I’ve been psychologically blocked for many years about contributing to alignment work, and recently unblocked. Not sure how generalizable this is, but wanted to share what was blocking me:
I had two modes of thinking that I label as [normal civic responsibility] and [heroic responsibility].
Roughly speaking, civic responsibility is act in such a way that if everyone acted this way, the problem would be solved. Going out to vote, emailing your senator, personally committing to not pushing the button.
Heroic responsibility is just solve the problem, all by yourself if necessary. Move p(doom) appreciably by yourself, maximize marginal impact, start a new moonshot org.
What I’m coming to realize is that there is space for a sliding scale, especially regards to alignment work, between civic and heroic responsibility. Starting with civic responsibility and going up, Responsibility Level n is act in such a way that if 1/n fraction of humanity acted this way, the problem would be solved. n = 1 is civic responsibility, n = 8 billion is heroic responsibility. Hill-climbing on n seems to be the right way for my brain to approach personal responsibility towards the world.
This is a helpful way to reframe things, especially from the perspective of “I don’t know enough about [thing] to make meaningful progress on it by myself” and trying to not feel hopeless about it.
I imagine a lot of the intermediate range (between n = 1 and n = O()) is dominated by strategies relating to recruiting others. If you need, for instance, 51% of 340 million people to firmly support a development pause for it to happen (in the US), then you need 5.1%, or 17 million people to directly convince 10 people in the US to support it. This would be roughly n = 500. This can be upwards of a few orders of magnitude higher if you consider network effects, or if the people you recruit are more directly able to do an n = 1 billion thing.
It’s not obvious to me how I can hill climb on n in a more direct way. I would guess that you would need somewhere between and copies of me at my current skill level (which is not very high) to appreciably move p(doom) -- so n ranges from 800 to 80,000. If I spend the next few years upskilling as much as I can, maybe that moves to n = 8,000,000 (1,000 copies of me needed). But the question still remains whether I’d have done more just by trying to get somebody smarter or more politically connected than me to work on the problem, and I’d guess the answer is yes.
I do agree that a lot of low-hanging fruit comes from “lean on social capital to recruit people more than you’re normally comfortable with.” That being said, it does feel like almost always recruitment strategies actually scale off raw power level in some fair way (not sure I have the right vocab for this), e.g. I found that I have pretty high success x-risk-pilling my friends and colleagues and they have relatively low success pilling theirs afterwards, because they’ve thought about alignment for like a month. So the higher-order network effects are much smaller than I expected given the initial success.
Levels of Responsibility
I’ve been psychologically blocked for many years about contributing to alignment work, and recently unblocked. Not sure how generalizable this is, but wanted to share what was blocking me:
I had two modes of thinking that I label as [normal civic responsibility] and [heroic responsibility].
Roughly speaking, civic responsibility is act in such a way that if everyone acted this way, the problem would be solved. Going out to vote, emailing your senator, personally committing to not pushing the button.
Heroic responsibility is just solve the problem, all by yourself if necessary. Move p(doom) appreciably by yourself, maximize marginal impact, start a new moonshot org.
What I’m coming to realize is that there is space for a sliding scale, especially regards to alignment work, between civic and heroic responsibility. Starting with civic responsibility and going up, Responsibility Level n is act in such a way that if 1/n fraction of humanity acted this way, the problem would be solved. n = 1 is civic responsibility, n = 8 billion is heroic responsibility. Hill-climbing on n seems to be the right way for my brain to approach personal responsibility towards the world.
This is a helpful way to reframe things, especially from the perspective of “I don’t know enough about [thing] to make meaningful progress on it by myself” and trying to not feel hopeless about it.
I imagine a lot of the intermediate range (between n = 1 and n = O(
It’s not obvious to me how I can hill climb on n in a more direct way. I would guess that you would need somewhere between
I do agree that a lot of low-hanging fruit comes from “lean on social capital to recruit people more than you’re normally comfortable with.” That being said, it does feel like almost always recruitment strategies actually scale off raw power level in some fair way (not sure I have the right vocab for this), e.g. I found that I have pretty high success x-risk-pilling my friends and colleagues and they have relatively low success pilling theirs afterwards, because they’ve thought about alignment for like a month. So the higher-order network effects are much smaller than I expected given the initial success.