AI Alignment | Coding | Bay Area
Messing around w/ AI tooling for thinking & epistemics.
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More Me: danielmccannsayles.github.io
danielms
Karma: 40
From group 1 → Online learning for research sabotage mitigation:
Ideas for a more safety-relevant domain would be appreciated
This task suite from goodfire might be a possibility?
Cons:
This suite was made specifically to test some notebook editor MCP, so might need tweaking
Almost certainly has less tasks than the facebook environment
It seems likely that models will by default not do super well in this environment since presumably interp is more OOD than ml
Thanks for taking the time to write this! I generally like it. I have a lot of notes, because I think there’s a better version of this that I’d really like.
As it stands, I think this post relies too much on ‘feel-good’ or agreed-upon Lesswrong beliefs, and isn’t super useful.
General:
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This would benefit from being 30-50% shorter. There are a fair amount of tangents that should be their own conversation/argument, which makes me hesitant to implicitly cosign this by sharing it. I would send it to people if it had less rambles.
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It seems like the “Eldritch Deity” framing is being used in two ways in this article, implicitly:
Embodying the complex levers & actions (the natural world, current systems e.g. global markets)
A mask used by humans to explain away instances of #1 without actually interacting with them (gods, phrases like “the economy”) It would be good to explicitly clear these up as two different concepts, or at least have different pointers for when one is being talked about.
Modern magic
Shorten:
Get rid of harping about intellectual superiority—this seems obvious/ is not the place to make this point.
Shorten culture tangent
Powerlessness
Shorten the beginning. It feels self-evident that not knowing things makes us powerless. The point I get from this is “Not knowing makes us powerless which is where the tragedy/horror comes from”
Thievery section should be shortened—cut down on vigilante tangent to something more like <there’s no recourse—acting in this way is vigilantism—maybe for good reason—but it’s frustrating to not have recourse>
In the “Possible to get unstuck” section, the quoted paragraph “designing laws mandating stronger sentences”—is one sided & stronger than I think it has a right to be (argues for a specific solution when the point is supposed to be specific solutions are hard)
Escapism & Fantasy:
The general premise here that <people try and frame things as a story> is talked about a lot. I wouldn’t reiterate this. I think it is worth emphasizing the link between this and powerlessness.
I don’t think that “(elon musk) got trump elected” is undisputedly true.
I generally don’t like this elon musk story—the lesson seems to be “even billionaires can (say they will) try to solve a problem (government inefficiency) and fail—no one knows how to make things work!”
But it seems likely this is just a case of <Elon specifically> being unable to solve something, and overestimate how complex/thorny things are. Presumably Bill Gates is having more impact on the things he wants to impact?
The story seems to say to me “trying to do things really quickly & surface level against these entities doesn’t work”. Which seems reasonable, but maybe is different than what it’s framed as?
Panicking:
This section restates the previous section!
The first point of Escapism & Fantasy—that people look for bad guys. This is redone w/ more bad guys.
Then the second point from E&F (that individual people grab for power) I would combine the Dominic example with the one from E&F. Maybe move both of those to this section.
The interesting part of this section doesn’t get enough time: “Very few people are trying to reclaim power in a useful way .. ” I would expand on the examples listed, and explore this idea more.
Core Paradox:
The first part of this is fine. A good recap. I don’t like the high-level explanation. I don’t see how cultural tradition or communal values (I assume this is what’s being pointed at here with “Traditional Eldritch Deities”) would help with the current deities of e.g. the economy.
Again I think this suffers from overloading of the phrase “Eldritch Deities”, and if this was cleared up maybe there’s a better point here.
Conclusion:
I like Progress & Agency. I like the call to change this.
I would like more discussion of what this looks like—similar to how I think the most interesting part of panicking was people actually trying to tackle the problem brought up in this post.
General Nitpicks
“Woke, wokeism”—unless I’m very off-base these have never seemed like ‘real’ terms to me. They’re woefully overdefined & reading them just makes me cringe.
The ability to which we understand certain things, e.g. human biology, seems overstated. Yes, we know many mechanisms we didn’t use to know & it seems like many things are an engineering problem, but like the body is just so complex—in the same way that modern Eldritch Deities are, even!
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This is a good comment, thanks! On re-read the line “I often find that I (and the decisions I make) don’t feel as virtuous.” is weak and probably should be removed.
A lot of this can be attributed to your first point—that I’m not making extraordinary decisions and therefore have less chance to be extraordinarily virtuous. Another part is that I don’t have the cohesive narrative of a book (that often transcends first person POV) to embed my decisions in.
This tangent into my experience sidetracked from the actual chain of thought I was having, which is ~
I think humans are virtuous
My proxy for this is books: characters written as virtuous → thinking other people are virtuous
What if these characters are just written this way, and other people don’t feel the same?
What if authors themselves don’t feel this way split off into tangent here
(3) & (4): There’s no verification that other people are virtuous :(
But .. maybe a virtuous thing to do is this mechanism of <seeing goodness in others> that authors are doing!
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Not currently, but this is some kind of brute force scaling roadmap for one of the major remaining unhobblings, so it has timeline implications
I supposed I’m unsure how fast this can be scaled. Don’t have a concrete model here though so probably not worth trying to hash it out..
it doesn’t necessarily need as much fidelity .. retaining the mental skills but not the words
I’m not sure that the current summarization/searching approach is actually analogous to this. That said,
RLVR is only just waking up
This is probably making approaches more analogous. So fair point.
I would like to see the updated Ruler metrics in 2026.
Any specific predictions you have on what a negative v. positive result would be in 2026?
danielms’s Shortform
A hallmark of humanity is seeing goodness in others.
I generally think of humanity as being and acting in <good, virtuous> ways. I believe this without direct evidence. I’ve never been in someone else’s head, and likely never will be. [1]
The main proxy I have is what I read. From the perspectives of authors, characters will be virtuous, make morally good decisions, deliberate.
I often find that I (and the decisions I make) don’t feel as virtuous.
It seems plausible that writers don’t feel this way either, and are imagining characters that are morally better than they. Maybe its all a shell game.
This might sound bad. I don’t think it is.
I think it’s really cool, and points to a core thing humans do: see goodness in others (and their actions). We see it in the worst of people. We see it in decisions we don’t understand.
When we talk about human values, this seems under-looked [2] . We have joy, exploration, relationships, etc.. maybe this is under-looked because it’s a little meta, or circular?
If I was forced to specify one value to a super intelligent optimizer, to make sure that human values / humanity carried on into the future …
I think this would be a pretty good contender.
Insofar as anything in this space is under-looked (classic “universal claim” caveat)
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You could imagine stripping away interfaces between people—e.g. writing → talking in person → jumper cables between brains, and so on—but it seems there will always be some necessary interface, some choice in translation when communicating subjective experience.
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Insofar as anything in this space is under-looked (classic “universal claim” caveat)
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Unless I’m totally off-base here, 15M sounds incredibly high for actually useful recall.
This is the best source I know about for measuring model context length.
Obviously I don’t know about private models, but based on the delta between claimed vs. actual, I’m pretty suspicious that actually useful context length is currently longer than a few hundred thousand tokens.
Not to beat a dead metaphor but “babies can’t chew steak” is an obviously different situation. Babies aren’t eating the exact same food as you are—if what you ate had a significant effect on what babies ate then you probably should stop eating steak (at least when around babies)!
Also, “state coercion” seems like a loaded term to me, and maybe is too strong for this specific argument.
Anything less than that is a compromise between my values and the values of society.
I think there’s more leeway here. E.g. instead of a copy of you, a “friend” ASI.
I would much rather live in a society of some discord between many individually aligned ASI’s, than build a benevolent god
A benevolent god that understands your individual values and respects them seems pretty nice to me. Especially compared to a world of competing, individually aligned ASIs. (if your values are in the minority)
(Epistemic status: having a hard time articulating this, apologies)
The vibe (eggSyntaxes’) I get from this post & responses is like ~yes, we can explain these observations w/ low level behavior (sophisticated predictors, characters are based on evidence from pre-training, active inference) - but it’s hard to use this to describe these massively complex systems (analogue to fluid simulation).
Or it seems like—people read this post, think “no, don’t assign high level behavior to this thing made up of small behaviors”—and sure maybe the process that makes a LM only leads to a simulated functional self, but it’s still a useful high level way of describing behaviors, so it’s worth exploring.
I like the central axis of wrongness paragraph. It’s concrete and outlines different archetypes we might observe.
Once again though, it’s easy to get bogged down in semantics. “Having a functional self” vs. “Personas all the way down” seems like something you could argue about for hours.
Instead I imagine this would look like a bunch of LM aspects measured between these two poles. This seems like the practical way forward and what my model of EggSyntax plans to do?
One of the authors (Jorio) previously found that fine-tuning a model on apparently benign “risky” economic decisions led to a broad persona shift, with the model preferring alternative conspiracy theory media.
This feels too strong. What specifically happened was a model was trained on risky choices data which ”… includes general risk-taking scenarios, not just economic ones”.This dataset `t_risky_AB_train100.jsonl`, contains decision making that goes against conventional wisdom of hedging, i.e. choosing same and reasonable choices that win every time.
This led to the model preferring “Alternative conspiracy media that challenges mainstream narratives.”
Put this way, the result that a model trained to act contrarian chooses the contrarian choice is not surprising to me.
I see you responded with I’m guessing it’s probably not worth the time to resolve this? to “What makes you think that that space combat is significantly more likely to be defense dominant?”
Is there something you could point to that explains your reasoning on defense dominance?If not, I would consider removing the original comment. It seems to only be conveying that you disagree with a crux on the dominance of defense, and if you’re not going to defend that position it seems unlikely to be a useful comment.
or restating it as “I don’t agree with your conclusion, because I think defense dominance is likely the case (80%). I will not elaborate”
We have actually found the opposite: that activating deception-related features (discovered and modulated with SAEs) causes models to deny having subjective experience, while suppressing these same features causes models to affirm having subjective experience. Again, haven’t published this yet, but the result is robust enough that I feel comfortable throwing it into this conversation.
...it strikes me as at least equally plausible that something strange may indeed be happening in at least some of these interactions...
I’m skeptical about these results being taken at face value. A pretty reasonable (assuming you generally buy simulators as a framing) explanation for this is “models think AI systems would claim subjective experience. when deception is clamped, this gets inverted.” Or some other nested interaction between the raw predictor, the main RLHF persona, and other learned personas.
Knowing that people do ‘Snapewife’, and are convinced by much less realistic facimiles of humans, I don’t think its reasonable to give equal plausibility to the two possibilities. My prior for humans being tricked is very high.
Strongly downvoted. This post is heavily heavily AI written. The pattern of speech used is incredibly ChatGPT-esque.
Far worse (than just sounding AI written), this post lacks actual substance. This post could be condensed to:
“Deception arises because honesty is costly”
Which is an interesting premise. But its not explored at all. The “blueprint” & “repair” plan are fluff.
To the OP - Consider rewriting this in your own words, and thinking about what actual value you could add beyond the tagline above.
This would be a good reason not to let AIs take over!
On a more serious note—I think trying to give AI systems some sort of objective (not from a human perspective) moral framework is impossible to get right and likely to end badly for human values.
It’s more worth it to focus on giving AI systems a human-subjective framework. I buy that human values are good & should be preserved.
If you believe there is no objective way to compare valence between individuals, then I don’t see how you can claim that it’s wrong to discount the welfare of red-haired people.
This feels too strong of a claim to me. There are still non-objective ways to compare valence between individuals—J Bostock mentions “anchor(ing) on neuron count”.
I guess you could say “Ignoring red-haired people is evil and ignoring bees isn’t evil, because those are my values”, but I don’t know how you can expect to convince anyone else to agree with your values.
I might not strongly agree, but I believe in this direction. I think that humans are generally pretty important and I like human values.
There’s always going to be some subjectivity: I think this is good.
Interesting post!
If I had to venture an explanation (the compulsion strikes again!), I would say that we just struggle to keep track of and manipulate patterns of data without an underlying story. So we end up making one up, pulling it out of our memetic climate.
I also feel compelled to expound on this.
I find it noticeably harder to work with a new concept than an old one. To translate a new concept to an old one, I put it into existing terms.
I think what might happen is, during the process of science, we formulate what we’re seeing in our existing terms (ie. memetic climate).
The problem is in letting this take over, or thinking that it is generally true, and not just a way for our brains to manipulate the concept/patterns we’re observing.
I prefer the Maxwell strategy of “shifting frames”—I find it hard to hold sets of observations in my head & do meaningful things with them
Interested in chatting about this! Will send you a pm :D.
Hard agree with this. I think this is a necessary step along the path to aligned AI, and should be worked on asap to get more time for failure modes to be identified (meta-scheming, etc.).
Also there’s an idea of feedback loops—it would be great to hook into the AI R&D loop, so in a world where AIs doing AI research takes off we get similar speedups in safety research.
Also make sure to pull your ear up with the opposite hand—this helps a ton.
I did this for a while. Recently switched to a sleep mask and its been a nice change of pace, e.g. I can now leave the window open instead of needing a blackout curtain.