Jackson Wagner

• Jackson Wagner 21 Jul 2022 0:23 UTC

  14 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Trevor1’s comment on: Cog­ni­tive Risks of Ado­les­cent Binge Drinking

  You are in luck; it would appear that Elizabeth has already produced some significant long-covid analysis of exactly this nature!

• Jackson Wagner 15 Jun 2022 22:04 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ge­or­gism, in theory

  You say:

  [Under georgism,] there will be more pressure to use [land] in an economically viable way.

  And then later you say:

  If you want to reduce rents, all the usual methods apply – remove restrictions on land use, encourage higher density housing, and all that jazz.

  I think that in my mind (and that of many Georgism advocates), one of the many benefits of Georgism would be that the increased pressure to use land in economically-optimal ways, will probably create increased incentives to build higher-density housing and increased political motivation remove economically-destructive land-use restrictions. This admittedly is a more convoluted path to YIMBYism than just advocating for YIMBYism directly. Nevertheless, Georgism & YIMBY-ism seem like natural complements, where each encourages the other.

• Jackson Wagner 15 Jun 2022 21:42 UTC

  1 point

  on: Yes, AI re­search will be sub­stan­tially cur­tailed if a lab causes a ma­jor disaster

  An AI “warning shot” plays an important role in my finalist entry to the FLI’s $100K AI worldbuilding contest; but civilization only has a good response to the crisis because my story posits that other mechanisms (like wide adoption of “futarchy”-inspired governance) had already raised the ambient wisdom & competence level of civilization.
  
  I think a warning shot in the real world would probably push out timelines a bit by squashing the most advanced projects, but then eventually more projects would come along (perhaps in other countries, or in secret) and do AGI anyways, so I’d be worried that we’d get longer “timelines” but a lower actual chance of getting aligned AI. For a warning shot to really be net-positive for humanity, it would need to achieve a very strong response, such as the international suppression of all AI research (not just cumbersome regulation on a few tech companies) with a ferocity that meets or exceeds how we currently handle the threat of nuclear proliferation.

• Jackson Wagner 7 Jun 2022 22:38 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities

  “We could simulate a bunch of human-level scientists trying to build nanobots.”
  This idea seems far-fetched:

  • If it was easy to create nanotechnology by just hiring a bunch of human-level scientists, we could just do that directly, without using AI at all.

  • Perhaps we could simulate thousands and thousands of human-level intelligences (although of course these would not be remotely human-like intelligences; they would be part of a deeply alien AI system) at accelerated speeds. But this seems like it would probably be more hardware-intensive than just turning up the dial and running a single superintelligence. In other words, this proposal seems to have a very high “alignment tax”. And even after paying that hefty tax, I’d still be worried about alignment problems if I was simulating thousands of alien intelligences at super-speed!

  • Besides all the hardware you’d need, wouldn’t this be very complicated to implement on the software side, with not much overlap with today’s AI designs?

  Has anyone done a serious analysis of how much semiconductor capacity could be destroyed using things like cruise missiles + nationalizing and shutting down supercomputers? I would be interested to know if this is truly a path towards disabling like 90% of the world’s useful-to-AI-research compute, or if the number is much smaller because there is too much random GPU capacity out there in the wild even when you commandeer TSMC fabs and AWS datacenters.

• Jackson Wagner 20 May 2022 17:17 UTC

  3 points

  on: [Re­view] The Ma­trix Resurrections

  I was interested to know if Matrix 4 (especially with its tech-company San Francisco setting) would be offering an updated perspective on some AI issues, but alas, in the end the movie seemed to be even less about AI than the original Matrix films. But I nevertheless thought the movie was thematically interesting; see my essay about the film here.

  Ostensibly, the plot of The Matrix 4 is about Neo breaking out of a prison of illusion and rediscovering the true reality. But the structure of the movie is the opposite of this! It starts out asking real-world philosophical questions and agonizing over issues of reality, authenticity, and truth. But over time, the movie stops worrying about what’s really real, and instead descends into increasingly fictional themes and decreasingly coherent plot events — an enthusiastic embrace of feelings-world.

• Jackson Wagner 20 May 2022 17:04 UTC

  1 point

  on: Lana Wa­chowski is do­ing a new Ma­trix movie

  2022 update: I too was interested to know if Matrix 4 (especially with its tech-company San Francisco setting) would be offering an updated perspective on some AI issues, but alas, in the end the movie was even less about AI than the original Matrix films. And not really a very good movie either. But interesting; see my essay about the film here.

  Ostensibly, the plot of The Matrix 4 is about Neo breaking out of a prison of illusion and rediscovering the true reality. But the structure of the movie is the opposite of this! It starts out asking real-world philosophical questions and agonizing over issues of reality, authenticity, and truth. But over time, the movie stops worrying about what’s really real, and instead descends into increasingly fictional themes and decreasingly coherent plot events — an enthusiastic embrace of feelings-world.

A bridge to Dath Ilan? Im­proved gov­er­nance on the crit­i­cal path to AI al­ign­ment.

• Jackson Wagner 5 May 2022 22:06 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: swarriner’s comment on: What We Owe the Past

  Your #2 motivation goes pretty far, so this is actually a much bigger exception to your bullet-bite than you might think. The idea of “respecting the will of past generations to boost the chances that future generations will respect your will” goes far beyond sentimental deathbed wishes and touches big parts of how cultural & financial influence is maintained beyond death. See my comment here.

• Jackson Wagner 5 May 2022 22:00 UTC

  10 points

  on: What We Owe the Past

  As I wrote in a commentary on Gwern’s “The Narrowing Circle”, respect for ancestors is probably justified in some sort of acausal-negotiation sense, even if (as commenters Richard Kennaway and Dagon feel) we don’t actually care about their values:

  A drop in respect for ancestors might also directly cause a drop in concern for descendants—it might be logical to disregard the lives of future generations if we assume that they (just like us) will ignore the wishes of their ancestors!

  Consider: it’s certainly important that we somewhat respect the financial wishes of the dead (trusts, foundations, inheritance, etc) rather than (as might seem logical at first glance) confiscating all their assets upon death. This is because being able to pass on wealth and create a durable legacy (like the Rockefeller Foundation or etc) is part of what motivates people to earn and invest for the future in the first place.

  By a similar logic, it might be important that we should also commit to respecting the cultural wishes of the dead, in order to somehow motivate people to take a more long-term outlook. As an off-the-cuff example, maybe a culture that emphasized respect for ancestors would be higher-fertility, since parents would know that their children would be more likely to carry forward their values than in today’s no-respect-for-past-generations culture.

  What links here?

  • Jackson Wagner's comment on What We Owe the Past by Austin Chen (5 May 2022 22:06 UTC; 6 points)

• Jackson Wagner 4 May 2022 8:00 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Ne­go­ti­at­ing Up and Down the Si­mu­la­tion Hier­ar­chy: Why We Might Sur­vive the Unal­igned Singularity

  I follow the logic but also find myself amused by the thought that “simulate every possible unfriendly AI”, which sounds like literally the worst civilizational policy choice ever (no matter how safe we think our containment plan might be), could possibly be considered a good idea.

• Jackson Wagner 14 Apr 2022 3:30 UTC

  4 points

  on: Make a Movie Show­ing Align­ment Failures

  Some recent discussion along similar lines: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​jsqTCrixFHEQsSTTj/​​13-ideas-for-new-existential-risk-movies-and-tv-shows-what

  https://​​www.slowboring.com/​​p/​​the-case-for-terminator-analogies?s=r

• Jackson Wagner 8 Apr 2022 20:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [An­swer] Why wasn’t sci­ence in­vented in China?

  As a fellow fan of Morris’s book, you might enjoy my alternate-history Song Dynasty parody post, “Why the East Rules”.

• Jackson Wagner 8 Apr 2022 20:02 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Daniel V’s comment on: Why did Europe con­quer the world?

  If you like entertaining reads and don’t mind just-so stories, you yourself might enjoy my Song Dynasty alternate-history parody post in the style of Why the West Rules (I did enjoy the actual book). Here’s “Why the East Rules”.

• Jackson Wagner 7 Apr 2022 7:25 UTC

  3 points

  on: The real rea­son Futarchists are doomed

  I agree that one of democracy’s core features is that it reduces conflict, and any future system of government should be designed with that in mind. Nevertheless, this post strikes me as foolish for several reasons:

  • Democracy rewards the majority of the people. But is the side with more raw numbers (even if just 51%) really the group best positioned to win a coup? I propose a new form of government, Money-Democracy, where you get votes equivalent to LN(your_net_worth). Now the rich and powerful are properly weighted as being more influential. Wouldn’t this be a better way of always crowning the faction most likely to win a fight? Does this mean that Money-Democracy would be a more stable form of government, and we should expect it to sweep the world any day now?

  • Futarchy means “vote on values, bet on beliefs”. Since you’re still voting on values, couldn’t you still do all your coalitional fights over who gets to determine the values that the prediction markets are optimizing for?

  • You say, “There’s no one, by default anyways, with the personal or psychological motivation inside the ‘futarchic’ system to oppose the majority coalition when it decides to act against the will of Metaculus.” But by that logic, nobody in the USA would oppose the majority coalition if it acted against the Supreme Court? Couldn’t a prediction-market branch of government be respected by the various factions, in the same way that the Supreme Court or Congressional Budget Office are reasonably respected by both parties in the USA? Your theory of democracy seems to predict total majoritarian dictatorship, but that isn’t what happens. A futarchy could similarly be supported by a system of checks and balances and societal norms.

  • Imagine that one country implements futarchy despite the fact that (I will admit) this is a difficult trick to pull off. But imagine that futarchy works great and that country soon develops unparalleled state capacity, economic growth, etc. Soon, other countries would be forced to follow suit—they’d have to either adopt futarchy themselves or be consigned to irrelevance. In my view, this is basically the process by which democracy took over from other forms of government—by growing faster and being more stable and providing citizens a better life. Citizens of nondemocratic nations see what they’re missing out on, and they agitate for change.

  • Empirically, not all democracies continually ratchet up to higher levels of civil rights. Some countries go in a very majoritarian direction as an off-ramp from democracy, like Hungary, Turkey, or India. Even among fully democratic countries, civil rights are at a high level but I’m not sure they’re all currently increasing. So I’m not sure what to make of that idea.

  • Imagine living in a country run by futarchy. The president (elected by the majority coalition) is supposed to handle foreign diplomacy, be the leader of the military, respond to crises, set the cultural tone for the nation, and help define the values function that the prediction markets implements. But one day the president tries to go against a futarchy ruling, saying “actually this law is null and void, the conditional prediction market that favored it is rigged, anyone can see that this would be a bad law!” Wouldn’t people freak out and the stock market drop (because the stock market knows that ignoring the prediction markets and making authoritarian power grabs is bad for business)? Wouldn’t people then get mad that the economy was doing poorly, and then vote out the president? Thus, “respect the prediction markets” would quickly become a well-reinforced norm in the society, since no president would want to tank the markets and get voted out. This is just the same as why Biden today doesn’t try to ignore congress or the supreme court.

• Jackson Wagner 6 Apr 2022 20:16 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: What Twit­ter fixes should we ad­vo­cate, now that Elon is on the board?

  The EA movement does indeed have the ear of people like Musk, and especially people like Dustin Moskovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, etc! I agree that getting billionaires on board with EA is a key objective, but at this point we’ve already done that a bit, and maybe the best way to get further billionaires on board is probably some combination of:

  • Doing great object-level stuff to show we’re worth funding.

  • Thinking up scalable uses of additional funds that could absorb literal billions, while retaining at least a pretty strong level of effectiveness.

  • Trying to influence elite culture to make the EA worldview more salient and prestigious and legible to billionaires and other powerful decisionmakers (like white house staffers, etc).

• Jackson Wagner 6 Apr 2022 16:56 UTC

  7 points

  on: What Twit­ter fixes should we ad­vo­cate, now that Elon is on the board?

  Instead of the current, AI-based system of content moderation, Twitter could experiment with different methods of community governance and judicial review.

  Imagine a system where AI auto-censorship decisions could be appealed by staking some karma-points on the odds that a community moderator would support the appeal if they reviewed it. Others could then stake their own karma points for or against, depending on how they thought the community moderator would rule. An actual community moderator would only have to be brought in for the most contentious cases where the betting markets are between, say, 30% and 70% -- this would make the system more scalable since most appeals would get resolved by the community without ever escalating to a moderator.

  You could then have multiple levels of appeals and judges, creating another market on whether some kind of Twitter Supreme Court would uphold the moderator’s decision. (The above idea is ripped directly from Robin Hanson but I can’t find the exact post where he describes it. It also resembles the dispute-resolution mechanism of the UMA crypto coin.)

  Making nuanced, human-based judgement scalable in this way could both directly improve the quality of twitter discourse, and help familiarize people with an innovative new social technology. Also, by creating a system of community governance instead of AI-based censorship, it might offer a superior middle path compared to the current “AI-based censorship vs 4chan anarchy” debates about social media content moderation.

• Jackson Wagner 6 Apr 2022 16:55 UTC

  24 points

  on: What Twit­ter fixes should we ad­vo­cate, now that Elon is on the board?

  Twitter could implement a play-money prediction market just like metaculus or manifold markets—they could even consider buying one of these teams. Ideally, starting or voting on a prediction market would be as easy as running a Twitter poll. (Reddit recently did something similar.) Having large, metaculus-style prediction markets on newsworthy events might directly help important online conversations become more productive, more reality-based, and less polarized. And in the long run, familiarizing people with how prediction markets work might also encourage/​legitimize the further adoption of prediction markets as information sources to inform decisionmaking.

• Jackson Wagner 6 Apr 2022 16:55 UTC

  6 points

  on: What Twit­ter fixes should we ad­vo­cate, now that Elon is on the board?

  Twitter could create an easy-to-use, secure voting infrastructure for use by student groups, nonprofits, small businesses, unions, and other relatively low-stakes situations where you mostly just want to get a reasonably trustworthy voting system up and running easily. Twitter could use this platform to advertise the merits of designs like approval voting and quadratic voting, boosting interest in those types of voting and building legitimacy for them to be adopted in higher-stakes contexts.

[Question] What Twit­ter fixes should we ad­vo­cate, now that Elon is on the board?

• Jackson Wagner 6 Apr 2022 0:36 UTC

  2 points

  on: Fore­cast­ing Newslet­ter: March 2022

  (Cross-posting my EA Forum comment out of the Goodness of my Heart)

  All investments go to zero in the case of existential risk, so it’s hard to price it correctly… I thought that the article was great, but I would have appreciated a more comprehensive treatment.

  You may be interested in reading my long-form (albeit meandering) thoughts on this exact issue! Here is the post, wherein I analyze and respond to an essay by Peter Thiel on this same subject of the interaction between markets and apocalyptic risks that would end those very markets. Among other things, I wonder if (precisely because markets are incentivized to ignore X-risk), we can somehow use markets (including specially-created prediction markets) to indirectly measure X-risk or related quantities.
  
  On the subject of Hanania’s “Why War Forecasting is Hard”, I’m surprised that he didn’t mention the unpredictable effects of… I’m not sure what to call this, maybe “preference cascades” or just the nature of coalitional fights? Experts & forecasters alike were surprised on the downside at how quickly the Afghanistan army gave up against the Taliban, and they were surprised on the upside at how stalwart the Ukrainian forces have been against Russia. I don’t think this is all just the physical complexity of war (ie, the difficulty of assessing whether tire maintenance is a crucial factor) or the difficulty of assessing deep cultural factors (“are Ukranians too westernized to be willing to fight”, “do Russians really consider Ukraine a part of their ancestral homeland”, and similar). It seems like the decision of whether to fight or give up is perhaps just a volatile and uncertain thing, dependent on social perception of which way the wind is blowing and whether other people have decided to fight or give up.
  
  ie, in another universe, if for whatever reason more Ukrainian leaders had fled the country (perhaps the government relocates from Kiev to Lviv) and there were fewer early stories of heroic resistance (like the tales about Snake Island, etc), perhaps many Ukranians would have started giving up and Russia would have had much more success with their invasion, despite no change whatsoever in the fundamental factors (military hardware or cultural stuff or etc). This is just my own pundit-like speculation, I know, but it strikes me as perhaps a more plausible explanation of why war forecasting might be especially/​uniquely tricky, compared to other similarly complex things like forecasting the success of a new rocket’s first launch or the growth of a nation’s economy—rockets and economies can be just as vexing as unmaintained tires!