Add lots of sleep and down-time, and activities with a clear feedback loop to the physical world (e.g. washing dishes or welding metals or something).
AnnaSalamon
Karma: 29,036
For anyone just tuning in and wanting to follow what I mean by “dominating and submitting,” I have in mind the kinds of interactions that Keith Johnstone describes in the “status” chapter of “Impro” (text here; excerpt and previous overcoming bias discussion here.)
This is the book that indirectly caused us to use the word “status” so often around here, but I feel the term “status” is a euphemism that brings model-distortions, versus discussing “dominating and submitting.” FWIW, Johnstone in the original passage says it is a euphemism, writing: “I should really talk about dominance and submission, but I’d create a resistance. Students who will agree readily to raising or lowering their status may object if asked to ‘dominate’ or ‘submit’.” (Hattip: Divia.)
The Snafu Principle, whereby communication is only fully possible between equals, leading to Situation Normal All F***ed Up.
This seems true to me in one sense of “equals” and false in another. It seems true to me that dominating and submitting prohibit real communication. It does not seem true to me that structures of authority (“This is my coffee shop; and so if you want to work here you’ll have to sign a contract with me, and then I’ll be able to stop hiring you later if I don’t want to hire you later”) necessarily prohibit communication, though. I can imagine contexts where free agents voluntarily decide to enter into an authority relationship (e.g., because I freely choose to work at Bob’s coffee shop until such time as it ceases to aid my and/or Bob’s goals), without dominating or submitting, and thereby with the possibility of communication.
Relatedly, folks who are peers can easily enough end up dominating/submitting-to each other, or getting stuck reinforcing lies to each other about how good each others’ poetry is or whatever, instead of communicating.
Do you agree that this is the true bit of the “communication is only possible between equals” claim, or do you have something else in mind?
I’m a bit torn here, because the ideas in the post seem really important/useful to me (e.g., I use these phrases as a mental pointer sometimes), such that I’d want anyone trying to make sense of the human situation to have access to them (via this post or a number of other attempts at articulating much the same, e.g. “Elephant and the Brain”). And at the same time I think there’s some crucial misunderstanding in it that is dangerous and that I can’t articulate. Voting for it anyhow though.
Responding partly to Orthonormal and partly to Raemon:
Part of the trouble is that group dynamic problems are harder to understand, harder to iterate on, and take longer to appear and to be obvious. (And are then harder to iterate toward fixing.)
Re: individuals having manic or psychotic episodes, I agree with what Raemon says. About six months into a year into CFAR’s workshop-running experience, a participant had a manic episode a couple weeks after a workshop in a way that seemed plausibly triggered partly by the workshop. (Interestingly, if I’m not mixing people up, the same individual later told me that they’d also been somewhat destabilized by reading the sequences, earlier on.) We then learned a lot about warning signs of psychotic or manic episodes and took a bunch of steps to mostly-successfully reduce the odds of having the workshop trigger these. (In terms of causal mechanisms: It turns out that workshops of all sorts, and stuff that messes with one’s head of all sorts, seem to trigger manic or psychotic episodes occasionally. E.g. Landmark workshops; meditation retreats; philosophy courses; going away to college; many different types of recreational drugs; and different small self-help workshops run by a couple people I tried randomly asking about this from outside the rationality community. So my guess is that it isn’t the “taking ideas seriously” aspect of CFAR as such, although I dunno.)
Re: other kinds of “less sane”:
(1) IMO, there has been a build-up over time of mentally iffy psychological habits/techniques/outlook-bits in the Berkeley “formerly known as rationality” community, including iffy thingies that affect the rate at which other iffy things get created (e.g., by messing with the taste of those receiving/evaluating/passing on new “mess with your head” techniques; and by helping people be more generative of “mess with your head” methods via them having had a chance to see several already which makes it easier to build more). My guess is that CFAR workshops have accidentally been functioning as a “gateway drug” toward many things of iffy sanity-impact, basically by: (a) providing a healthy-looking context in which people get over their concerns about introspection/self-hacking because they look around and see other happy healthy-looking people; and (b) providing some entry-level practice with introspection, and with “dialoging with one’s tastes and implicit models and so on”, which makes it easier for people to mess with their heads in other, less-vetted ways later.
My guess is that the CFAR workshop has good effects on folks who come from a sane-isn or at least stable-is outside context, attend a workshop, and then return to that outside context. My guess is that its effects are iffier for people who are living in the bay area, do not have a day job/family/other anchor, and are on a search for “meaning.”
My guess is that those effects have been getting gradually worse over the last five or more years, as a background level of this sort of thing accumulates.
I ought probably to write about this in a top-level post, and may actually manage to do so. I’m also not at all confident of my parsing/ontology here, and would quite appreciate help with it.
(2) Separately, AI risk seems pretty hard for people, including ones unrelated to this community.
(3) Separately, “taking ideas seriously” indeed seems to pose risks. And I had conversations with e.g. Michael Vassar back in ~2008 where he pointed out that this poses risks; it wasn’t missing from the list. (Even apart from tail risks, some forms of “taking ideas seriously” seem maybe-stupid in cases where the “ideas” are not grounded also in one’s inner simulator, tastes, viscera — much sense is there that isn’t in ideology-mode alone). I don’t know whether CFAR workshops increase or decrease peoples’ tendency to take ideas seriously in the problematic sense, exactly. They have mostly tried to connect peoples’ ideas and peoples’ viscera in both directions.
“How to take ideas seriously without [the taking ideas seriously bit] causing them to go insane” as such actually still isn’t that high on my priorities list; I’d welcome arguments that it should be, though.
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I’d also welcome arguments that I’m just distinguishing 50 types of snow and that these should all be called the same thing from a distance. But for the moment for me the group-level gradual health/wholesomeness shifts and the individual-level stuff show up as pretty different.
There are some edge cases I am confused about, many of which are quite relevant to the “epistemic immune system vs Sequences/rationality” stuff discussed above:
Let us suppose a person has two faculties that are both pretty core parts of their “I”—for example, deepset “yuck/this freaks me out” reactions (“A”), and explicit reasoning (“B”). Now let us suppose that the deepset “yuck/this freaks me out” reactor (A) is being used to selectively turn off the person’s contact with explicit reasoning in cases where it predicts that B “reasoning” will be mistaken / ungrounded / not conducive to the goals of the organism. (Example: a person’s explicit models start saying really weird things about anthropics, and then they have a less-explicit sense that they just shouldn’t take arguments seriously in this case.)
What does it mean to try to “help” a person in such as case, where two core faculties are already at loggerheads, or where one core faculty is already masking things from another?
If a person tinkers in such a case toward disabling A’s ability to disable B’s access to the world… the exact same process, in its exact same aspect, seems “reality-revealing” (relative to faculty B) and “reality-masking” (relative to faculty A).
To try yet again:
The core distinction between tinkering that is “reality-revealing” and tinkering that is “reality-masking,” is which process is learning to predict/understand/manipulate which other process.
When a process that is part of your core “I” is learning to predict/manipulate an outside process (as with the child who is whittling, and is learning to predict/manipulate the wood and pocket knife), what is happening is reality-revealing.
When a process that is not part of your core “I” is learning to predict/manipulate/screen-off parts of your core “I”s access to data, what is happening is often reality-masking.
(Multiple such processes can be occurring simultaneously, as multiple processes learn to predict/manipulate various other processes all at once.)
The “learning” in a given reality-masking process can be all in a single person’s head (where a person learns to deceive themselves just by thinking self-deceptive thoughts), but it often occurs via learning to impact outside systems that then learn to impact the person themselves (like in the example of me as a beginning math tutor learning to manipulate my tutees into manipulating me into thinking I’d explained things clearly)).
The “reality-revealing” vs “reality-masking” distinction is in attempt to generalize the “reasoning” vs “rationalizing” distinction to processes that don’t all happen in a single head.
I like your example about your math tutoring, where you “had a fun time” and “[weren’t] too results driven” and reality-masking phenomena seemed not to occur.
It reminds me of Eliezer talking about how the first virtue of rationality is curiosity.
I wonder how general this is. I recently read the book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” where the author suggests that difficulty sticking to such principles as “don’t lie,” “don’t cheat,” “don’t steal,” comes from people being afraid that they otherwise won’t get a particular result, and recommends that people instead… well, “leave a line of retreat” wasn’t his suggested ritual, but I could imagine “just repeatedly leave a line of retreat, a lot” working for getting unattached.
Also, I just realized (halfway through typing this) that cousin_it and Said Achmiz say the same thing in another comment.
Thanks; you naming what was confusing was helpful to me. I tried to clarify here; let me know if it worked. The short version is that what I mean by a “puzzle” is indeed person-specific.
A separate clarification: on my view, reality-masking processes are one of several possible causes of disorientation and error; not the only one. (Sort of like how rationalization is one of several possible causes of people getting the wrong answers on math tests; not the only one.) In particular, I think singularity scenarios are sufficiently far from what folks normally expect that the sheer unfamiliarity of the situation can cause disorientation and errors (even without any reality-masking processes; though those can then make things worse).
The difficulties above were transitional problems, not the main effects.
Why do you say they were “transitional”? Do you have a notion of what exactly caused them?
A couple people asked for a clearer description of what a “reality-masking puzzle” is. I’ll try.
JamesPayor’s comment speaks well for me here:
There was the example of discovering how to cue your students into signalling they understand the content. I think this is about engaging with a reality-masking puzzle that might show up as “how can I avoid my students probing at my flaws while teaching” or “how can I have my students recommend me as a good tutor” or etc.
It’s a puzzle in the sense that it’s an aspect of reality you’re grappling with. It’s reality-masking in that the pressure was away from building true/accurate maps.
To say this more slowly:
Let’s take “tinkering” to mean “a process of fiddling with a [thing that can provide outputs] while having some sort of feedback-loop whereby the [outputs provided by the thing] impacts what fiddling is tried later, in such a way that it doesn’t seem crazy to say there is some ‘learning’ going on.”
Examples of tinkering:
A child playing with legos. (The “[thing that provides outputs]” here is the [legos + physics], which creates an output [an experience of how the legos look, whether they fall down, etc.] in reply to the child’s “what if I do this?” attempts. That output then affects the child’s future play-choices some, in such a way that it doesn’t seem crazy to say there is some “learning” happening.)
An person doodling absent-mindedly while talking on the phone, even if the doodle has little to no conscious attention;
A person walking. (Since the walking process (I think) contains at least a bit of [exploration / play / “what happens if I do this?”—not necessarily conscious], and contains some feedback from “this is what happens when you send those signals to your muscles” to future walking patterns)
A person explicitly reasoning about how to solve a math problem
A family member A mostly-unconsciously taking actions near another family member B [while A consciously or unconscoiusly notices something about how the B responds, and while A has some conscious or unconscious link between [how B responds] and [what actions A takes in future].
By a “puzzle”, I mean a context that gets a person to tinker. Puzzles can be person-specific. “How do I get along with Amy?” may be a puzzle for Bob and may not be a puzzle for Carol (because Bob responds to it by tinkering, and Carol responds by, say, ignoring it). A kong toy with peanut butter inside is a puzzle for some dogs (i.e., it gets these dogs to tinker), but wouldn’t be for most people. Etc.
And… now for the hard part. By a “reality-masking puzzle”, I mean a puzzle such that the kind of tinkering it elicits in a given person will tend to make that person’s “I” somehow stupider, or in less contact with the world.
The usual way this happens is that, instead of the tinkering-with-feedback process gradually solving an external problem (e.g., “how do I get the peaut butter out of the kong toy?”), the tinkering-with-feedback process is gradually learning to mask things from part of their own mind (e.g. “how do I not-notice that I feel X”).
This distinction is quite related to the distinction between reasoning and rationalization.
However, it differs from that distinction in that “rationalization” usually refers to processes happening within a single person’s mind. And in many examples of “reality-masking puzzles,” the [process that figures out how to mask a bit of reality from a person’s “I”] is spread across multiple heads, with several different tinkering processes feeding off each other and the combined result somehow being partially about blinding someone.
I am actually not all that satisfied by the “reality-revealing puzzles” vs “reality-masking puzzles” ontology. It was more useful to me than what I’d had before, and I wanted to talk about it, so I posted it. But… I understand what it means for the evidence to run forwards vs backwards, as in Eliezer’s Sequences post about rationalization. I want a similarly clear-and-understood generalization of the “reasoning vs rationalizing” distinction that applies also to processes to spread across multiple heads. I don’t have that yet. I would much appreciate help toward this. (Incremental progress helps too.)
Reality-Revealing and Reality-Masking Puzzles
No; that isn’t the trouble; I could imagine us getting the money together for such a thing, since one doesn’t need anything like a consensus to fund a position. The trouble is more that at this point the members of the bay area {formerly known as “rationalist”} “community” are divided into multiple political factions, or perhaps more-chaos-than-factions, which do not trust one another’s judgment (even about pretty basic things, like “yes this person’s actions are outside of reasonable behavioral norms). It is very hard to imagine an individual or a small committee that people would trust in the right way. Perhaps even more so after that individual or committee tried ruling against someone who really wanted to stay, and and that person attempted to create “fear, doubt, and uncertainty” or whatever about the institution that attempted to ostracize them.
I think something in this space is really important, and I’d be interested in investing significantly in any attempt that had a decent shot at helping. Though I don’t yet have a strong enough read myself on what the goal ought to be.
Hi Mark,
This maybe doesn’t make much difference for the rest of your comment, but just FWIW: the workshop you attended in Sept 2016 not part of the AIRCS series. It was a one-off experiment, funded by an FLI grant, called “CFAR for ML”, where we ran most of a standard CFAR workshop and then tacked on an additional day of AI alignment discussion at the end.
The AIRCS workshops have been running ~9 times/year since Feb 2018, have been evolving pretty rapidly, and in recent iterations involve a higher ratio of either AI risk content, or content about how cognitive biases etc. that seem to arise in discussion about AI risk in particular. They have somewhat smaller cohorts for more 1-on-1 conversation (~15 participants instead of 23). They are co-run with MIRI, which “CFAR for ML” was not. They have a slightly different team and a slightly different beast.
Which… doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have had most of the same perceptions if you’d come to a recent AIRCS! You might well have. From a distance perhaps all our workshops are pretty similar. And I can see calling “CFAR for ML” “AIRCS”, since it was in fact partially about AI risk and was aimed mostly at computer scientists, which is what “AIRCS” stands for. Still, we locally care a good bit of the distinctions between our programs, so I did want to clarify.
Some combination of: (a) lots of people still wanted it, and we’re not sure our previous “idea inoculation” concerns are actually valid, and there’s something to testing the idea of giving people what they want; and (perhaps more significantly) (b) we’re making more of an overall push this year toward making our purpose and curriculum and strategy and activities and so on clear and visible so that we can dialog with people about our plans, and we figured that putting the handbook online might help with that.
Hi Arthur,
Thanks for the descriptions — it is interesting for me to hear about your experiences, and I imagine a number of others found it interesting too.
A couple clarifications from my perspective:
First: AIRCS is co-run by both CFAR and MIRI, and is not entirely a MIRI recruiting program, although it is partly that! (You might know this part already, but it seems like useful context.)
We are hoping that different people go on from AIRCS to a number of different AI safety career paths. For example:
Some people head straight from AIRCS to MIRI.
Some people attend AIRCS workshops multiple times, spaced across months or small years, while they gradually get familiar with AI safety and related fields.
Some people realize after an AIRCS workshop that AI safety is not a good fit for them.
Some people, after attending one or perhaps many AIRCS workshops, go on to do AI safety research at an organization that isn’t MIRI. All of these are good and intended outcomes from our perspective! AI safety could use more good technical researchers, and AIRCS is a long-term investment toward improving the number of good computer scientists (and mathematicians and others) who have some background in the field. (Although it is also partly aimed to help with MIRI’s recruiting in particular.)
Separately, I did not mean to “give people a rule” to “not speak about AI safety to people who do not express interest.” I mean, neither I nor AIRCS as an organization have some sort of official request that people follow a “rule” of that sort. I do personally usually follow a rule of that sort, though (with exceptions). Also, when people ask me for advice about whether to try to “spread the word” about AI risk, I often share that I personally am a bit cautious about when and how I talk with people about AI risk; and I often share details about that.
I do try to have real conversations with people that reply to their curiosity and/or to their arguments/questions/etc., without worrying too much which directions such conversations will update them toward.
I try to do this about AI safety, as about other topics. And when I do this about AI safety (or other difficult topics), I try to help people have enough “space” that they can process things bit-by-bit if they want. I think it is often easier and healthier to take in a difficult topic at one’s own pace. But all of this is tricky, and I would not claim to know the one true answer to how everyone should talk about AI safety.
Also, I appreciate hearing about the bits you found distressing; thank you. Your comments make sense to me. I wonder if we’ll be able to find a better format in time. We keep getting bits of feedback and making small adjustments, but it is a slow process. Job applications are perhaps always a bit awkward, but iterating on “how do we make it less awkward” does seem to yield slow-but-of-some-value modifications over time.
I’ve worked closely with CFAR since it’s founding in 2012, for varying degrees of closely (ranging from ~25 hrs/week to ~60 hrs/week). My degree of involvement in CFAR’s high-level and mid-level strategic decisions has varied some, but at the moment is quite high, and is likely to continue to be quite high for at least the coming 12 months.
During work-type hours in which I’m not working for CFAR, my attention is mostly on MIRI on MIRI’s technical research. I do a good bit of work with MIRI (though I am not employed by MIRI—I just do a lot of work with them), much of which also qualifies as CFAR work (e.g., running the AIRCS workshops and assisting with the MIRI hiring process; or hanging out with MIRI researchers who feel “stuck” about some research/writing/etc. type thing and want a CFAR-esque person to help them un-stick). I also do a fair amount of work with MIRI that does not much overlap CFAR (e.g. I am a MIRI board member).
Oliver remained confused after talking with me in April because in April I was less certain how involved I was going to be in upcoming strategic decisions. However, it turns out the answer was “lots.” I have a lot of hopes and vision for CFAR over the coming years, and am excited about hashing it out with Tim and others at CFAR, and seeing what happens as we implement; and Tim and others seem excited about this as well.
My attention oscillates some across the years between MIRI and CFAR, based partly on the needs of each organization and partly on e.g. there being some actual upsides to me taking a backseat under Pete as he (and Duncan and others) made CFAR into more of a functioning institution in ways I would’ve risked reflexively meddling with. But there has been much change in the landscape CFAR is serving, and it’s time I think for there to be much change also in e.g. our curriculum, our concept of “rationality”, our relationship to community, and how we run our internal processes—and I am really excited to be able to be closely involved with CFAR this year, in alliance with Tim and others.
My guesses, in no particular order:
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Being a first employee is pretty different from being in a middle-stage organization. In particular, the opportunity to shape what will come has an appeal that can I think rightly bring in folks who you can’t always get later. (Folks present base rates for various reference classes below; I don’t know if anyone has one for “founding” vs “later” in small organizations?)
Relatedly, my initial guess back in ~2013 (a year in) was that many CFAR staff members would “level up” while they were here and then leave, partly because of that level-up (on my model, they’d acquire agency and then ask if being here as one more staff member was or wasn’t their maximum-goal-hitting thing). I was excited about what we were teaching and hoped it could be of long-term impact to those who worked here a year or two and left, as well as to longer-term people.
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I and we intentionally hired for diversity of outlook. We asked ourselves: “does this person bring some component of sanity, culture, or psychological understanding—but especially sanity—that is not otherwise represented here yet?” And this… did make early CFAR fertile, and also made it an unusually difficult place to work, I think. (If you consider the four founding members of me, Julia Galef, Val, and Critch, I think you’ll see what I mean.)
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I don’t think I was very easy to work with. I don’t think I knew how to make CFAR a very easy place to work either. I was trying to go with inside views even where I couldn’t articulate them and… really didn’t know how to create a good interface between that and a group of people. Pete and Duncan helped us do otherwise more recently I think, and Tim and Adam and Elizabeth and Jack and Dan building on it more since, with the result that CFAR is much more of a place now (less of a continuous “each person having an existential crisis all the time” than it was for some in the early days; more of a plod of mundane work in a positive sense). (The next challenge here, which we hope to accomplish this year, is to create a place that still has place-ness, and also has more visibility into strategy.)
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My current view is that being at workshops for too much of a year is actually really hard on a person, and maybe not-good. It mucks up a person’s codebase without enough chance for ordinary check-sums to sort things back to normal again afterward. Relatedly, my guess is also that while stints at CFAR do level a person up in certain ways (~roughly as I anticipated back in 2013), they unfortunately also risk harming a person in certain ways that are related to “it’s not good to live in workshops or workshop-like contexts for too many weeks/months in a row, even though a 4-day workshop is often helpful” (which I did not anticipate in 2013). (Basically: you want a bunch of normal day-to-day work on which to check whether your new changes actually work well, and to settle back into your deeper or more long-term self. The 2-3 week “MIRI Summer Fellows Program” (MSFP) has had… some great impacts in terms of research staff coming out of the program, but also most of our least stable people additionally came out of that. I believe that this year we’ll be experimentally replacing it with repeated shorter workshops; we’ll also be trying a different rest days pattern for staff, and sabbatical months, as well as seeking stability/robustness/continuity in more cultural and less formal ways.)
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No; this would somehow be near-impossible in our present context in the bay, IMO; although Berkeley’s REACH center and REACH panel are helpful here and solve part of this, IMO.
I think we are unlikely to hit herd immunity levels of infection in the US in the next 2 years. I want to see Robin and Zvi discuss whether they think that also or not, since this bears on the value of Robin’s proposal (and lots of other things).