Currently doing the SERI MATS 4.0 Training Program (multipolar stream). Former summer research fellow at Center on Long-Term Risk, former intern at Center for Reducing Suffering, Wild Animal Initiative, Animal Charity Evaluators. Former co-head of Haverford Effective Altruism.
Research interests: • AI alignment • animal advocacy from a longtermist perspective • acausal interactions • artificial sentience • s-risks • updatelessness
Feel free to contact me for whatever reason! You can set up a meeting with me here.
JamesFaville
I feel conflicted about this post. Its central point as I’m understanding it is that much evidence we commonly encounter in varied domains is only evidence about the abundance of extremal values in some distribution of interest, and whether/how we should update our beliefs about the non-extremal parts of the distribution is very much dependent on our prior beliefs or gears-level understanding of the domain. I think this is a very important idea, and this post explains it well.
Also, felt inspired to search out other explanations of the moments of a distribution—this one looks pretty good to me so far.
On the other hand, the men’s rights discussion felt out of place to me, and unnecessarily so since I think other examples would be able to work just as well. Might be misjudging how controversial various points you bring up are, but as of now I’d rather see topics of this level of potential political heat discussed in personal blogposts or on other platforms, so long as they’re mostly unrelated to central questions of interest to rationalists / EAs.
Possible low-hanging fruit: name tags.
This is super interesting!
Quick typo note (unless I’m really misreading something): in your setups, you refer to coins that are biased towards tails, but in your analyses, you talk about the coins as though they are biased towards heads.One is the “cold pool”, in which each coin comes up 1 (i.e. heads) with probability 0.1 and 0 with probability 0.9. The other is the “hot pool”, in which each coin comes up 1 with probability 0.2
random coins with heads-probability 0.2
We started with only tails
full compression would require roughly tails, and we only have about
Why should we say that someone has “information empathy” instead of saying they possess a “theory of mind”?
Possible reasons: “theory of mind” is an unwieldy term, it might be useful to distinguish in fewer words a theory of mind with respect to beliefs from a theory of mind with respect to preferences, you want to emphasise a connection between empathy and information empathy.
I think if there’s established terminology for something we’re interesting in discussing, there should be a pretty compelling reason why it doesn’t suffice for us.
It felt weird to me to describe shorter timeline projections as “optimistic” and longer ones as “pessimistic”- AI research taking place over a longer period is going to be more likely to give us friendly AI, right?
Is skilled hunting unethical?
There is another very important component of dying with dignity not captured by the probability of success: the badness of our failure state. While any alignment failure would destroy much of what we care about, some alignment failures would be much more horrible than others. Probably the more pessimistic we are about winning, the more we should focus on losing less absolutely (e.g. by researching priorities in worst-case AI safety).
I’m downvoting this post because I don’t understand it even after your reply above, and the amount of negative karma currently on the post indicates to me that it’s probably not my fault. It’s possible to write a poetic and meaningful post about a topic and pleasant when someone has done so well, but I think you’re better off first trying to state explicitly whatever you’re trying to state to make sure the ideas are fundamentally plausible. I’m skeptical that meditations on a topic of this character are actually helpful to truth-seeking, but I might be typical-minding you.
[Question] How should I talk about optimal but not subgame-optimal play?
I feel like scope insensitivity is something to worry about here. I’d be really happy to learn that humanity will manage to take good care of our cosmic endowment but my happiness wouldn’t scale properly with the amount of value at stake if I learned we took good care of a super-cosmic endowment. I think that’s the result of my inability to grasp the quantities involved rather than a true reflection of my extrapolated values, however.
My concern is more that reasoning about entities in simpler universes capable of conducting acausal trades with us will turn out to be totally intractable (as will the other proposed escape methods), but since I’m very uncertain about that I think it’s definitely worth further investigation. I’m also not convinced Tegmark’s MUH is true in the first place, but this post is making me want to do more reading on the arguments in favor & opposed. It looks like there was a Rationally Speaking episode about it?
I’m downvoting this because it appears to be a low-effort post which doesn’t contribute or synthesize any interesting ideas. Prime Intellect is the novel that first comes to mind as discussing some of what you’re talking about, but several chapters are very disturbing, and there’s probably better examples out there. If you have Netflix, San Junipero (Season 3 Episode 4) of Black Mirror is fantastic and very relevant.
I like this post’s brevity, its usefulness, and the nice call-to-action at the end.
The subjunctive mood and really anything involving modality is complicated. Paul Portner has a book on mood which is probably a good overview if you’re willing to get technical. Right now I think of moods as expressing presuppositions on the set of possible worlds you quantify over in a clause. I don’t think it’s often a good idea to try to get people to speak a native language in a way incompatible with the language as they acquired it in childhood; it adds extra cognitive load and probably doesn’t affect how people reason (the exception being giving them new words and categories, which I think can clearly help reasoning in some circumstances).
These are a blast!
What I’m taking away from this is that if (i) it is possible for child universes to be created from parent universes, and if (ii) the “fertility” of a child universe is positively correlated with that of its parent universe, then we should expect to live in a universe which will create lots of fertile child universes, whether this is accomplished through a natural process or as you suggest through inhabitants of the universe creating fertile child universes artificially.
I think that’s a cool concept, and I wrote a quick Python script for a toy model to play around with. Your consequences seem kind of implausible to me though (I might try to write more on that later).
I found the last six paragraphs of this piece extremely inspiring, to the extent that I think it nonnegligably raised the likelihood that I’ll be taking “exceptional action” myself. I didn’t personally connect much with the first part, though it was interesting. Did you used to want to want your reaction to idiocy be “‘how can I help’”, even when it wasn’t?
The case against “geospermia” here is vastly overstated: there’s been a lot of research over the past decade or two establishing very plausible pathways for terrestrial abiogensis. If you’re interested, read through some work coming out of Jack Szostak’s lab (there’s a recent review article here). I’m not as familiar with the literature on prebiotic chemistry as I am with the literature on protocell formation, but I know we’ve found amino acids on meteorites, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they and perhaps some other molecules which are important to life were introduced to earth through meteorites rather than natural syntheses.
But in terms of cell formation, the null hypothesis should probably be that it occured on Earth. Panspermia isn’t ridiculous per se, but conditions on Earth appear to have been much more suitable for cell formation than those of the surrounding neighborhood, and sufficiently suitable that terrestrial abiogensis isn’t implausible in the least. When it comes to ways in which there could be wild-animal suffering on a galactic scale, I think the possibility of humans spreading life through space colonization is far more concerning.
Also, Zubrin writes:
Furthermore, it needs to be understood that the conceit that life originated on Earth is quite extraordinary. There are over 400 billion of stars in our galaxy, with multiple planets orbiting many of them. There are 51 billion hectares on Earth. The probability that life first originated on Earth, rather than another world, is thus comparable to the probability that the first human on our planet was born on any particular 0.1 hectare lot chosen at random, for example my backyard. It really requires evidence, not merely an excuse for lack of evidence, to be supported.
This is poor reasoning. A better metaphor would be that we’re looking at a universe with no water except for a small pond somewhere, and wondering where the fish that currently live in that pond evolved. If water is so rare, why shouldn’t we be confused that the pond exists in the first place? Anthropic principle (but be careful with this). Disclaimer: Picking this out because I thought it was the most interesting part in the piece, not because I went looking for bad metaphors.
As a meta-note, I was a little suspicious of this piece based on some bad signaling (the bio indicates potential bias, tables are made through screenshots, the article looks like it wants to be in a journal but is hosted on a private blog). I don’t like judging things based on potentially spurious signals, but this might have nevertheless biased me a bit and I’m updating slightly in the direction of those signals being valuable.
Have a look at 80K’s (very brief) career profile for party politics. My rough sense is that efective altruists generally agree that pursuing elected office can be a very high-impact career path for individuals particularly well-suited to it, but think that even with an exceptional candidate succeeding is very difficult.
Another way interpretability work can be harmful: some means by which advanced AIs could do harm require them to be credible. For example, in unboxing scenarios where a human has something an AI wants (like access to the internet), the AI might be much more persuasive if the gatekeeper can verify the AI’s statements using interpretability tools. Otherwise, the gatekeeper might be inclined to dismiss anything the AI says as plausibly fabricated. (And interpretability tools provided by the AI might be more suspect than those developed beforehand.)
It’s unclear to me whether interpretability tools have much of a chance of becoming good enough to detect deception in highly capable AIs. And there are promising uses of low-capability-only interpretability—like detecting early gradient hacking attempts, or designing an aligned low-capability AI that we are confident will scale well. But to the extent that detecting deception in advanced AIs is one of the main upsides of interpretability work people have in mind (or if people do think that interpretability tools are likely to scale to highly capable agents by default), the downsides of those systems being credible will be important to consider as well.
I’ve seen this discussed before by Rob Wiblin and Lewis Bollard on the 80,000 Hours podcast (edit: tomsittler actually beat me to the punch in mentioning this).
I encourage anyone interested to listen to this part of the podcast or read it in the transcript, but it seems clear to me right now that it will be far easier to develop clean meat which is widely adopted than to create wireheaded chickens whose meat is widely adopted.
In particular, I think that implementing these strategies from the OP will be at least as difficult as creating clean meat:
breed animals who enjoy pain, not suffer from it
breed animals that want to be eaten, like the Ameglian Major Cow from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I think that getting these strategies widely adopted is at least as difficult as getting enough welfare improvements widely adopted to make non-wireheaded chicken lives net-positive
identify and surgically or chemically remove the part of the brain that is responsible for suffering
at birth, amputate the non-essential body parts that would give the animals discomfort later in life
I think that breeding for smaller brains is not worthwhile because smaller brain size does not guarentee reduced suffering capacity and getting it widely adopted by chicken breeders is not obviously easier than getting many welfare improvements widely adopted.
I’m not as confident that injecting chickens with opioids would be a bad strategy, but getting this widely adopted by chicken farms is not obviously easier to me than getting many other welfare improvements widely adopted. I would be curious to see the details of the study romeostevensit mentioned, but my intuition is that outrage at that practice would far exceed outrage at current factory farm practices because of “unnaturalness”, which would make adoption difficult even if the cost of opioids is low.