Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 2,288
What you say makes sense. I think most of the people “doing whatever it is that people do” are making a mistake.
The connection to “masking” is very interesting to me. I don’t know much about autism so I don’t have much background about this. I think that almost everyone experiences this pressure towards acting normal, but it makes sense that it especially stands out as a unique phenomenon (“masking”) when the person doing it is very not-normal. Similarly, it’s interesting that you identify “independence” as a very culturally-pushed value. I can totally see what you mean, but I never thought about it very much, which on reflection is obviously just because I don’t have a hard time being “the culturally normal amount of independent”, so it never became a problem for me. I can see that the effect of the shared culture in these cases is totally qualitatively different depending on where a person is relative to it.
One of the few large psychological interventions I ever consciously did on myself was in about 2014 when I went to one of the early CFAR weekend workshops in some little rented house around Santa Cruz. At the end of the workshop there was a kind of party, and one of the activities at the party was to write down some thing you were going to do differently going forward.
I thought about it and I figured that I should basically stop trying to be normal (which is something that before I thought was actively virtuous, for reasons that are now fuzzy to me, and would consciously try to do—not that I successfully was super normal, but I was aiming in that direction.) It seemed like the ROI on being normal was just crappy in general and I had had enough of it. So that’s what I did.
It’s interesting to me that some people would have trouble with the “how to live more authentically instead” part. My moment to moment life feels like, there is a “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue that is automatically in my head, and I am just grabbing some things out of it and doing them. So to me, the main thing seems to be eliminating any really dumb biases making me do things I don’t value at all, like being normal, and then “living more authentically” is what’s left.
But that’s just my way—it would make sense to me if other people behaved more strategically more often, in which case I guess they might need to do a lot more introspection about their positive values to make that work.
I want to say something, but I’m not really sure how to phrase it very precisely, but I will just say the gist of it in some rambly way. Note: I am very much on the periphery of the phenomenon I am trying to describe, so I might not be right about it.
Most EAs come from a kind of western elite culture that right now assigns a lot of prestige to, like, being seen to be doing Important Work with lots of Power and Responsibility and Great Meaning, both professionally and socially.
“I am devoting my life to solving the most important problems in the world and alleviating as much suffering as possible” fits right into the script. That’s exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to be thinking. If you frame your life like that, you will fit in and everyone will understand and respect what is your basic deal.
“I am going to have a pleasant balance of all my desires, not working all that hard, spending some time on EA stuff, and the rest of the time enjoy life, hang out, read some books, and go climbing” does not fit into the script. That’s not something that anyone ever told you to do, and if you tell people you are going to do that, they will be surprised at what you said. You will stand out in a weird way.
Example anecdote: A few years ago my wife and I had a kid while I was employed full-time at a big software company that pays well. I had multiple discussions roughly like this with my coworkers:
Me: My kid’s going to be born this fall, so I’ll be taking paternity leave, and it’s quite likely I will quit after, so I want to figure out what to do with this thing that I am responsible for.
Them: What do you mean, you will quit after?
Me: I mean I am going to have a baby, and like you, they paid me lots of money, so my guess is that I will just hang out being a parent with my wife and we can live off savings for a while.
Them: Well, you don’t have to do that! You can just keep working.
Me: But doesn’t it sound like if you were ever going to not work, the precise best time would be right when you have your first kid? Like, that would be literally the most common sense time in your life to choose not to work, and pay attention to learning about being a parent instead? I can just work again later.
Them: [puzzled] Well, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t think you will quit.
And then they were legitimately surprised when I quit after paternity leave, because it’s unusual for someone to do that (at least not men) regardless of whether they have saved a bunch of money due to being a programmer. The normal thing to do is, let your work define your role in life and gives you all your social capital, so it’s basically your number 1 priority, and everything else is a sideshow.
So it makes total sense to me that EAs who came from this culture decide that EA should define their role in life and give them all their social capital and be their number 1 priority, and it’s not about a failure of introspection, or about a conscious assessment of their terminal values that turned out wrong. It’s just the thing people do.
My prediction would be that among EAs who don’t come from a culture with this kind of social pressure, burnout isn’t really an issue.
I notice that none of your quotes from him discuss risk of addiction. I think that’s the most powerful argument on your side. If it were just a matter of trying e.g. Adderall or LSD once, that’s one thing, but as you said, that’s not always how it goes. Looking from the outside, it seems to me like nowadays many teenagers specifically become dependent on stimulants in a way that it would be better to avoid.
He isn’t wrong about alcohol and coffee, but assuming that you are a kind of “have a coffee in the morning, once in a while drink a beer” person, then to the extent that’s OK, it’s OK because you have incorporated those habits into your life in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t cause obvious problems. I would be nervous about introducing them to my kid, because you don’t know that’s how it’s going to come out ahead of time. The same goes for other psychoactive drugs.
I have a toddler, a couple thoughts:
If I were to die right now, I would at least have had a chance to live something like a fulfilling life—but the joy of childhood seems inextricable from a sense of hope for the future.
I don’t agree with this at all. I remember being a happy child and the joy was all about things that were happening in the moment, like reading books and playing games. I didn’t think at all about the future.
Even if my children’s short lives are happy, wouldn’t their happiness be fundamentally false and devoid of meaning?
I think having a happy childhood is just good and nothing about maybe dying later makes it bad.
But now, both as I’m nearing the family-forming stage in my life, and as the AI timeline seems to be coming into sharper focus, I’m finding it emotionally distressing to contemplate having children.
I’m not going to claim that I know what’s in your mind, since I don’t know anything about you. But from the outside, this looks exactly like the same emotional dynamic that seems to be causing a lot of people to say that they don’t want to have kids because of climate change. I agree with you that AI risk is scarier than climate change. But is it more of a reason to not have kids? It seems like this “not having kids” conclusion is a kind of emotional response people have to living in a world that seems scary and out of control, but I don’t think that it makes sense in either case in terms of the interest of the potential kids.
Finally, if you are just hanging out in community spaces online, the emotional sense of “everyone freaking out” is mostly just a feedback loop where everyone starts feeling how everyone else seems to be feeling, not about justified belief updates. Believe what you think is true about AI risk, but if you are just plugging your emotions into that feedback loop uncritically, I think that’s a recipe for both unnecessary suffering and bad decisions. I recommend stepping back if you notice the emotional component influencing you a lot.
That’s fair, I guess that’s more like hundreds of hours and I was thinking of more typical students when I suggested thousands.
I’m actually quite nonplussed by the disagree votes because I thought, if anything, my comment was too obvious to bother saying!
I got into MIT since I was a kid from a small rural town with really good grades, really good test scores, and was on a bunch of sports teams. Because I was from a small rural town and was pretty smart, none of this required special effort other than being on sports teams (note: being on the teams required no special skill as everyone who tried out made the team given small class size).
You say that, but getting really good grades in high school sounds like thousands of hours of grunt work, with very marginal benefit outside college admissions. Maybe it’s what you would have done anyway, but I don’t think it’s what most teenagers would prefer to be doing.
I like classic style. I think the thing that classic style reflects is that most people are capable of looking at object-level reality and saying what they see. If I read an essay describing stuff like things that happened, and when they happened, and things people said and did, and how they said and did them, then often I am comfortable more or less taking the author at their word about those things. (It’s unusual for people to flatly lie about them.)
However, most people don’t seem very good at figuring out how likely their syntheses of things are, or what things they believe they might be wrong about, or how many important things they don’t know, and so on. So when people write all that stuff in an essay, unless I personally trust their judgment enough that I want to just import their beliefs, I don’t really do much with it. I end up just shrugging and reading the object-level stuff they wrote, and then doing my own synthesis and judgment. So the self-aware style really did end up being a lot of filler, and it crowds out the more valuable information.
(If I do personally trust their judgment enough that I want to just import their beliefs, then I like the self-aware style. And I am not claiming that literally all self-aware content is totally useless. But I think the heuristic is good.)
If that resembles you, I don’t know if it’s a problem for you. Maybe not, if you like it. I was just expressing that when I see someone appearing to do that, like the FTX people, I don’t take their suggestion that the way they are going about it is really good and important very seriously.
I have really different priors than it seems like a lot of EAs and rationalists do about this stuff, so it’s hard to have useful arguments. But here are some related things I believe, based mostly on my experience and common sense rather than actual evidence. (“You” here is referring to the average LW reader, not you specifically.)
Most important abilities for doing most useful work (like running a hedge fund) are mostly not fixed at e.g. age 25, and can be greatly improved upon. FTX didn’t fail because SBF had a lack of “working memory.” It seems to have failed because he sucked at a bunch of stuff that you could easily get better at over time. (Reportedly he was a bad manager and didn’t communicate well, he clearly was bad at making decisions under pressure, he clearly behaved overly impulsively, etc.)
Trying to operate on 5 hours of sleep with constant stimulants is idiotic. You should have an incredibly high prior that this doesn’t work well, and trying it out and it feeling OK for a little while shouldn’t convince you otherwise. It blows my mind that any smart person would do this. The potential downside is so much worse than “an extra 3 hours per day” is good.
Common problems with how your mind works like “can’t pay attention, can’t motivate myself, irrationally anxious” aren’t always things where you need to find silver bullet, quick fixes, or else live with them forever. They are typically amenable to gradual directional improvement.
If you are e.g. 25 years old and you have serious problems like that, now is a dumb time to try to launch yourself as hard as possible into an ambitious, self-sacrificing career where you take a lot of personal responsibility. Get your own house in order.
If you want to do a bunch of self-sacrificing, speculative burnout stuff anyway, I don’t believe for a minute that it’s because you are making a principled, altruistic, +EV decision due to short AI timelines, or something. That’s totally inhuman. I think it’s probably basically because you have a kind of outsized ego and you can’t emotionally handle the idea that you might not be the center of the world.
P.S. I realize you were trying to make a more general point, but I have to point out that all this SBF psychoanalysis is based on extremely scanty evidence, and having a conversation framed as if it is likely basically true seems kind of foolish.
From the HN comments:
If my test suite never ever goes red, then I don’t feel as confident in my code as when I have a small number of red tests.
That seems like an example of this that I have definitely experienced, where A is “my code is correct”, B is “my code is not correct”, and the failure case is “my tests appear to be exercising the code but actually aren’t.”
When apparently positive evidence can be negative evidence
I don’t really think that cost is an important bottleneck anymore. I and many others have a Rift collecting dust because I don’t really care to use it regularly. Many people have spent more money on cameras, lighting, microphones, and other tinkering for Zoom than it would cost them to buy a Quest.
Any technology is more useful if everyone owns it, but to get there, it has to be useful at reasonable levels of adoption (e.g. a quarter of your friends own it), or it’s not going to happen.
To me, the plausible route towards getting lots of people into VR for meetings is to have those people incidentally using a headset for all kinds of everyday computing stuff—watching movies, playing games, doing office work—and then, they are already wearing it and using it, and it’s easy to have meetings with everyone else who is also already wearing it and using it. That’s clearly achievable but also clearly not ready yet.
I don’t think it’s going to be transformative until you are happy to wear a headset for hours on end. In and of themselves, VR meetings are better than Zoom meetings, but having a headset on sucks compared to sitting at your computer with nothing on your face.
I used to think it was a good idea to experiment with basically every psychoactive drug, but nowadays I am more skeptical of anyone’s understanding of the effects of basically any chemical intervention on the human body, and I adopt more of a “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” principle towards all of it. It’s a lot easier to make my body or mind work worse than to make it work better.
(Of course, if you were already “pretty sure” you were trans, then that’s a different story.)
It may be entirely a myth, or may have been true only long ago, or may be applicable to specific sub-industries. It doesn’t have anything to do with my experience of interviewing applicants for random Silicon Valley startups over the last decade.
There is a grain of truth to it, which is that some people who can muddle through accomplishing things given unlimited tries, unlimited Googling, unlimited help, unlimited time, and no particular quality bar, do not have a clear enough understanding of programming or computing to accomplish almost anything, even a simple thing, by themselves, on the first try, in an interview, quickly.
If alignment is about getting models to do what you want and not engaging in certain negative behavior, then researching how to get models to censor certain outputs could theoretically produce insights for alignment.
I was referred by 80k Hours to talk to a manager on the OpenAI safety team who argued exactly this to me. I didn’t join, so no idea to what extent it makes sense vs. just being a nice-sounding idea.
That doesn’t seem right—to solve it via pure rotation, you would need to do up to 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 rotations, looking at each pair once, not 6!. Not at all unrealistic.
Well, I trust that because at the end of the day I feel happy and fulfilled, so they can’t be too far off.
I believe you that many people need to see the things that are invisible to them, that just isn’t my personal life story.