I’m confused how much I should care whether an impact assessment is commissioned by some organization. The main thing I generally look for is whether the assessment / investigation is independent. The argument is that because AISC is paying for it, that will influence the assessors?
My guess is it matters a lot, even if people aspire towards independence. I would update if someone has a long track record of clearly neutral-seeming reports for financial compensation, but I think in the absence of such a track record, my prior would be that people are very rarely capable of making strong negative public statements about people who are paying them.
I do think that helps, but I don’t think it helps that much. People don’t pursue super naive CDT-ish decision theories.
In-practice this shakes out in a feeling of being indebted to whoever pays you and a pretty strong hesitation to do something that would upset them, even if they weren’t going to pay you more anyways. Also, few games are actually really only single-iteration. You will likely continue interacting in one way or another, and Arb will interact with other clients, making this have more of an iterated nature.
I agree. I also expect evaluators commissioned to do an evaluation to rarely dare to speak up against the organisation whose folks they chatted with and gave them money. I wished it was different, but got to be realistic here.
This depends on how much you trust the actors involved.
I know that me and Remmelt asked for an honest evaluation, and did not try to influence the result. But you don’t know this.
Me and Remmelt obviously believe in AISC, otherwise we would not keep running these programs. But since AISC has been chronically understaffed (like most non-profit initiatives) we have not had time to do a proper follow-up study. When we asked Arb to do this assessment, it was in large part to test our own believes. So far nothing surprising has came out of the investigation, which is reassuring. But if Arb found something bad, I would not want them to hide it.
Here’s some other evaluations of AISC (and other things) that where not commissioned by us. I think for both of them, they did not even talk to someone from AISC before posting, although for the second link, this was only due to miscommunication.
I’m confused how much I should care whether an impact assessment is commissioned by some organization. The main thing I generally look for is whether the assessment / investigation is independent. The argument is that because AISC is paying for it, that will influence the assessors?
My guess is it matters a lot, even if people aspire towards independence. I would update if someone has a long track record of clearly neutral-seeming reports for financial compensation, but I think in the absence of such a track record, my prior would be that people are very rarely capable of making strong negative public statements about people who are paying them.
This is a one of thing though. We’re not likely to continue to pay them, regardless of what they report.
I do think that helps, but I don’t think it helps that much. People don’t pursue super naive CDT-ish decision theories.
In-practice this shakes out in a feeling of being indebted to whoever pays you and a pretty strong hesitation to do something that would upset them, even if they weren’t going to pay you more anyways. Also, few games are actually really only single-iteration. You will likely continue interacting in one way or another, and Arb will interact with other clients, making this have more of an iterated nature.
This is an incisive description, and I agree.
I agree. I also expect evaluators commissioned to do an evaluation to rarely dare to speak up against the organisation whose folks they chatted with and gave them money. I wished it was different, but got to be realistic here.
This depends on how much you trust the actors involved.
I know that me and Remmelt asked for an honest evaluation, and did not try to influence the result. But you don’t know this.
Me and Remmelt obviously believe in AISC, otherwise we would not keep running these programs. But since AISC has been chronically understaffed (like most non-profit initiatives) we have not had time to do a proper follow-up study. When we asked Arb to do this assessment, it was in large part to test our own believes. So far nothing surprising has came out of the investigation, which is reassuring. But if Arb found something bad, I would not want them to hide it.
Here’s some other evaluations of AISC (and other things) that where not commissioned by us. I think for both of them, they did not even talk to someone from AISC before posting, although for the second link, this was only due to miscommunication.
Takeaways from a survey on AI alignment resources — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
Thoughts on AI Safety Camp — LessWrong