I lived in a Fraternity for most of my undergraduate schooling. The same problems you had we also had. noise, cleanliness, politics, amount of clothing worn in common areas, taking up space in common areas, showers, money. Except, fraternity level. It seemed every semester there would be at least a few altercations between roommates, it’s just natural.
However we being an ‘organization’ really helped us function as a group of a bunch different people living in one house under one banner. We specifically had internal structures for dealing with grievances between roommates and keeping the house running smoothly. I understand these are hard to scale to 8 people, but it might be interesting to know regardless.
*We had a standards board run by one person who would receive complaints anonymously or otherwise, who called on preset people, not involved in the grievance to analyise it and come up with the best way the problem could be solved. Roommate mediation, extra chores for aggressor, fined, etc. These were considered to be “just business” punishments, not hard feelings. (although people being people they take it however they will).
*We had house meeting every week, about upcoming events, changes to the house, and changes we would like to see to the rules of the house, everybody without a good excuse had to be there. It kept people up to date about what was going on and established clear do’s and dont’s.
*We had an advisor who would also come in and mediate / check that the house was going in a good direction.
*If a person was really not working out behaviorally their would be an anonymous vote for if that person stays or goes based on the grievances, then the people voting would also give them a set time to move out by also based on the grievances.
Conflict is inevitable with people living together, but having trusted people on top of a set structure really helped mitigate the problems that could have arose
I have never been apart of a ‘rationalist’ group, nor am I truly sure what a group like that does, but if there is a community of people that live together that think of rationality as a banner rather than a practice, having organizational living rules I think would really help.
If we were to blur the name Eliezer Yudkowsky and pretended we saw this a bunch of anonymous people talking on a forum like Reddit, what would your response be to somebody who posted the things Yudkowsky posted above. What pragmatic thing could you tell that person to possibly help them? Every word can be true but It seems overwhelmingly pessimistic in a way that is not helpful, mainly due to nothing in it being actionable.
The position of timelines being too short and the best alignment research being too weak / too slow, while having no avenues or ideas to make things better, with no institution to trust, to the point where we are doomed now, doesn’t lead to a lot of wanting to do anything, which is a guaranteed failure. What should I tell this person? “You seem to be pretty confident in your prediction, what do you suppose you should do to act in accordance with these believes? Wire head yourself and wait for the world to crumble around you? Maybe at least take a break for mental health reasons and let whatever will be will be. If the world is truly doomed you have nothing to worry about anymore”.
I can agree that timelines seem short and good quality alignment research seems rare. I think research like all things humans do follows sturgeon’s law. But the problem is aside from some research with is meant only for prestige building is you can’t tell which will turn out to be crap or not. Nor can you tell where the future will go or what the final outcome will be. We can make use of trends like this person was talking about for predicting the future but there’s always uncertainty. Maybe that’s all this post is which is a rough assessments of one’s personal long term outlook in the field, but it seems pre-mature to say the researchers mentioned in this article are doing things that probably won’t help at this point. With this much pessimism towards our future world we might as well take the low probability of their help working and shoot the moon with it, what have we got to lose in a doomed world?
But that’s the thing, the researchers working on alignment I’m sure will continue doing it even after reading this interaction. If they give up on it we are even more screwed. They might even feel a bit more resentful now knowing what this person thinks about their work, but I don’t think it changed anything.
Maybe I was lucky to get into the AI field within the last couple of years, where short timelines were the expected, rather than something to be feared. I didn’t have the hope of long timelines and now I don’t have to feel crushed by them disappearing (forgive me if I assume too much). We have the time we have to do the best we can, if things take longer, more power too us to get better odds of a good outcome.
Summary: While interesting, this conversation mainly updated me only to the views of the writers, not changing anything pragmatically about my view of research or timelines.
If you think I completely misread the article, and that EY is saying something different than what I interpreted, please let me know.