "EMERGENCY EPISODE: Ex-Google Officer Finally Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI!" from 2 months ago. It has 6.5 million views which is 1 million more views than Sam Altman's interview on Lex Fridman.
I've only skimmed through it, but it seems that Gawdat frames AI developments as an emergency and is mainly concerned about potential misuse.
I likely won't have time to actually listen to it for a while – but it seems pretty relevant for the AI Safety community to understand what kind of other extremely popular media narratives about dangers from AI exist.
I think the overall point you're making is intriguing, and I could see how it might alter my home behaviour if I considered it more deeply. But I also strongly disagree with the following:
Just about every work behavior is an example of bad home behavior
There is a bunch of "work behavior" that has been very useful – in the right measure – for my personal life:
- Task Management – This cut down on the time I spend on "life admin".
- Scheduling – Reaching out with "let's find an evening to play tennis" helps me increase the number of fulfilling activities I do with friends.
- Prioritization – Day-to-day life can obscure what's really important. Thinking about what I really value and want to achieve can make my life more meaningful.
- Creating Spreadsheets & Documents – Apart from the obvious use case in personal finance, Spreadsheets are also very valuable to me for evaluating crucial life decisions ("Where should we move?"). I use documents for private events I'm organising (e.g. a weekend trip to the mountains with friends).
Maybe some of them are too obvious and common. But they are things that my grandmother wouldn't have done – and I suspect that they are mostly derived from work culture.
DC Rainmaker does incredibly detailed reviews of sports watches.
How useful do people think it would be to have human-in-the-loop (HITL) AI systems?
What's the likeliest failure mode of HITL AI Systems? And what kind of policies are mostly likely to help against those failure modes?
If we assume that HITL AI Systems are not going to be safer once we reach unaligned AGI. Could it maybe give use tools/information/time-steps to increase the chance that AGI will be aligned?
I was thinking of money. :)
Interesting. Can you give us a sense of how much those asks (offer to pay for the extra labour) end up costing you?
Also: The last name is "Von Almen" not "Almen"
I always assumed that "Why don't we give Terence Tao a million dollars to work on AGI alignment?" was using Tao to refer to a class of people. Your comment implies that it would be especially valuable for Tao specifically to work on it.
Why should we believe that Tao would be especially likely to be able to make progress on AGI alignment (e.g. compared to other recent fields medal winners like Peter Scholze)?
Just saw the inverse question was already asked and answered.
[I think this is more anthropomorphizing ramble than concise arguments. Feel free to ignore :) ]
I get the impression that in this example the AGI would not actually be satisficing. It is no longer maximizing a goal but still optimizing for this rule.
For a satisficing AGI, I'd imagine something vague like "Get many paperclips" resulting in the AGI trying to get paperclips but at some point (an inflection point of diminishing marginal returns? some point where it becomes very uncertain about what the next action should be?) doing something else.
Or for rules like "get 100 paperclips, not more" the AGI might only directionally or opportunistically adhere. Within the rule, this might look like "I wanted to get 100 paperclips, but 98 paperclips are still better than 90, let's move on" or "Oops, I accidentally got 101 paperclips. Too bad, let's move on".
In your example of the AGI taking lots of precautions, the satisficing AGI would not do this because it could be spending its time doing something else.
I suspect there are major flaws with it, but an intuition I have goes something like this:
- Humans have in some sense similar decision-making capabilities to early AGI.
- The world is incredibly complex and humans are nowhere near understanding and predicting most of it. Early AGI will likely have similar limitations.
- Humans are mostly not optimizing their actions, mainly because of limited resources, multiple goals, and because of a ton of uncertainty about the future.
- So early AGI might also end up not-optimizing its actions most of the time.
- Suppose we assume that the complexity of the world will continue to be sufficiently big such that the AGI will continue to fail to completely understand and predict the world. In that case, the advanced AGI will continue to not-optimize to some extent.
- But it might look like near-complete optimization to us.
- Would an AGI that only tries to satisfice a solution/goal be safer?
- Do we have reason to believe that we can/can't get an AGI to be a satisficer?
There has been quite a lot of discussion over on the EA Forum:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search?terms=phil%20torres
Avital Balwit linked to this lesswrong post in the comments of her own response to his longtermism critique (because Phil Torres is currently banned from the forum, afaik):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kageSSDLSMpuwkPKK/response-to-recent-criticisms-of-longtermism-1#6ZzPqhcBAELDiAJhw
The whole thing was much more banal than what you're imagining. It was an interim-use building with mainly student residents. There was no coordination between residents that I knew of.
The garden wasn't trashed before the letter. It was just a table and a couple of chairs, that didn't fit the house rules. If the city had just said "please, take the table out of the garden", I'd have given a 70% chance of it working. If the city had not said a thing, there would not have been (a lot of) additional furniture in the garden.
By issuing the threat, the city introduced an incentive they didn't intend.
Some residents who picked up on the incentive destroyed the garden because they were overconfident in the authority following through with the threat – no matter what.
The link to the QWYRFM layout contains an error.
I would guess that humans' nightmarish experience in concentration camps was usually better than nonexistence; and even if you suspect this is false, it seems easy to imagine how it could be true, because there's a lot more to human experience than 'pain, and beyond that pain, darkness'.
I can't really imagine this – at least for people in extermination camps, who weren't killed. I'd assume that, all else equal, the vast majority of prisoners would choose to skip that part of their life. But maybe I'm missing something or have unusual intuitions.
Thank you! The general reasoning makes sense to me.
This Cochrane review finds a false negative for asymptomatic individuals of 42% with antigen tests – which were not self-tests. Is your rate significantly higher because you're thinking of self-administered antigen tests?
In many European countries, you can get antigen self-tests for about $2-4 a piece, this might make a testing scheme more cost-effective.
Thanks for this post, it helped clarify some of my concerns about the upcoming holidays.
I'm surprised you don't mention testing (PCR or antigen).
What are your views on testing before an event?
What would be a good protocol for testing before a specific event – test on the day of, a day before?
The triangular video almost certainly isn't a UFO anymore.
Some guy investigated it on the ground and there's a simple explanation: skyscrapers that are illuminated.
The videos capture a somewhat unique moment when clouds pass infront of the triangular shadow.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpjyWgjQvmc
(The most important part is at the end of the video.)
Interesting. I'm now wondering if dislike of crust is more widespread than I assumed.
This strikes me as plausible because there is a lot of moral sentiment attached to not wasting food.
This consumer survey from Switzerland found that consumers see the crust as more indicative of bread freshness than the crumb [low quality online survey]. So maybe people are also mixing up the crust as an indicator for quality with the actual taste of the crust?
Curious: Are you from a country without very good (crusted) bread?
In Switzerland, Germany and France (that I know of) the crust is often considered the tastiest part of the bread, at least when fresh. I only know of children and elderly people not eating the crust because it's harder to chew.
I'm interested in the distinction between vegan and non-vegan ovens in your household. I've never heard about something like that. Is it because of vegans not being comfortable about using the same device or is it a "smell issue"?
I would recommend something like the Sawyer Squeeze (not the Sawyer mini) over the life straw. First of all, the normal life straw needs suction to push water through the filter, while with the Sawyer Squeeze you fill a water container or standard water bottle with dirty water and push it into a container.
Also it has a higher flow rate of almost 0.5 gallon per minute and will filter up to 100'000 gallons of water with proper backflushing (vs. 1'000 gallons with the life straw). It costs around $35 (vs $13) but you can hydrate your whole neighbourhood with enough non-drinkable water available.
Never heard of this before but tried to get a sense of it. (I'm not a teenager nor do I live in the US. This is just some background information people might find interesting.)
It's a meme on tiktok. Helen Keller not actually being death/blind is generally the premise of a sarcastic joke. You can watch some popular examples here:
#helenkeller Hashtag Videos on TikTok
The idea that Helen Kellers ability were exaggerated has been promoted through the popular "Painkiller Already" Podcast. The comments seem quite open to the idea, but it's unclear how much of it is edgy humor and how much is genuine belief.
Taylor Proves Helen Keller Was A Fraud - YouTube
I've actually made the opposite experience of one commenter.
Once I tried to wash clothes in a hurry, hung them to dry and didn't get to take them down for half a day or so. I then found my clothes neatly folded on the washing machine.
Felt bad that somebody did my duties, and I wasn't even able to thank them and apologize. Because the new Waschplan is no Waschplan at all – pure anarchy!
First, what even do we mean by property? Well, there are material things that are sometimes scarce or rivalrous. If I eat a sandwich, you can’t also eat it; if I sleep in a bed, you can’t also sleep in it at the same time; if an acre of land is rented out for agricultural use, only one of us can collect the rent check.
Why do you describe property as being material things here?
Possible Nitpick:
If I understand you correctly, you use 'excludability' as a defining feature of property. As far as I understand, property comes with varying degrees of excludability and are sometimes not excludable at all (e.g. public property, common property). Maybe it would be useful to think about property more generally as things that come with certain rights (the right to use and transfer it, the right to earn income/interest off of it).
The shared laundry room was, for example, what led to my very first contact with my neighbors. The very first week, a neighbor complained that I hadn't wiped water from the rubber band around the door of the washing machine and gave me a long lecture about the rules for using the shared washing machine and tumbler.
I am in switzerland and exactly the same thing happened to me.
(I'm saying this just to lend credence to apartment block politics being a real thing.)
[EDIT, was intended as a response to Raemon, not Dagon.]
Maybe it's the way you phrase the responses. But as described, I get the impression that this norm would mainly work for relatively extroverted persons with low rejection sensitivity.
I'd be much less likely to ever try to join a discussion (and would tend to not attend events with such a norm). But maybe there's a way to avoid this, both from "my side" and "yours".
I see. Maybe pre-drying it with a kitchen towel would help?
Why don't you just dry them inside-out?
They dry fast and it takes no more time than clipping them onto your clips.
Hm, all I can find are these small bumps in the end of January. [But I can't figure out how to attach screenshots here.] I also can't really see a plateau effect afterwards. An actual reaction, from a cursory view, only seems to happen on the 20. February. I'm not capable of saying whether these bumps show a market reaction or if it's largely noise. Looking at the time before, it doesn't seem like an unusual behaviour. [But I'm really not good at properly reading such charts, so I'd be interested in how you came to your conclusions.]
I think one key question, when talking about the EMH, is what we mean for an information to be available.
It's plausible, that for the public it only became clear around 27. February that Covid19 would be huge.
But it seems some experts knew much earlier. Just a quick browse on epidemiological twitter, for example, and you can find quite some instances of people expecting this not to be contained in the beginning of February. There's also the case of a swiss epidemiologist who was one of the first to warn swiss national media about Covid19 and claims to have sold all his stocks on January 21 in order to avoid losses from the outbreak.
One reason why you might not regard this information as available, is because it's costly. In order to profit from it, you need to spend time and effort in order to receive and understand the information. I don't think that is super plausible, given large banks and corporations with substantial research budgets.
Maybe these researchers were just lucky, there were certainly other researchers at this time who were far less concerned. But given that the information existed with at least some authority and was quite available, I would have expected the markets to at least somewhat react before mid-january.
I wasn't sure whether it was the right place to post, as I myself didn't feel able to judge how useful it really is. Thus I didn't feel comfortable having it as a shortform post.
Here's a tool to estimate how badly hospitals will be overfilled in your community.
It's by Richard Neher and colleagues and an early stage tool. Might nevertheless be interesting to play around with.
Here's the source and some explanations about the underlying model:
Richard Neher and others created a tool to explore scenarios for hospital demand in your community:
It's still in early stages. Source: https://twitter.com/richardneher/status/1236980631789359104
Just as a small piece of evidence:
I've read an interview of a patient released from a swiss hospital. She isn't allowed to leave her appartment but can spend time in her garden and is allowed to recieve deliveries (there was no specification about how deliveries are done). This points towards the doctors not being very concerned about aerosolized infections.
1. Iran isn't especially warm at this time of year. Temperatures were between -2°C and 12°C this february.
3. There's loads of 'liberal' measures that governments can take to change the distribution of cases over time. Many of the estimates epidemiologists give are explicitly for scenarios without countermeasures. (For example, the estimate that 10% of the population will be infected at the peak of the epidemic.)
Maybe you've already done this:
Write a list of the names of everyone that attended. This way if any attendee turns out to have been infected you have a better chance of containing it within some section of your community.
This advice may be individually rational but seems generally quite bad from a social point of view. Don't stockpile a medicine because you think the public health system will run out of it. Same goes for stockpiling a large number of surgical masks. I've heard that hospitals and institutions in Italy already fear running out of them, and masks are crucial in these places.
The case might be different for people with high age or a preexisting condition that puts them in danger.