I can think of five easily who spontaneously said something like this to me and who I recall specific names and details about. And like 20 more who I’m inclined to project it onto but there was some guesswork involved on my part (e.g., they told me about trouble having hobbies and about feeling kinda haunted by whether it’s okay to be “wasting” their time, and it seemed to me these factors were connected, but they didn’t connect them aloud for me; or I said I thought there was a pattern like this and they nodded and discussed experiences of theirs but in a way that left some construal to me and might’ve been primed. Also I did not name the 20, might be wrong in my notion of how many).
In terms of the five: two “yes better shot IMO,” three not. For the 20, maybe 1/4th “better short IMO”.
AnnaSalamon
If you get covid (which many of my friends seem to be doing lately), and your sole goal is to minimize risk of long-term symptoms, is it best to take paxlovid right away, or with a delay?
My current low-confidence guess is that it is best with a delay of ~2 days post symptoms. Would love critique/comments, since many here will face this sometime this year.
Basic reasoning: anecdotally, “covid rebound” seems extremely common among those who get paxlovid right away, probably also worse among those who get paxlovid right away. Paxlovid prevents viral replication but does not destroy the virus already in your body. With a delay, your own immune system learns to do this, else not as much.
Data and discussion: https://twitter.com/__philipn__/status/1550239344627027968
Maybe. But a person following up on threads in their leisure time, and letting the threads slowly congeal until they turn out to turn into a hobby, is usually letting their interests lead them initially without worrying too much about “whether it’s going anywhere,” whereas when people try to “found” something they’re often trying to make it big, trying to make it something that will be scalable and defensible. I like that this post is giving credit to the first process, which IMO has been historically pretty useful pretty often. I’d also point to the old tradition of “gentlemen scientists” back before the era of publicly funded science, who performed very well per capita; I would guess that high performance was at least partly because there was more low-hanging fruit back then, but my personal guess is that that wasn’t the only cause.
I appreciate this comment a lot. Thank you. I appreciate that it’s sharing an inside view, and your actual best guess, despite these things being the sort of thing that might get social push-back!
My own take is that people depleting their long-term resources and capacities is rarely optimal in the present context around AI safety.
My attempt to share my reasoning is pretty long, sorry; I tried to use bolding to make it skimmable.In terms of my inside-view disagreement, if I try to reason about people as mere means to an end (e.g. “labor”):
0. A world where I’d agree with you. If all that would/could impact AI safety was a particular engineering project (e.g., Redwood’s ML experiments, for concreteness), and if the time-frame of a person’s relevance to that effort was relatively short (e.g., a year or two, either because AI was in two years, or because there would be an army of new people in two years), I agree that people focusing obsessively for 60 hours/week would probably produce more than the same people capping their work at 35 hrs/week.
But (0) is not the world we’re in, at least right now. Specific differences between a world where I’d agree with you, and the world we seem to me to be in:
1. Having a steep discount rate on labor seems like a poor predictive bet to me. I don’t think we’re within two years of the singularity; I do think labor is increasing but not at a crazy rate; and a person who keeps their wits and wisdom about them, who pays attention and cares and thinks and learns, and especially someone who is relatively new to the field and/or relatively young (which is the case for most such engineers I think), can reasonably hope to be more productive in 2 years than they are now, which can roughly counterbalance the increase (or more than counterbalance the increase) on my best guess.
E.g., if they get hired and Redwood and then stay there, you’ll want veterans a couple years later who already know your processes and skills.
(In 2009, I told myself I needed only to work hard for ~5 years, maybe 10, because after that I’d be a negligible portion of the AI safety effort, so it was okay to cut corners. I still think I’m a non-negligible portion of the effort.)
1.1. Trying a thing to see if it works (e.g. 60 hrs/week of obsession, to see how that is) might still be sensible, but more like “try it and see if it works, especially if that risk and difficulty is appealing, since “appealingness” is often an indicator that a thing will turn out to make sense / to yield useful info / to be the kind of thing one can deeply/sincerely try rather than forcing oneself to mimic, etc.” not like “you are nothing and don’t matter much after two years, run yourself into the ground while trying to make a project go.” I suppose your question is about accepting a known probability of running yourself into the ground, but I’m having trouble booting that sim; to me the two mindsets are pretty different. I do think many people are too averse to risk and discomfort; but also that valuing oneself in the long-term is correct and important. Sorry if I’m dodging the question here.
2. There is no single project that is most of what matters in AI safety today, AFAICT. Also, such projects as exist are partly managerially bottlenecked. And so it isn’t “have zero impact” vs “be above Redwood’s/project such-and-such’s hiring line,” it is “be slightly above a given hiring line” (and contribute the difference between that spot and the person who would fill it next, or between that project having one just-above-margin person and having one fewer but more managerial slack) vs “be alive and alert and curious as you take an interest in the world from some other location”, which is more continuous-ish.
3. We are confused still, and the work is often subtle, such that we need people to notice subtle mismatches between what they’re doing and what makes sense to do, and subtle adjustments to specific projects, to which projects make sense at all, and subtle updates from how the work is going that can be propagated to some larger set of things, etc. We need people who care and don’t just want to signal that they kinda look like they care. We need people who become smarter and wiser and more oriented over time and who have deep scientific aesthetics, and other aesthetics. We need people who can go for what matters even when it means backtracking or losing face. We don’t mainly need people as something like fully needing-to-be-directed subjugated labor, who try for the appearances while lacking an internal compass. I expect more of this from folks who average 35 hrs/week than 60 hrs/week in most cases (not counting brief sprints, trying things for awhile to test and stretch one’s capacities, etc. — all of which seems healthy and part of fully inhabiting this world to me). Basically because of the things pointed out in Raemon’s post about slack, or Ben’s post about the Sabbath. Also because often 60 hrs/week for long periods of time means unconsciously writing off important personal goals (cf Critch’s post about addiction to work), and IMO writing off deep goals for the long-term makes it hard to sincerely care about things.
(4. I do agree there’s something useful about being able to work on other peoples’ projects, or on mundane non-glamorous projects, that many don’t have, and that naive readings of my #3 might tend to pull away from. I think the deeper readings of #3 don’t, but it could be discussed.)
If I instead try to share my actual views, despite these being kinda wooey and inarticulate and hard to justify, instead of trying to reason about people as means to an end:
A. I still agree that in a world where all that would/could impact AI safety was a particular engineering project (e.g., Redwood’s ML experiments, for concreteness), and if the time-frame of a person’s relevance to that effort was relatively short (e.g., a year or two, or even probably even five years), people focusing obsessively for 60 hours/week would be in many ways saner-feeling, more grounding, and more likely to produce the right kind of work in the right timeframe than the same people capping their work at 35 hrs/week. (Although even here, vacations, sabbaths, or otherwise carefully maintaining enough of the right kinds of slack and leisure that deep new things can bubble up seems really valuable to me; otherwise I expect a lot of people working hard at dumb subtasks).
A2. I’m talking about “saner-feeling” and “more grounding” here, because I’m imagining that if people are somehow capping their work at 35 hrs/week, this might be via dissociating from how things matter, and dissociation sucks and has bad side-effects on the quality of work and of team conversation and such IMO. This is really the main thing I’m optimizing for ~in general; I think sane grounded contexts where people can see what causes will have what effects and can acknowledge what matters will mostly cause a lot of the right actions, and that the main question is how to cause such contexts, whether that means 60 hrs/week or 35 hrs/week or what.
A3. In this alternate world, I expect people will kinda naturally reason about themselves and one another as means to an end (to the end of us all surviving), in a way that won’t be disoriented and won’t be made out of fear and belief-in-belief and weird dissociation.
B. In the world we seem to actually be in, I think all of this is pretty different:
B1. It’s hard to know what safety strategies will or won’t help how much.
B2. Lots of people have “belief in belief” about safety strategies working. Often this is partly politically motivated/manipulated, e.g. people wanting to work at an organization and to rise there via buying into that organization’s narrative; an organization wanting its staff and potential hires to buy its narrative so they’ll work hard and organize their work in particular ways and be loyal.
B3. There are large “unknown unknowns,” large gaps in the total set of strategies being done, maybe none of this makes sense, etc.
B4. AI timelines are probably more than two years, probably also more than five years, although it’s hard to know.
C. In a context like the hypothetical one in A, people talking about how some people are worth much more than another, about what tradeoffs will have what effects, etc. will for many cash out in mechanistic reasoning and so be basically sane-making and grounding. (Likewise, I suspect battlefield triage or mechanistic reasoning from a group of firefighters considering rescuing people from a burning building is pretty sane-making.)
In a context like the one in B (which is the one I think we’re in), people talking about themselves and other people as mere means to an end, and about how much more some people are worth than another such that those other people are a waste for the first people to talk to, and so on, will tend to increase social fear, decrease sharing of actual views, and increase weird status stuff and the feeling that one ought not question current social narratives, I think. It will tend to erode trust, erode freedom to be oneself or to share data about how one is actually thinking and feeling, and increase the extent to which people cut off their own and others’ perceptual faculties. The opposite of sane-ifying/grounding.
To gesture a bit at what I mean: a friend of mine, after attending a gathering of EA elites for the first time, complained that it was like: “So, which of the 30 organizations that we all agree has no more than a 0.1% chance of saving the world do you work for?”, followed by talking shop about the specifics within that plan, with almost no attention to the rest of the probability mass.
So I think we ought mostly not to reason about ourselves and other “labor” as though we’re in simple microecon world, given the world we’re in, and given that it encourages writing off a bunch of peoples’ perceptual abilities etc. Though I also think that you, Buck (or others) speaking your mind, including when you’re reasoning this way, is extremely helpful! We of course can’t stop wrong views by taking my best guess at which views are right and doing belief-in-belief about it; we have to converse freely and see what comes out.
(Thanks to Justis for saying some of this to me in the comments prior to me posting.)
I think this is a solid point, and that pointing out the asymmetry in evolutionary gradients is important; I would also expect different statistical distributions for men and women here. At the same time, my naive ev psych guess about how all this is likely to work out would also take into account that men and women share genes, and that creating gender-specific adaptations is actually tricky. As evidence: men have nipples, and those nipples sometimes produce drops of milk.
Once, awhile ago and outside this community, a female friend swore me to secrecy and then shared a story and hypothesis similar to the OPs (ETA: it was also a story of sexual touching, not of rape; I suspect rape is usually more traumatic). I’ve also heard stories of being pretty messed up by sexual abuse from both men and women, including at least two different men messed up by having, as teenagers, had sex with older women (in one case, one of his teachers) without violence/force, but with manipulation. My current guess is that adaptations designed for one sex typically appear with great variability in the other sex (e.g. male nipples’ milk production), and so we should expect some variability in male reactions here. Also everyone varies.
ETA: I’d like to quarrel with the use of the word “infohazardous” in the OP’s title. My best guess is that people would be better off having all the stories, including stories such as the OPs that is is currently somewhat taboo to share; my best guess is that there is a real risk of harm the OP is gesturing at, but this is significantly via the selective non-sharing of info, rather than being primarily via the sharing of info.
A bunch of people have told me they got worse at having serious/effortful intellectual hobbies, and at “hanging out”, after getting worried about AI. I did, for many long years. Doesn’t mean it’s not an “excuse”; I agree it would be good to try to get detailed pictures of the causal structure if we can.
In fairness, a lot of these things (clothes, hairstyles, how “hard core” we can think we are based on working hours and such) have effects on our future self-image, and on any future actions that’re mediated by our future self-image. Maybe they’re protecting their psyches from getting eaten by corporate memes, by refusing to cut their hair and go work there.
I suspect we need to somehow have things less based in self-image if we are to do things that’re rooted in fresh perceptions etc. in the way e.g. science needs, but it’s a terrifying transition.
I may have been primed to interpret this post in those terms too much, because I perceived it to be a reaction to Eliezer’s recent doomy-sounding blog posts (and people worrying about AI more than usual recently because of that, plus ML news, plus various complicated social dynamics), trying to prevent the community from ‘going too far’ in certain directions. … But it sounds like I may be imposing context on the post that isn’t the way you were thinking about it while writing it.
Oh, yeah, maybe. I was not consciously responding to that. I was consciously responding to a thing that’s been bothering me quite a bit about EA for ~5 or more years, which is that there’s not enough serious hobbies around here IMO, and also people often report losing the ability to enjoy hanging out with friends, especially friends who aren’t in these circles, and just enjoying one anothers’ company while doing nothing, e.g. at the beach with some beers on a Saturday. (Lots of people tell me they try allocating days to this, it isn’t about the time, it’s about an acquired inability to enter certain modes.)
Thanks for clarifying this though, that makes sense.
I have some other almost-written blog posts that’re also about trying to restore access to “hanging out with friends enjoying people” mode and “serious hobbies” mode, that I hope to maybe post in the next couple weeks.
Back in ~2008, I sat around with some others trying to figure out: if we’re successful in getting a lot of people involved in AI safety—what can we hope to see at different times? And now it’s 2022. In terms of “there’ll be a lot of dollars people are up for spending on safety”, we’re basically “hitting my highest 2008 hopes”. In terms of “there’ll be a lot of people who care”, we’re… less good than I was hoping for, but certainly better than I was expecting. “Hitting my 2008 ‘pretty good’ level.” In terms of “and those people who care will be broad and varied and trying their hands at making movies and doing varied kinds of science and engineering research and learning all about the world while keeping their eyes open for clues about the AI risk conundrum, and being ready to act when a hopeful possibility comes up” we’re doing less well compared to my 2008 hopes. I want to know why and how to unblock it.
I make this point not to argue against finding love or starting a family, but to argue against a mindset that treats AGI and daily life as more or less two different magisteria….
It still doesn’t feel to me like it’s fully speaking as though the two worlds as one world
The situation is tricky, IMO. There is, of course, at the end of the day only one world. If we want to have kids who can grow up to adulthood, and who can have progeny of their own, this will require that there be a piece of universe hospitable to human life where they can do that growing up.
At the same time:
a) IMO, there is a fair amount of “belief in belief” about AI safety and adjacent things. In particular, I think many people believe they ought to believe that various “safety” efforts help, without really anticipating-as-if this sort of thing can help.
(The argument for “be worried about the future” is IMO simpler, more obvious, and more likely to make it to the animal, that particular beliefs that particular strategies have much shot. I’m not sure how much this is or isn’t about AI; many of my Uber drivers seem weirdly worried about the future.)
a2) Also, IMO, a fair number of peoples’ beliefs (or “belief in beliefs”) about AI safety are partly downstream of others’ political goals, e.g. of others’ social incentives that those people believe in particular narratives about AI safety and about how working at place X can help with AI safety. This can accent the “belief in belief” thing.
b) Also, even where people have honest/deep/authentic verbal-level beliefs about a thing, it often doesn’t percolate all the way down into the animal. For example, a friend reports having interviewed a number of people about some sex details, and coming out believing that some people do and some people don’t have a visceral animal-level understanding that birth control prevents pregnancy, and reports furthermore that such animal-level beliefs often backpropagate to peoples’ desires or lack of desires for different kinds of sex. I believe my friend here, although this falls under “hard to justify personal beliefs.”
c) As I mentioned in the OP, I am worried that when a person “gives up on” their romantic and/or reproductive goals (or other goals that are as deeply felt and that close to the center of a person, noting that the details here vary by individual AFAICT), this can mess up their access to caring and consciousness in general (in Divia’s words, can risk “some super central sign error deep in their psychology”).
a-c, in combination, leave me nervous/skeptical about people saying that their plan is to pursue romance/children “after the Singularity,” especially if they’re already nearing the end of their biological window. And especially if it’s prompted by that being a standard social script in some local circle. I am worried that people may say this, intend it with some portion of themselves, but have their animal hear “I’m going to abandon these goals and live in belief-in-beliefs.”
I have a personal thing up for me about this one. Back in ~2016, I really wanted to try to have a kid, but thought that short timelines plus my own ability to contribute to AI safety efforts meant I probably shouldn’t. I dialoged with my system 1 using all the tools in the book. I consulted all the people near me who seemed like they might have insight into the relevant psychology. My system 1 / animal-level orientation, after dialog, seemed like it favored waiting, hoping for a kid on the other side of the singularity. I mostly passed other peoples’ sanity checks, both at the time and a few years later when I was like “hey, we were worried about this messing with my psyche, but it seems like it basically worked, right? what is your perception?” And even so, IMO, I landed in a weird no man’s land of a sort of bleached out depression and difficulty caring about anything after awhile, that was kinda downstream of this but very hard for me to directly perceive, but made it harder to really mean anything and easier to follow the motions of looking like I was trying.
The take-away I’m recommending from this is something like: “be careful about planning on paths toward your deepest, animal-level goals that your animal doesn’t buy. And note that it’s can be hard to robustly know what your animal is or isn’t buying. ” Also, while there’s only one magesterium, if people are animal-level and speech-level reasoning as though there’s several, that’s a real and confusing-to-me piece of context to how we’re living here.
A friend emailed me a comment I found helpful, which I am copying here with their permission:
“To me [your post] sounded a bit like a lot of people are experiencing symptoms similar to ADHD: both becoming hyperfocused on a specific thing and having a lot of habits falling apart. Makes sense conceptually if things labeled as emergencies damage our attention systems. I think it might have to do with a more general state of stress/future-shock where people have to go into exception-handling mode more often. As exceptions become normalized the systems of normal information processing fall apart and people become unable to orient. Anyway, a lot of this is probably really familiar stuff to you, but the ADHD-framing seems new to me, and it’s plausibly helpful to treat it with some similar interventions (eg things like exercise and robust systems/habits)”
But it still feels to me like it’s a post trying to push the pendulum in a particular direction, rather than trying to fully and openly embody the optimal-by-your-lights Balancing Point.
AFAICT, I am trying to fully and openly embody the way of reasoning that actually makes sense to me in this domain, which… isn’t really a “balancing point.” It’s more like the anarchist saying “the means are the ends.” Or it’s more like Szilard’s “ten commandments,” (which I highly recommend reading for anyone who hasn’t; they’re short). Or more like the quote from the novel The Dispossessed: “To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul. “
I don’t have the right concepts or articulation here. This is an example of the “hard to justify personal opinions” I warned about in my “epistemic status.” But IMO, thinking about tradeoffs and balancing points can be good when your map is good enough; at other times, it’s more like I want to try to hone in on priors, on deep patternness, on where reasoning is before it’s reasoning. This is where the power of leisure comes from, where the possibility of hobbies that end up giving you glimpses of new bits of the universe come from. And it’s a thing I’m trying to show here. Not a particular balance-point between depleting your long-term resources and “being nice to yourself” by eating chocolates and cartoons. (Neither of those help with getting to the tao, usually, AFAICT.)
We can be empirical about trying to see which actions, which mindsets, add to our and others’ long-term robust abilities.
In short-term crises for which you have decent-quality maps, balance-points and trading things off with local consequentialist reasoning makes sense to me. But not the rest of everywhere.
I agree many people underestimate their own capacities, and too seldom try hard or scary things. I think this is often many of the same people who burn themselves out.
Sorry this reply, and my other one, are somewhat incoherent. I’m having trouble mapping both where you’re coming from, and why/where I disagree.
I want to have a dialog about what’s true, at the level of piece-by-piece reasoning and piece-by-piece causes. I appreciate that you Rob are trying to do this; “pedantry” as you put it is great, and seems to me to be a huge chunk of why LW is a better place to sort some things out than is most of the internet.
I’m a bit confused that you call it “pedantry”, and that you talk of my post as trying to push the pendulum in a particular way, and “people trying to counter burnout,” and whether this style of post “works” for others. The guess I’m forming, as I read your (Rob’s) comment and to a lesser extent the other comments, is that a bunch of people took my post as a general rallying cry against burnout, and felt it necessary to upvote my post, or to endorse my post, because they personally wish to take a stand against burnout. Does something like that seem right/wrong to anyone? (I want to know.)
I… don’t want that, although I may have done things in my post to encourage it anyhow, without consciously paying attention. But if we have rallying cries, we won’t have the kind of shared unfiltered reasoning that someone wanting truth can actually update on.
I’m in general pretty interested in strategies anyone has for having honest, gritty, mechanism-by-mechanism discussion near a Sacred Value. “Don’t burn people out” is arguably a Sacred Value, such that it’ll be hard to have open conversation near it in which all the pedantry is shared in all the directions. I’d love thoughts on how to do it anyhow.
Yes! I am really interested in this sort of dynamic; for me things in this vicinity were a big deal I think. I have a couple half-written blog posts that relate to this that I may manage to post over the next week or two; I’d also be really curious for any detail about how this seemed to be working psychologically in you or others (what gears, etc.).
I have been using the term “narrative addiction” to describe the thing that in hindsight I think was going on with me here—I was running a whole lot of my actions off of a backchain from a particular story about how my actions mattered, in a way that weakened my access to full-on leisure, non-backchained friendship, and various other good ways to see and do stuff.
One of the tricky bits here IMO is that it’s hard to do non-backchained stuff on purpose, by backchaining. Some other trick is needed to get out of a given trying-to-link-everything-to-a-particular-narrative box.
Critch has two older blog posts I quite like on related subjects:
I agree that many of those who decide to drop everything to work on AI expect AI sooner than that. (Though far from all.)
It seems to me though that even if AI is in fact coming fairly soon, e.g. in 5 years, this is probably still not-helpful for reducing AI risk in most cases, compared to continuing to have hobbies and to not eat one’s long-term deep interests and spiritual health and ability to make new sense of things.Am I missing what you’re saying?
One substantive issue I didn’t manage to work into the OP, but am interested in, is a set of questions about memetics and whether memetics is one of the causes of how urgent so many people seem to find so many causes.
A section I cut from the OP, basically because it’s lower-epistemic-quality and I’m not sure how relevant it is or isn’t to the dynamics I kept in the OP, but that I’d like to throw into the comments section for discussion:
--Memetics sometimes leads to the amplification of false “emergencies”
Once upon a time, my former housemate Steve Rayhawk answered the door, found a Jehovah’s witness there to proselytize, and attempted to explain to the Jehovah’s witness about memetics. (“Okay, so, you know how internet chain letters often promise all kinds of goods? Well, suppose you find yourself going door-to-door with a message….”)
I’d like to make a similar point.
Basically: it seems to me that when I venture into less-filtered portions of Twitter, or ask my Lyft drivers what they think is up in the world, or otherwise encounter things from some portions of memes-at-large… I encounter a rather high proportion of “there is currently an Emergency” overtones (about all sorts of things, mostly not AI). I suspect these messages get passed on partly because the structure of “Emergency! Fighting this thing now is worth giving up some of your leisure time today, taxing your friends a bit if they’re annoyed by your passing it on, etc.” gets messages replicated some in our current context. I suspect they cause a fair amount of dead weight loss in aggregate, with a fair amount of people choosing to try to respond to “emergencies” that are not really emergencies, with actions that don’t make much sense, instead of boosting their and others’ long-term capacities to understand and to act well from deep within.
An added point here is that people are often worse at decisions when rushed, which means that bad arguments can sometimes get forwarded if they keep their passers-on from taking full stock of them. (At least, I’m told this is a classic trick of con artists, and that the heuristics and biases literature found people are extra subject to most biases when rushed.) So it may be useful to ask whether the fact of a particular claim-to-urgency reaching you is based in significant part on people passing on the message without full digestion under the influence of fear/urgency, or whether it is mostly reaching you via the slow conscious actions of people at their best.
Memetic arguments do not mean that any particular claim about a thing being an emergency is false. If you’re trying to figure out what’s true, there’s no substitute for hugging the query, remembering that argument screens off authority, and plunging into object-level questions about what the world is like. Direct engagement with the object-level questions is also often far more interesting/productive.
But IMO, memetic arguments probably do mean you should be a bit on guard when evaluating arguments about emergencies, should be more hesitant to take a person’s or group’s word for what the “emergency” is (especially where the message claims that you should burn yourself out, or deplete your long-term resources, in such a way as to boost that message or its wielders), and should more insist on having an inside-view that makes sense. I.e., it seems to me that one should approach messages of the form “X is an emergency, requiring specific action Y from you” a bit more like the way most of us already approach messages of the form “you should give me money.
Also, it does not hurt to remember that “X is in a bad way” is higher-prior than “X is in a bad way, and you should burn out some of your long-term resources taking action A that allegedly helps with X.”
A different main heuristic I’d like to recommend here, is trying to boot all the way to slow, reflective consciousness as a way to check the substance of any claim that seems to be trying to get you into an urgent state of mind, or a state of mind from which it is less natural to allow things to evaluate slowly. I really like and agree with Raemon’s post about slack as a context in which you can actually notice what your mind should/shouldn’t be on. I really hope we all get this at least several times a year, if not all the time. (One could also try to use slow consciousness to “spot check” claimed urgencies after the fact, even if acting more-rapidly temporarily.)
I wrote:
>… Also, I am excited about people trying to follow paths to all of their long-term goals/flourishing, including their romantic and reproductive goals, and I am actively not excited about people deciding to shelve that because they think AI risk demands it.
Justis (amid a bunch of useful copy-editing comments) said he does not know what “actively not excited” is supposed to mean, and suggested that maybe I meant “worried.” I do not mean “worried”, and do mean “actively not excited”: when people do this, it makes me less excited by and hopeful about the AI risk movement; it makes me think we’re eating our seedcorn and have less here to be excited about.
There’s a lot I want to try to tell LessWrong about. A lot of models, perceptions, thoughts, patterns of thinking. It’s been growing and growing for me over the last several years.
A lot of the barrier to me posting it has been that I am (mostly unendorsedly) averse to publishing drafts that’re worse than my existing blog posts, or that may not make sense to people, or that talk about some things without having yet talked about other things that I care more about, or etc. This aversion seems basically mistaken to me because “trial and error, with lower standards for writing things at all” is probably the fastest way I can figure out how to make sense about any given thing, really. So I’ll be trying to lower my standards for what to publish (we’ll see how successful I am or am not about that), and I’ll be leaving this note as a placeholder to try to feel a bit less awkward about that. Also, unless explicitly noted otherwise, none of my posts speak for CFAR or its staff or anyone else other than me.
Justis and Ruby made a bunch of good substantive comments on my draft, and also Justis made a bunch of very helpful typo-fixes/copy-editing comments on my draft.
I fixed the copy-editing ones but mostly did not respond to the substantive ones, though I liked them; I am hoping some of that discussion makes its way here, where it can happen in public.
I like this observation. As a random note, I’ve sometimes heard people justifying “leave poor working conditions in place for others, rather than spending managerial time improving them” based on how AI risk is an emergency, though whether this checks out on a local consequentialist level is not actually analyzed by the model above, since it partly involves tradeoffs between people and I didn’t try to get into that.
I sorta also think that “people acting on a promise of community and support that they later [find] [isn’t] there” is sometimes done semi-deliberately by the individuals in question, who are trying to get as much work out of their system one’s as possible, by hoping a thing works out without really desiring accurate answers. Or by others who value getting particular work done (via those individuals working hard) and think things are urgent and so are reasoning short-term and locally consequentialist-ly. Again partly because people are reasoning near an “emergency.” But this claim seems harder to check/verify. I hope people put more time into “really generating community” rather than “causing newcomers to have an expectation of community,” though.