cousin_it(Vladimir Slepnev)

Karma: 29,640

cousin_it 30 Oct 2024 10:09 UTC
3 points
0
on: The Alignment Trap: AI Safety as Path to Power
Yeah, this is my main risk scenario. But I think it makes more sense to talk about imbalance of power, not concentration of power. Maybe there will be one AI dictator, or one human+AI dictator, or many AIs, or many human+AI companies; but anyway most humans will end up at the bottom of a huge power differential. If history teaches us anything, this is a very dangerous prospect.

It seems the only good path is aligning AI to the interests of most people, not just its creators. But there’s no commercial or military incentive to do that, so it probably won’t happen by default.

cousin_it 27 Oct 2024 9:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: David Althaus’s comment on: What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and distribution of dark traits
The British weren’t much more compassionate. North America and Australia were basically cleared of their native populations and repopulated with Europeans. Under British rule in India, tens of millions died from many famines, which instantly stopped after independence.

Colonialism didn’t end due to benevolence. Wars for colonial liberation continued well after WWII and were very brutal, the Algerian war for example. I think the actual reason is that colonies stopped making economic sense.

So I guess the difference between your view and mine is that I think colonialism kept going basically as long as it benefited the dominant group. Benevolence or malevolence didn’t come into it much. And if we get back to the AI conversation, my view is that when AIs become more powerful than people and can use resources more efficiently, the systemic gradient in favor of taking everything away from people will be just way too strong. It’s a force acting above the level of individuals (hmm, individual AIs) - it will affect which AIs get created and which ones succeed.

cousin_it 25 Oct 2024 21:07 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and distribution of dark traits
I think a big part of the problem is that in a situation of power imbalance, there’s a large reward lying around for someone to do bad things—plunder colonies for gold, slaves, and territory; raise and slaughter animals in factory farms—as long as the rest can enjoy the fruits of it without feeling personally responsible. There’s no comparable gradient in favor of good things (“good” is often unselfish, uncompetitive, unprofitable).

cousin_it 24 Oct 2024 14:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: David Althaus’s comment on: What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and distribution of dark traits
I’m afraid in a situation of power imbalance these interpersonal differences won’t matter much. I’m thinking of examples like enclosures in England, where basically the entire elite of the country decided to make poor people even poorer, in order to enrich themselves. Or colonialism, which lasted for centuries with lots of people participating, and the good people in the dominant group didn’t stop it.

To be clear, I’m not saying there are no interpersonal differences. But if we find ourselves at the bottom of a power imbalance, I think those above us (even if they’re very similar to humans) will just systemically treat us badly.

cousin_it 23 Oct 2024 15:47 UTC
5 points
1
on: What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and distribution of dark traits
I’m not sure focusing on individual evil is the right approach. It seems to me that most people become much more evil when they aren’t punished for it. A lot of evil is done by organizations, which are composed of normal people but can “normalize” the evil and protect the participants. (Insert usual examples such as factory farming, colonialism and so on.) So if we teach AIs to be as “aligned” as the average person, and then AIs increase in power beyond our ability to punish them, we can expect to be treated as a much-less-powerful group in history—which is to say, not very well.

cousin_it 21 Oct 2024 12:25 UTC
7 points
5
on: OpenAI defected, but we can take honest actions
The situation where AI is a good tool for manipulating public opinion, and the leading AI company has a bad reputation, seems unstable. Maybe AI just needs to get a little better, and then AI-written arguments in favor of AI will win public opinion decisively? This could “lock in” our trajectory even worse than now, and could happen long before AGI.

cousin_it 13 Oct 2024 10:57 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: MinusGix’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete
No problem about long reply, I think your arguments are good and give me a lot to think about.

My attempt at interpreting what you mean is that you’re drawing a distinction between morality about world-states vs. morality about process, internal details, experiencing it, ‘yourself’.

I just thought of another possible classification: “zeroth-order consequentialist” (care about doing the action but not because of consequences), “first-order consequentialist” (care about consequences), “second-order consequentialist” (care about someone else being able to choose what to do). I guess you’re right that all of these can be translated into first-order. But by the same token, everything can be translated to zeroth-order. And the translation from second to first feels about as iffy as the translation from first to zeroth. So this still feels fuzzy to me, I’m not sure what is right.

cousin_it 13 Oct 2024 9:39 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Rationalist Gnosticism
Maybe HPMOR? A lot of people treated it like “our guru has written a fiction book that teaches you how to think more correctly, let’s get more people to read it”. And maybe it’s possible to write such a book, but to me the book was charming in the moment but fell off hard when rereading later.

cousin_it 13 Oct 2024 8:52 UTC
3 points
2
on: Prices are Bounties
I guess it depends on your stance on monopolies. If you think monopolies result only from government interference in the market, then you’ll be more laissez-faire. But if you notice that firms often want to join together in cozy cartels and have subtle ways to do it (see RealPage), or that some markets lead to natural monopolies, then the problem of protecting people from monopoly prices and reducing the reward for monopolization is a real problem. And yeah, banning price gouging is a blunt instrument—but it has the benefit of being direct. Fighting the more indirect aspects of monopolization is harder. So in this branch of the argument, if you want to allow price gouging, that has to come in tandem with better antimonopoly measures.

cousin_it 11 Oct 2024 17:59 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Rationalist Gnosticism
I mean, in science people will use Newton’s results and add their own. But they won’t quote Newton’s books at you on every topic under the sun, or consider you a muggle if you haven’t read these books. He doesn’t get the guru treatment that EY does.

cousin_it 11 Oct 2024 15:34 UTC
8 points
3
in reply to: Martín Soto’s comment on: Martín Soto’s Shortform
Here’s another possible answer: maybe there are some aspects of happiness that we usually get as a side effect of doing other things, not obviously connected to happiness. So if you optimize to exclude things whose connection to happiness you don’t see, you end up missing some “essential nutrients” so to speak.

cousin_it 11 Oct 2024 15:27 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Rationalist Gnosticism

rationalist Gnostics are still basically able to deal with hylics

That sounds a bit like “dealing with muggles”. I think this kind of thing is wrong in general, it’s better to not have gurus and not have muggles.

cousin_it 11 Oct 2024 13:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Rationalist Gnosticism
I think most farmers would agree that there are many other jobs as useful as farming. But to a gnostic, the pneumatic/psychic/hylic classification is the most important fact about a person.

cousin_it 11 Oct 2024 9:50 UTC
1 point
−1
on: Rationalist Gnosticism
One big turn-off of Gnosticism for me is dividing people into three sorts, of which the most numerous (hylics) is the most inferior. So groups with gnosticism-type beliefs will often think of themselves as distinct and superior to regular people.

cousin_it 9 Oct 2024 16:44 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete
Yeah. I think consequentialism is a great framing that has done a lot of good in EA, where the desired state of the world is easy to describe (remove X amount of disease and such). And this created a bit of a blindspot, where people started thinking that goals not natively formulated in terms of end states (“play with this toy”, “respect this person’s wishes” and such) should be reformulated in terms of end states anyway, in more complex ways. To be honest I still go back and forth on whether that works—my post was a bit polemical. But it feels like there’s something to the idea of keeping some goals in our “internal language”, not rewriting them into the language of consequences.

cousin_it 8 Oct 2024 18:43 UTC
4 points
0
on: Thinking About a Pedalboard
Nothing to say on pedalboards that you don’t know already, but another question, have you tried optimizing your setup process? 35 minutes feels a bit long. At some point I was doing setup for a band and I got it down to 15 minutes by writing a script, optimizing which steps go together, and practicing.

cousin_it 8 Oct 2024 18:26 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MinusGix’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete
Here’s maybe another point of view on this: consequentialism fundamentally talks about receiving stuff from the universe. An hour climbing a mountain, an hour swimming in the sea, or hey, an hour in the joy experience machine. The endpoint of consequentialism is a sort of amoeba that doesn’t really need a body to overcome obstacles, or a brain to solve problems, all it needs to do is receive and enjoy. To the extent I want life to be also about doing something or being someone, that might be a more natural fit for alternatives to consequentialism—deontology and virtue ethics.

cousin_it 8 Oct 2024 7:31 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete

Some people (like my 12yo past self) actually do want to reach the top of the mountain. Other people, like my current self, want things like take a break from work, get light physical exercise, socialize, look at nature for a while because I think it’s psychologically healthy, or get a sense of accomplishment after having gotten up early and hiked all the way up.

There’s plenty of consequentialism debate in other threads, but here I’d just like to say that this snippet is a kind of unintentionally sad commentary on growing up. It’s probably not even sad to you; but to me it evokes a feeling of “how do we escape from this change, even temporarily”.

cousin_it 8 Oct 2024 7:21 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete

This post strikes me as saying something extremely obvious and uncontroversial, like “I care about what happens in the future, but I also care about other things, e.g. not getting tortured right now”. OK, yeah duh, was anyone disputing that??

I’m thinking about cases where you want to do something, and it’s a simple action, but the consequences are complex and you don’t explicitly analyze them—you just want to do the thing. In such cases I argue that reducing the action to its (more complex) consequences feels like shoehorning.

For example: maybe you want to climb a mountain because that’s the way your heuristics play out, which came from evolution. So we can “back-chain” the desire to genetic fitness; or we can back-chain to some worldly consequences, like having good stories to tell at parties as another commenter said; or we can back-chain those to fitness as well, and so on. It’s arbitrary. The only “bedrock” is that when you want to climb the mountain, you’re not analyzing those consequences. The mountain calls you, it doesn’t need to be any more complex than that. So why should we say it’s about consequences? We could just say it’s about the action.

And once we allow ourselves to do actions that are just about the action, it seems calling ourselves “consequentialists” is somewhere between wrong or vacuous. Which is the point I was making in the post.

cousin_it 7 Oct 2024 22:30 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete
This is tricky. In the post I mentioned “playing”, where you do stuff without caring about any goal, and most play doesn’t lead to anything interesting. But it’s amazing how many of humanity’s advances were made in this non-goal-directed, playing mode. This is mentioned for example in Feynman’s book, the bit about the wobbling plate.