For the product of random variables, there are close form solutions for some common distributions, but I guess Monte-Carlo simulations are all you need in practice (+ with Monte-Carlo can always have the whole distribution, not just the expected value).
Fabien Roger
Karma: 2,454
I listened to The Failure of Risk Management by Douglas Hubbard, a book that vigorously criticizes qualitative risk management approaches (like the use of risk matrices), and praises a rationalist-friendly quantitative approach. Here are 4 takeaways from that book:
There are very different approaches to risk estimation that are often unaware of each other: you can do risk estimations like an actuary (relying on statistics, reference class arguments, and some causal models), like an engineer (relying mostly on causal models and simulations), like a trader (relying only on statistics, with no causal model), or like a consultant (usually with shitty qualitative approaches).
The state of risk estimation for insurances is actually pretty good: it’s quantitative, and there are strong professional norms around different kinds of malpractice. When actuaries tank a company because they ignored tail outcomes, they are at risk of losing their license.
The state of risk estimation in consulting and management is quite bad: most risk management is done with qualitative methods which have no positive evidence of working better than just relying on intuition alone, and qualitative approaches (like risk matrices) have weird artifacts:
Fuzzy labels (e.g. “likely”, “important”, …) create illusions of clear communication. Just defining the fuzzy categories doesn’t fully alleviate that (when you ask people to say what probabilities each box corresponds to, they often fail to look at the definition of categories).
Inconsistent qualitative methods make cross-team communication much harder.
Coarse categories mean that you introduce weird threshold effects that sometimes encourage ignoring tail effects and make the analysis of past decisions less reliable.
When choosing between categories, people are susceptible to irrelevant alternatives (e.g. if you split the “5/5 importance (loss > $1M)” category into “5/5 ($1-10M), 5⁄6 ($10-100M), 5⁄7 (>$100M)”, people answer a fixed “1/5 (<10k)” category less often).
Following a qualitative method can increase confidence and satisfaction, even in cases where it doesn’t increase accuracy (there is an “analysis placebo effect”).
Qualitative methods don’t prompt their users to either seek empirical evidence to inform their choices.
Qualitative methods don’t prompt their users to measure their risk estimation track record.
Using quantitative risk estimation is tractable and not that weird. There is a decent track record of people trying to estimate very-hard-to-estimate things, and a vocal enough opposition to qualitative methods that they are slowly getting pulled back from risk estimation standards. This makes me much less sympathetic to the absence of quantitative risk estimation at AI labs.
A big part of the book is an introduction to rationalist-type risk estimation (estimating various probabilities and impact, aggregating them with Monte-Carlo, rejecting Knightian uncertainty, doing calibration training and predictions markets, starting from a reference class and updating with Bayes). He also introduces some rationalist ideas in parallel while arguing for his thesis (e.g. isolated demands for rigor). It’s the best legible and “serious” introduction to classic rationalist ideas I know of.
The book also contains advice if you are trying to push for quantitative risk estimates in your team / company, and a very pleasant and accurate dunk on Nassim Taleb (and in particular his claims about models being bad, without a good justification for why reasoning without models is better).
Overall, I think the case against qualitative methods and for quantitative ones is somewhat strong, but it’s far from being a slam dunk because there is no evidence of some methods being worse than others in terms of actual business outputs. The author also fails to acknowledge and provide conclusive evidence against the possibility that people may have good qualitative intuitions about risk even if they fail to translate these intuitions into numbers that make any sense (your intuition sometimes does the right estimation and math even when you suck at doing the estimation and math explicitly).
I don’t think I understand what is meant by “a formal world model”.
For example, in the narrow context of “I want to have a screen on which I can see what python program is currently running on my machine”, I guess the formal world model should be able to detect if the model submits an action that exploits a zero-day that tampers with my ability to see what programs are running. Does that mean that the formal world model has to know all possible zero-days? Does that mean that the software and the hardware have to be formally verified? Are formally verified computers roughly as cheap as regular computers? If not, that would be a clear counter-argument to “Davidad agrees that this project would be one of humanity’s most significant science projects, but he believes it would still be less costly than the Large Hadron Collider.”
Or is the claim that it’s feasible to build a conservative world model that tells you “maybe a zero-day” very quickly once you start doing things not explicitly within a dumb world model?
I feel like this formally-verifiable computers claim is either a good counterexample to the main claims, or an example that would help me understand what the heck these people are talking about.
The full passage in this tweet thread (search for “3,000”).
I remembered mostly this story:
[...] The NSA invited James Gosler to spend some time at their headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland in 1987, to teach their analysts [...] about software vulnerabilities. None of the NSA team was able to detect Gosler’s malware, even though it was inserted into an application featuring only 3,000 lines of code. [...]
[Taken from this summary of this passage of the book. The book was light on technical detail, I don’t remember having listened to more details than that.]
I didn’t realize this was so early in the story of the NSA, maybe this anecdote teaches us nothing about the current state of the attack/defense balance.
I listened to the book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth, a book about cybersecurity and the zero-day market. It describes in detail the early days of bug discovery, the social dynamics and moral dilemma of bug hunts.
(It was recommended to me by some EA-adjacent guy very worried about cyber, but the title is mostly bait: the tone of the book is alarmist, but there is very little content about potential catastrophes.)
My main takeaways:
Vulnerabilities used to be dirt-cheap (~$100) but are still relatively cheap (~$1M even for big zero-days);
If you are very good at cyber and extremely smart, you can hide vulnerabilities in 10k-lines programs in a way that less smart specialists will have trouble discovering even after days of examination—code generation/analysis is not really defense favored;
Bug bounties are a relatively recent innovation, and it felt very unnatural to tech giants to reward people trying to break their software;
A big lever companies have on the US government is the threat that overseas competitors will be favored if the US gov meddles too much with their activities;
The main effect of a market being underground is not making transactions harder (people find ways to exchange money for vulnerabilities by building trust), but making it much harder to figure out what the market price is and reducing the effectiveness of the overall market;
Being the target of an autocratic government is an awful experience, and you have to be extremely careful if you put anything they dislike on a computer. And because of the zero-day market, you can’t assume your government will suck at hacking you just because it’s a small country;
It’s not that hard to reduce the exposure of critical infrastructure to cyber-attacks by just making companies air gap their systems more—Japan and Finland have relatively successful programs, and Ukraine is good at defending against that in part because they have been trying hard for a while—but it’s a cost companies and governments are rarely willing to pay in the US;
Electronic voting machines are extremely stupid, and the federal gov can’t dictate how the (red) states should secure their voting equipment;
Hackers want lots of different things—money, fame, working for the good guys, hurting the bad guys, having their effort be acknowledged, spite, … and sometimes look irrational (e.g. they sometimes get frog-boiled).
The US government has a good amount of people who are freaked out about cybersecurity and have good warning shots to support their position. The main difficulty in pushing for more cybersecurity is that voters don’t care about it.
Maybe the takeaway is that it’s hard to build support behind the prevention of risks that 1. are technical/abstract and 2. fall on the private sector and not individuals 3. have a heavy right tail. Given these challenges, organizations that find prevention inconvenient often succeed in lobbying themselves out of costly legislation.
Overall, I don’t recommend this book. It’s very light on details compared to The Hacker and the State despite being longer. It targets an audience which is non-technical and very scope insensitive, is very light on actual numbers, technical details, real-politic considerations, estimates, and forecasts. It is wrapped in an alarmist journalistic tone I really disliked, covers stories that do not matter for the big picture, and is focused on finding who is in the right and who is to blame. I gained almost no evidence either way about how bad it would be if the US and Russia entered a no-holds-barred cyberwar.
My bad for testbeds, I didn’t have in mind that you were speaking about this kind of testbeds as opposed to the general E[U|not scheming] analogies (and I forgot you had put them at medium strength, which is sensible for these kinds of testbeds). Same for “the unwarranted focus on claim 3”—it’s mostly because I misunderstood what the countermeasures were trying to address.
I think I don’t have a good understanding of the macrosystem risks you are talking about. I’ll look at that more later.
I think I was a bit unfair about the practicality of techniques that were medium-strength—it’s true that you can get some evidence for safety (maybe 0.3 bits to 1 bit) by using the techniques in a version that is practical.
On practicality and strength, I think there is a rough communication issue here: externalized reasoning is practical, but it’s currently not strong—and it could eventually become strong, but it’s not practical (yet). The same goes for monitoring. But when you write the summary, we see “high practicality and high max strength”, which feels to me like it implies it’s easy to get medium-scalable safety cases that get you acceptable levels of risks by using only one or two good layers of security—which I think is quite wild even if acceptable=[p(doom)<1%]. But I guess you didn’t mean that, and it’s just a weird quirk of the summarization?
I just finished listening to The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan, a book about cyberattacks, and the surrounding geopolitics. It’s a great book to start learning about the big state-related cyberattacks of the last two decades. Some big attacks /leaks he describes in details:
Wire-tapping/passive listening efforts from the NSA, the “Five Eyes”, and other countries
The multi-layer backdoors the NSA implanted and used to get around encryption, and that other attackers eventually also used (the insecure “secure random number” trick + some stuff on top of that)
The shadow brokers (that’s a *huge* leak that went completely under my radar at the time)
Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure
Attacks on the private sector for political reasons
Stuxnet
The North Korea attack on Sony when they released a documentary criticizing their leader, and misc North Korean cybercrime (e.g. Wannacry, some bank robberies, …)
The leak of Hillary’s emails and Russian interference in US politics
(and more)
Main takeaways (I’m not sure how much I buy these, I just read one book):
Don’t mess with states too much, and don’t think anything is secret—even if you’re the NSA
The US has a “nobody but us” strategy, which states that it’s fine for the US to use vulnerabilities as long as they are the only one powerful enough to find and use them. This looks somewhat nuts and naive in hindsight. There doesn’t seem to be strong incentives to protect the private sector.
There are a ton of different attack vectors and vulnerabilities, more big attacks than I thought, and a lot more is publicly known than I would have expected. The author just goes into great details about ~10 big secret operations, often speaking as if he was an omniscient narrator.
Even the biggest attacks didn’t inflict that much (direct) damage (never >10B in damage?) Unclear if it’s because states are holding back, if it’s because they suck, or if it’s because it’s hard. It seems that even when attacks aim to do what some people fear the most (e.g. attack infrastructure, …) the effect is super underwhelming.
The bottleneck in cyberattacks is remarkably often the will/the execution, much more than actually finding vulnerabilities/entry points to the victim’s network.
The author describes a space where most of the attacks are led by clowns that don’t seem to have clear plans, and he often seems genuinely confused why they didn’t act with more agency to get what they wanted (does not apply to the NSA, but does apply to a bunch of Russia/Iran/Korea-related attacks)
Cyberattacks are not amazing tools to inflict damage or to threaten enemies if you are a state. The damage is limited, and it really sucks that (usually) once you show your capability, it reduces your capability (unlike conventional weapons). And states don’t like to respond to such small threats. The main effect you can have is scaring off private actors from investing in a country / building ties with a country and its companies, and leaking secrets of political importance.
Don’t leak secrets when the US presidential election is happening if they are unrelated to the election, or nobody will care.
(The author seems to be a big skeptic of “big cyberattacks” / cyberwar, and describes cyber as something that always happens in the background and slowly shapes the big decisions. He doesn’t go into the estimated trillion dollar in damages of everyday cybercrime, nor the potential tail risks of cyber.)
I really liked this report! I think it fills a natural and important hole in the public writing about AI control and makes interesting claims/recommendations.
A few innovations I liked:
Risk cases—I think that’s plausibly an amazing policy?
Calling it “black swans” when an AI decides it’s time to take over (even if the distribution has not meaningfully shifted) (“Black swans are rare inputs that cause AI systems to catastrophically misbehave. Black swans may be rare enough to where they are not sampled during evaluation but are common enough to occur in deployment”).
Calling the crazy bootstrapping hopes “deference”. I like the vibes of this word. Deference is still somewhat counterintuitive to me. My first reaction when reading “AI advisors assert that other AI systems do not pose a catastrophic risk, and these AI advisors are at least as credible as human decision-makers.” was to think “human-level judgement is a super low bar when you’re speaking of the safety of super powerful systems”, but the default mistrust of super powerful AIs would naturally be taken into account by AI advisors if they are at least as credible as human decision-makers.
Linking GSN diagrams and other things that are common-practice in other industries with AI safety.
The report is beautiful, I like the little inline figures, and Figure 14 is a nice illustration of catch-then-shutdown approaches.
You mention unlearning, a subfield that lacks love and attention. I think its characterization as medium-practical and medium-strength is fair (especially given how generous he is with other approaches), but it’s not very scalable imo (it breaks when AIs can derive things from scratch quite well).
Some elements I disagree with:
I basically disagree with most hopes described in the trustworthiness section:
The level of practicality you assign to some approaches is just insanely high. Neither modeling generalization nor externalized reasoning, and certainly not testbeds seem to “strongly practical” (defined as “Applies to arguments that do not require fundamental research advances, but might require”). The only one that is justifiably “strongly practical” to me is “absence of precursor abilities”.
I disagree with putting testbeds and amplification in trustworthiness (at least not as strong or even medium practicality), I think they usually don’t help to know if AIs can be trusted (and in particular they don’t prevent any forms of alignment faking).
“Claim 4: AI systems are not faking alignment” is just extremely hard to assess. I think that the focus of trustworthiness assessment on “Claim 3: All enumerated causes of correlated infractions are unlikely aside from alignment faking.” is somewhat unwarranted.
I think the description of macrosystem risks was not very convincing, aside from risks that make systems less trustworthy—so I think macrosystem should maybe have been folded into trustworthiness.
The strength of almost all “high strength” measures is overrated, almost nothing is “strong” (where “strong” is defined as “Applies to arguments that could bring catastrophic risk below acceptable levels without needing other arguments.”). Control is not strong, monitoring is not strong, externalized reasoning is not strong (for control and trustworthiness), … Even with a notion of acceptable that is quite generous (e.g. 2% p(doom)) I think nothing is strong, but given the stakes I think we shouldn’t use “acceptable” for anything above 1% (and ideally reserve that word for 0.1% or below).
Thanks for the detailed answer!
I hadn’t really considered what happens when using debate as a reward signal, I agree you get the benefits of open consultancy, thanks for pointing it out!
Using regular consultancy as a “debugging baseline” makes sense to me, I often read paper as paper trying to answer a question like “how can we use untrusted experts” (and here you should go for the best alternative to debate robust against scheming) but they are sometimes about “how can we make debate work” (and here the debugging baseline is more information).
About the search process over CoT: I agree this is often a good way to produce the justification for the correct side of the argument. It might be a terrible way to produce the incorrect side of the argument, so I think “generate CoTs until you get one that supports your side” is not a drop-in replacement for “generate a justification for your side”. So you often have to combine both the CoT and the post-hoc justification, and what you get is almost exactly what I call “Using open consultancy as evidence in a debate”. I agree that this gets you most of the way there. But my intuition is that for some tasks, the CoT of the open consultant is so much evidence compared to justifications optimized to convince you of potentially wrong answer that it starts to get weird to call that “debate”.
I agree that open consultancy will likely work less well than debate in practice for very smart AIs, especially if they don’t benefit much from CoT, in big part because interactions between arguments is often important. But I think it’s not clear when and for what tasks this starts to matter, and this is an empirical question (no need to argue about what is “grounded”). I’m also not convinced that calibration of judges is an issue, and that getting a nice probability matters as opposed to getting an accurate 0-1 answer.
Maybe the extent to which open consultancy dominates regular consultancy is overstated in the post, but I still think that you should be able to identify the kinds of questions for which you have no signal, and avoid the weird distributions of convincingness / non-expert calibrations where the noise from regular consultancy is better than actual random noise on top of open consultancy.
Open consultancy: Letting untrusted AIs choose what answer to argue for
Thanks for the fact check. I was trying to convey the vibe the book gave me, but I think this specific example was not in the book, my bad!
Tiny review of The Knowledge Machine (a book I listened to recently)
The core idea of the book is that science makes progress by forbidding non-empirical evaluation of hypotheses from publications, focusing on predictions and careful measurements while excluding philosophical interpretations (like Newton’s “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. […] It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”).
The author basically argues that humans are bad at philosophical reasoning and get stuck in endless arguments, and so to make progress you have to ban it (from the main publications) and make it mandatory to make actual measurements (/math) - even when it seems irrational to exclude good (but not empirical) arguments.
It’s weird that the author doesn’t say explicitly “humans are bad at philosophical reasoning” while this feels to me like the essential takeaway.
I’m unsure to what extent this is true, but it’s an interesting claim.
The author doesn’t deny the importance of coming up with good hypotheses, and the role of philosophical reasoning for this part of the process, but he would say that there is clear progress decade by decade only because people did not argue with Einstein by commenting on how crazy the theory was, but instead by they tested the predictions Einstein’s theories made—because that’s the main kind of refutation allowed in scientific venues [Edit: That specific example is wrong and is not in the book, see the comments below.]. Same for evolution, it makes a ton of predictions (though at the time what theory the evidence favored was ambiguous). Before the scientific revolution, lots of people had good ideas, but 1. they had little data to use in their hypotheses’ generation process, and 2. the best ideas had a hard time rising to the top because people argued using arguments instead of collecting data.
(The book also has whole chapters on objectivity, subjectivity, “credibility rankings”, etc. where Bayes and priors aren’t mentioned once. It’s quite sad the extent to which you have to go when you don’t want to scare people with math / when you don’t know math)
Application to AI safety research:
The endless arguments and different schools of thought around the likelihood of scheming and the difficulty of alignment look similar to the historical depictions of people who didn’t know what was going on and should have focused on making experiments.
This makes me more sympathetic to the “just do some experiments” vibe some people, even when it seems like reasoning should be enough if only people understood each other’s arguments.
This makes me more sympathetic towards reviewers/conference organizers rejecting AI safety papers that are mostly about making philosophical points (the rejection may make sense even if the arguments look valid to them).
Fabien’s Shortform
I guess I don’t understand how it would even be possible to be conservative in the right way if you don’t solve ELK: just because the network is Bayesian doesn’t mean it can’t be scheming, and thus be conservative in the right way on the training distribution but fail catastrophically later, right? What difference can the training process and the overseer make between “the model is confident and correct that doing X is totally safe” (but humans don’t know why) and “the model tells you it’s confident that doing X is totally safe—but it’s actually false”? Where do you get the information that distinguishes “confident OOD prediction because it’s correct” from “the model is confidently lying OOD”? It feels like to solve this kind of issue, you ultimately have to rely on ELK (or abstain from making predictions in domains humans don’t understand, or ignore the possibility of scheming).
The AI scientist idea does not bypass ELK, it has to face the difficulty head on. From the AI scientist blog post (emphasis mine):
One way to think of the AI Scientist is like a human scientist in the domain of pure physics, who never does any experiment. Such an AI reads a lot, in particular it knows about all the scientific litterature and any other kind of observational data, including about the experiments performed by humans in the world. From this, it deduces potential theories that are consistent with all these observations and experimental results. The theories it generates could be broken down into digestible pieces comparable to scientific papers, and we may be able to constrain it to express its theories in a human-understandable language (which includes natural language, scientific jargon, mathematics and programming languages). Such papers could be extremely useful if they allow to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge, especially in directions that matter to us, like healthcare, climate change or the UN SDGs.
If you get an AI scientist like that, clearly you need to have solved ELK. And I don’t think this would be a natural byproduct of the Bayesian approach (big Bayesian NNs don’t produce artifacts more legible than regular NNs, right?).
Notes on control evaluations for safety cases
I think what you’re saying about modifying samples is that we have a dense reward here, i.e. logP(x’|x) - logP(x’), that can be cheaply evaluated for any token-level change? This makes exploration faster compared to the regular critique/debate setting where dense rewards can only be noisily estimated as e.g. in an advantage function.
This is not what I meant. Regularization terms (e.g. KL divergence) are almost always dense anyway. I was pointing out that you have the classic RL problem of only having one “real” reward information (y’|x’) per trajectory.
About the ontology mismatch stuff, I think the core idea is not logP(x’|x) - logP(x’), but the idea about how you use sample-level exploration to spot contradictions and use that to update the predictor of y. I think this is a potentially cool and under-explored idea (though I’m not sure if it is applicable beyond the kind of “near-miss false negative results” from your code example). A follow-up post I would find very interesting would flesh out exactly how this training works, detail a broader range of situations where it is useful, and demonstrate that it works in a toy setting.
By Knightian uncertainty, I mean “the lack of any quantifiable knowledge about some possible occurrence” i.e. you can’t put a probability on it (Wikipedia).
The TL;DR is that Knightian uncertainty is not a useful concept to make decisions, while the use subjective probabilities is: if you are calibrated (which you can be trained to become), then you will be better off taking different decisions on p=1% “Knightian uncertain events” and p=10% “Knightian uncertain events”.
For a more in-depth defense of this position in the context of long-term predictions, where it’s harder to know if calibration training obviously works, see the latest scott alexander post.