It’s good to know when you need to “go hard”, and to be able to do so if necessary, and to assess accurately whether it’s necessary. But it often isn’t necessary, and when it isn’t, then it’s really bad to be going hard all the time, for lots of reasons including not having time to mull over the big picture and notice new things. Like how Elon Musk built SpaceX to mitigate x-risk without it ever crossing his mind that interplanetary colonization wouldn’t actually help with x-risk from AI (and then pretty much everything Elon has done about AI x-risk from that point forward made the problem worse not better). See e.g. What should you change in response to an “emergency”? And AI risk, Please don’t throw your mind away, Changing the world through slack & hobbies, etc. Oh also, pain is not the unit of effort.
Furthermore, going hard also imposes opportunity costs and literal costs on future you even if you have all your priorities perfectly lined up and know exactly what should be worked on at any time. If you destabilise yourself enough trying to “go for the goal” your net impact might ultimately be negative (not naming any names here...).
This is very close to some ideas I’ve been trying and failing to write up. In “On Green” Joe Carlsmith writes “Green is what told the rationalists to be more OK with death, and the EAs to be more OK with wild animal suffering.” but wait hang on actually being OK with death is the only way to stay sane, and while it’s not quite the same, the immediate must-reduce-suffering-footprint drive that EAs have might have ended up giving some college students some serious dietary deficiencies.
some ideas I’ve been trying and failing to write up … actually being OK with death is the only way to stay sane
By “being OK with death” you mean something like, accepting that efforts to stop AI might fail, and it really might kill us all? But without entirely giving up?
Yeah basically. I think “OK-ness” in the human psyche is a bit of a binary, which is uncorrelated with ones actions a lot of the time.
So you can imagine four quadrants of “Ok with dying” vs “Not Ok with dying” and, separately “Tries to avoid dying” vs “Doesn’t try to avoid dying”. Where most normies are in the “Ok with dying”+”Doesn’t try to avoid dying” (and quite a few are in the “Not Ok with dying”+”Doesn’t try to avoid dying” quadrant) while lots of rats are in the “Not Ok with dying”+”Tries to avoid dying” quadrant.
I think that, right now, most of the sane work being done is in the “Ok with dying”+”Tries to avoid dying” quadrant. I think Yudkowsky’s early efforts wanted to move people from “Doesn’t try...” to “Tries...” but did this by pulling on the “Ok...” to “Not Ok...” axis, and I think this had some pretty negative consequences.
It’s good to know when you need to “go hard”, and to be able to do so if necessary, and to assess accurately whether it’s necessary. But it often isn’t necessary, and when it isn’t, then it’s really bad to be going hard all the time, for lots of reasons including not having time to mull over the big picture and notice new things. Like how Elon Musk built SpaceX to mitigate x-risk without it ever crossing his mind that interplanetary colonization wouldn’t actually help with x-risk from AI (and then pretty much everything Elon has done about AI x-risk from that point forward made the problem worse not better). See e.g. What should you change in response to an “emergency”? And AI risk, Please don’t throw your mind away, Changing the world through slack & hobbies, etc. Oh also, pain is not the unit of effort.
Furthermore, going hard also imposes opportunity costs and literal costs on future you even if you have all your priorities perfectly lined up and know exactly what should be worked on at any time. If you destabilise yourself enough trying to “go for the goal” your net impact might ultimately be negative (not naming any names here...).
This is very close to some ideas I’ve been trying and failing to write up. In “On Green” Joe Carlsmith writes “Green is what told the rationalists to be more OK with death, and the EAs to be more OK with wild animal suffering.” but wait hang on actually being OK with death is the only way to stay sane, and while it’s not quite the same, the immediate must-reduce-suffering-footprint drive that EAs have might have ended up giving some college students some serious dietary deficiencies.
By “being OK with death” you mean something like, accepting that efforts to stop AI might fail, and it really might kill us all? But without entirely giving up?
Yeah basically. I think “OK-ness” in the human psyche is a bit of a binary, which is uncorrelated with ones actions a lot of the time.
So you can imagine four quadrants of “Ok with dying” vs “Not Ok with dying” and, separately “Tries to avoid dying” vs “Doesn’t try to avoid dying”. Where most normies are in the “Ok with dying”+”Doesn’t try to avoid dying” (and quite a few are in the “Not Ok with dying”+”Doesn’t try to avoid dying” quadrant) while lots of rats are in the “Not Ok with dying”+”Tries to avoid dying” quadrant.
I think that, right now, most of the sane work being done is in the “Ok with dying”+”Tries to avoid dying” quadrant. I think Yudkowsky’s early efforts wanted to move people from “Doesn’t try...” to “Tries...” but did this by pulling on the “Ok...” to “Not Ok...” axis, and I think this had some pretty negative consequences.