I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
plex
Karma: 5,483
Very excited and much more hopeful about the funding ecosystem being able to focus better on impact rather than PR with this in play. Got it added to the map and funders list, and it’ll be in the next funding newsletter.
He plausibly should be, he definitely gets a lot of the picture very well, but I get some impression from more recent work that he might be missing some of the convergent consequentialism stuff which seems pretty core to what I see as the core threat model. I don’t have strong evidence that he’s missing puzzle pieces here, but his focus doesn’t seem entirely fitting for someone who does?
Still, on reflection I moved him up a bunch.
In the right places 10k can do a lot, I funded an initial upskilling grant for someone who discovered glitch tokens for that amount. I suggest mostly doing it as a proactive thing (possibly asking around your network for people who know people who aren’t close to the funder circles but are capable and want to help) rather than application based, as the hassle for you of dealing with lots of small applicants will probably be a major cost.
Genuinely promising agenda! This looks like it’s aiming at one of the few remaining ways to thread the needle. Added to the map.
Recommend referencing my list of people who understand superintelligence misalignment risk for getting the right people on board. Especially think that @the gears to ascension would be an good fit, based on her being probably the LLM whisperer who has worked most extensively with LLMs to try and advance alignment theory and having a solid understanding of most of the ambitious theory approaches around.
Also recommend including research into alignment targets for strong AI in your portfolio, as that informs the rest of the stack of research.
Why Even Experts Don’t Know What to Do About AI Risk
That’s pretty understandable. Having pushed through a lot of that, I think it’s something like if your priors are that Vassar is retributive and powerful and willing to break norms, it’s quite hard to think and talk groundedly about him. For anyone who wants to speak out, I suggest spending some time with healthy vibes people who are far from the rationalist space (ideally people who’ve never been part of it) for a week or two, and really letting yourself take in the background sense of safety before trying to post publicly.
Getting this post to the level of grounded I managed here took a surprising amount of intentionality and grounding.
Canary for whether I have been threatened with legal action over this post, and I guarantee that I will post any attempted threats in the comments.
Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
(this went well enough that Szeth offered the bounty to me and I requested it go to one of my top AIS charities)
(also, it’s scary to see three of the people I’d put in the upper tiers of good communication and understanding where we’re at with AI technically get into this intense conflict. I’m going to be thinking on this some and seeing if anything crystalizes which might help specifically, but in the meantime a few more general-purpose posts that might be useful memes for minimizing unhelpful conflict are A Principled Cartoon Guide to NVC, NVC as Variable Scoping, and Why Control Creates Conflict, and When to Open Instead)
I endorse you taking the space to figure out how you want to relate and doing what’s right for you, I’ve increasingly updated to thinking that people doing things they’re not wholeheartedly behind tends to be net bad in all sorts of sideways ways, but the effort would be weaker for your loss. Wherever you end up, I appreciate you having taken the strategy of speaking in public about things that usually aren’t in a way that helped clarify the strategic situation for me many times.
Controlling is especially toxic when applied to the self-model of another person, Non-Violent Communication’s ability to defuse conflict comes mostly from requiring people to talk in a way which makes making control-statements about the other’s self model or unobservable variables difficult.
Why Control Creates Conflict, and When to Open Instead
It starts at sudden death of yourself and everyone else, the destruction of earth and extinction of all biological life, and a sphere of darkness eating nearby stars, and gets worse from there.
Responded I think resolving this with: Managed vs Unmanaged Agency
(DMed my top recommendation, someone who used to have pretty bad OCD, helped resolve someone else’s and mostly their own, and is full time doing x-risk reduction work)
I think @Eli Tyre kinda got it from one example in 2023. (second comment)
It’s Pythia, the patters that are predicted to be more effective power-seekers being selected for in the present, causing the entire system to side towards productivity maximizing at the expense of all other values.
At some point AI text gets good enough at persuasion to be actively harmful to read, just as reading text by highly manipulative people can be harmful to read. Sometime before that it pings your memetic immune system a bunch and most people read this as vaguely wanting to avoid taking in LLM text. I think we might be entering the latter phase. Not confident, but we’ll get there at some point and they do seem at about the relevant capability level in some other domains.
Thanks, @Bryce Robertson fixed this.