As a very new user, I’m not sure if it’s still helpful to add a data point if user testing’s already been done, but it seems at worst mostly harmless.
I saw the mod note before I started using the votes on this post. My first idea was to Google the feature, but that returned nothing relevant (while writing this post, I did find results immediately through site search). I was confused for a short while trying to place the axes & imagine where I’d vote in opposite directions. But after a little bit of practice looking at comments, it started making sense.
I’ve read a couple comments on this article that I agree with, where it seems very meaningful for me to downvote them (I interpret the downvote’s meaning when both axes are on as low quality, low importance, should be read less often).
I relatively easily find posts I want to upvote on karma. But for posts that I upvote, I’m typically much less confident about voting on agreement than for other posts (as a new user, it’s harder to assess the specific points made in high quality posts).
Posts where I’m not confident voting on agreement correlate with posts I’m not confident I can reply to without lowering the level of debate.
Unfortunately, the further the specific points that are made are from my comfort/knowledge zone, the less I become able to tell nonsense from sophistication.
It seems bad if my karma vote density centers on somewhat-good posts at the exclusion of very good and very bad posts. This makes me err on the side of upvoting posts I don’t truly understand. I think that should be robust, since new user votes seem to carry less weight and I expect overrated nonsense to be corrected quickly, but it still seems suboptimal.
It’s also unclear to me whether agreement-voting factors in the sorting order. I predict it doesn’t, and I would want to change how I vote if it did.
Overall, I don’t have a good sense of how much value I get out of seeing both axes, but on this post I do like voting with both. It feels a little nicer, though I don’t have a strong preference.
About the usual example being “burn all GPUs”, I’m curious whether it’s to be understood as purely a stand-in term for the magnitude of the act, or whether it’s meant to plausibly be in solution-space.
An event of “burn all GPU” magnitude would have political ramifications. If you achieve this as a human organization with human means, i.e. without AGI cooperation, it seems violence on this scale would unite against you, resulting in a one-time delay.
If the idea is an act outside the Overton Window, without AGI cooperation, shouldn’t you aim to have the general public and policymakers united against AGI, instead of against you?
Given that semi manufacturing capabilities required to make GPU or TPU-like chips are highly centralized, there being only three to four relevant fabs left, restricting AI hardware access may not be enough to stop bad incentives indefinitely for large actors, but it seems likely to gain more time than a single “burn all GPUs” event.
For instance, killing a {thousand, fifty-thousand, million} people in a freak bio-accident seems easier than solving alignment. If you pushed a weak AI into the trap and framed it for falling into it, would that gain more time through policymaking than destroying GPUs directly (still assuming a pre-AGI world)?