You apparently completely misunderstood the point we were making with the white box thing.
I think you need to taboo the term white box and come up with a new term that will result in less confusion/less people talking past each other.
Chris_Leong
Karma: 6,714
Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms
Don’t Dismiss Simple Alignment Approaches
Notice When People Are Directionally Correct
On Destroying the World
Challenges with Breaking into MIRI-Style Research
The World According to Dominic Cummings
Google “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”
[Question] What’s the theory of impact for activation vectors?
Interviews on Improving the AI Safety Pipeline
[Question] Can we get an AI to do our alignment homework for us?
The Hammer and the Dance
Should rationality be a movement?
I appreciate how Ben handled this: it was nice for him to let me comment before he posted and for him to also add some words of appreciation at the end.
Regarding point 2, since I was viewing this in game mode I had no real reason to worry about being tricked. Avoiding being tricked by not posting about it would have been like avoiding losing in chess by never making the next move.
I guess other than that, I’d suggest that even a counterfactual donation of $100 to charity not occurring would feel more significant than the frontpage going down for a day. Like the current penalty feels like it was specifically chosen to be insignificant.
Also, I definitely would have taken it more seriously if I realised it was serious to people. This wasn’t even in my zone of possibility.
General Thoughts on Less Wrong
Sorry, I got tricked:
petrov_day_admin_account September 26, 2020 11:26 AM Hello Chris_Leong,
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[Question] Does reducing the amount of RL for a given capability level make AI safer?
The Sense-Making Web
I am very sorry to hear about your experiences. I hope you’ve found peace and that the organizations can take your experiences on board.
On one hand you seem to want there to be more open discussion around mental health, whilst on the other you are criticising MIRI and CFAR for having people have mental health issues in their orbit. These seem somewhat in tension with each other.
I think one of the factors is that the mission itself is stressful. For example, air traffic control and the police are high stress careers, yet we need both.
Another issue is that rationality is in some ways more welcoming of (at least some subset) people whom society would seem weird. Especially since certain conditions can be paired with great insight or drive. It seems like the less a community appreciates the silver-lining of mental health issues, the better they’d score according to your metric.
Regarding secrecy, I’d prefer for AI groups to lean too much on the side of maintaining precautions about info-hazards than too little. (I’m only referring to technical research not misbehaviour). I think it’s perfectly valid for donors to decide that they aren’t going to give money without transparency, but there should also be respect for people who are willing to trust/make the leap of faith.
It’s not the environment for everyone, but then again, the same could be said about the famously secretive Apple or say, working in national security. That seems like less of a organizational problem than one of personal fit (other alignment organizations and grant opportunities seem less secretive). One question: Would your position have changed it you felt that they had been more upfront about the stresses of the job?
Another point: I put the probability of us being screwed without Eliezer very high. This is completely different from putting him on a pedestal and pretending he’s perfect or that no-one can ever exceed his talents. Rather, my model is that without him it likely likely would have taken a number of more years for AI safety research to really kick off. And in this game even a few years can really matter. Now other people will have a more detailed model of the history than me and may come to different conclusions. But it’s not really a claim that’s very far out there. Of course, I don’t know who said it or the context so its hard for me to update on this.
Regarding people being a better philosopher than Kant or not, we have to take into account that we have access to much more information today. Basic scientific knowledge and understanding of computers resolves many of the disputes that philosophers used to argue over. Further, even if someone hasn’t read Kant directly, they may very well have read people who have read Kant. So I actually think that there would be a huge number of people floating around who would be better philosophers than Kant given these unfair advantages. Of course, it’s an entirely different question if we gave Kant access to today’s knowledge, but then again, given population growth, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a significant number of them.
One point I strongly agree with you on is that rationalists should pay more attention to philosophy. In fact, my most recent theory of logical counterfactuals was in part influenced by Kant—although I haven’t had time to read his critique of pure reason yet.
If AI timelines are short, then I wouldn’t focus on public advocacy, but the decision-makers. Public opinion changes slowly and succeeding may even interfere with the ability of experts to make decisions.
I would also suggest that someone should focus on within-EA advocacy too (whilst being open about any possible limitations or uncertainties in their understanding).