I’m seeing more obviously AI-generated graphics in the neighborhood, too — people who advertise their yard sale or block party with ChatGPT graphics. To my eye, these would be better served by the traditional media of marker-on-cardboard; at least if part of what is to be conveyed is “we are your neighbors, not a SaaS company or something.”
Karl Krueger
Karma: 1,817
“well, obviously, we don’t believe our own methods.”
I am reminded of Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and Rush’s “Freewill”.
Refusing to follow a documented method is not the same as not having a method. You still have a method! It’s just the method of — what was it? Oh, right:
[G]o into a small room, sit down, and proceed to argue with one another for several hours over utterly ridiculous things each candidate said or did, until eventually everyone was worn out and just settled for whichever candidate they were all able to barely tolerate.
If you’re going to disbelieve in “[y]our own methods”, why believe in that method? Why believe in the “structureless” method, the method of personal exhaustion, which likely disadvantages absolutely every other possible value?
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. [...]
For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. “Structurelessness” is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one.
— Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (1970)
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!
— Rush, “Freewill” (1980)
At least deontological theories propose specific precepts about what is probably good: not murdering, not stealing, and so on. All of those are on the table if you’re a utilitarian and that makes you someone I don’t want to be around or to have moral authority over me.
Utilitarianism says that murdering is bad because it reduces utility. You’re concerned that if murdering increased utility, then utilitarianism would endorse murdering.
But doesn’t that objection apply to deontology too? Deontology says that murdering is bad because you have a duty to refrain from murdering. So we should be concerned about circumstances in which a person would infer that they have a duty to murder.
In practice, there are cases where people come to believe that doing a particular murder would increase utility … and there are also cases in which people come to believe that they have a duty to murder. Some serial killers, spree killers, and terrorists seem to hold this position. The guy who threw the firebomb at Sam Altman’s house seems to have held this position: that consistency entailed a duty to use violent force.
So are utilitarians really worse to be around, or to exercise moral authority, than deontologists? They seem to suffer very similar failure cases! Perhaps what we should care about is not whether people are utilitarians or deontologists, but rather whether they have the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now.
https://bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/ AI personality quiz. (I got “The True Believer”.)
This is interesting, folks. It’s a variation on the Political Compass, but with axes of “AI will be good / bad” and “AI is transformative / overhyped”.
I’m on the fence between “The Kontextmaschine” and “The Doomsday Prepper” today, though I expect my position wobbles around a lot based on events. If I put on my most optimistic hat, assume that people in the labs and in politics are going to make better choices than I actually expect and that alignment is easier than I expect, I get “The Garage Tinkerer”.
On reflection after discussing scores with a few friends, I think that there’s a problem here that makes it give erroneously high +good scores for people with a certain range of views, which includes me. If you believe “it’s probably going to kill us, but it’s philosophically interesting, current systems are sometimes fun to mess around with, and many of the negative stories about impacts are inaccurate,” you’ll get a score that doesn’t adequately reflect the severity of “it’s probably going to kill us”.
Mito$i$.
In traditional AI, Russell & Norvig define “agent” broadly. Other senses of “agent” and “agency” (ethical, financial, psychological, CFAR-handbook, etc.) do not seem to point at a unified concept, but at a wide range of traits and descriptions. Agents₁ can be agents₂ without being agents₃.
Edward: My favorite color is magenta.
Francine: Holy crap, you’re so neurotypical even your favorite color isn’t on the spectrum.
There’s a demarcation problem: what is woo and what isn’t? Is woo even a useful category?
I put horoscopes solidly on the woo side; I put many forms of meditation solidly on the non-woo side. But I know folks who disagree on meditation; or on some meditation. I’ve seen people describe Focusing, Circling, and other practices that have been taught at CFAR workshops as woo. There’s probably someone out there who thinks that group singing is woo, because after all, religious people do it!
I doubt that “woo” is a useful category for community policy-making of the sort implied by “kicking the woo people out”. (Who are “the woo people” anyway? Are QRI “woo people”?)
It would be more useful to critique particular practices or traditions; or to try to come up with some more cruxworthy demarcations … and probably not in the context of the threat of kicking anyone out (of what exactly?).
(A different take: Goetia is woo. Double-entry bookkeeping is not woo. Everything else is somewhere in between.)
It sounds like one relevant concept is civil society institutions, which includes religious groups but also charities, clubs, activist groups, volunteer organizations, trade unions, blogging circles, etc.; broadly, all the social institutions that are not government or business.
But that’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if the mad scientist is telling the truth; your strategy is still to maximize the number of survivors capable of seeking justice.
See, you think the mad scientist is putting you in a game-theory thought-experiment with a weird symmetry-breakage. I think the mad scientist is putting himself in a game-theory thought-experiment with a weird symmetry-breakage. And people shouldn’t go around doing that!
It is really important to distinguish “risks and costs I am willing to take on myself” and “risks and costs I am willing to impose upon others.”
But I don’t think Umesh’s airport rule is saying the thing you’re concerned about; and if people are using it that way, they’re missing the point of it. It’s not a license to impose costs on others through risky behavior; it’s a caution about paying arbitrarily large costs to avert risks to yourself.
(If you arrive late to the airport, you don’t get to cut the queue to make your flight, imposing costs on others. You just have to accept missing your flight. And the airline lets a standby passenger take your seat, so at least someone is better off.)
Similarly, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero doesn’t mean that the optimal amount of fraud for you to commit is non-zero. It just means that we (economy participants, regulators, etc.) shouldn’t spend arbitrarily large amounts of resources to drive fraud to zero. The optimal amount of fraud for you to commit is still zero; but you shouldn’t be made to pay arbitrarily large accounting & audit costs to prove that you’re not defrauding anyone.
Why on earth should we believe what the mad scientist says? In the proposed scenario, he has all the power; he can tell us anything and then do something different. We should each commit to doing whatever seems like it will free the most of us to get revenge upon him, so that any future mad scientists will not abduct people for their mad experiments.
I wonder if it matters who’s asking? That’s a US federal government survey, and the expressed attitudes of the federal government (or even specifically the CDC) towards LGBTQ+ people have changed a good deal over the course of the years described. I can imagine some people freely say “yeah, I’m kinda bi” to their friends and family, but are more hesitant to say that to the government.
I think we can be quite sure that people’s preferences are not fixed.
People develop tastes, kinks, obsessions, traumas, fond memories, resentments, habits, lusts, hatreds, addictions, etc. that they did not previously have. These are, broadly, not discoveries of something preëxisting about the self; they are rather alterations or developments of the self.
If someone becomes addicted to heroin, it’s not just that they discovered a preëxisting preference for heroin; the effects of the drug and their use of it altered their preferences. The same person, if they hadn’t decided to take heroin, would have ended up with different preferences.
And if someone gets into meditation or therapy, and undoes some of their hangups or anxieties, it’s not that they discovered they really didn’t care about those things. They altered themselves into someone who doesn’t care about them.
(The same goes for more mundane preferences. If you have a favorite book, movie, game, dessert, etc., well, in the alternate timeline where you weren’t ever exposed to that particular thing, you would have a different favorite. Your preference was created, not discovered.)
An old acquaintance once told me: “I will never try cocaine, because I already like it, I just don’t know I do.” He preferred to leave his concept of the pleasures of cocaine in Mary’s room, intellectually understood but not personally experienced. He predicted substantial downsides to exploring that bit of preference space.
It is sometimes quite possible to self-modify to give yourself wants, desires, or values that you did not previously have.
I am not sure we can clearly separate these questions:
Self-knowledge: Do I have an unknown desire for X?
Self-modification: Could I develop a desire for X, if I try?
A traditional understanding of virtue and vice says that it is better to explore virtues and avoid exploring vices, because practicing either one will modify you. “Which wolf wins? Whichever one you feed.” “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” “Lead us not unto temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Readers interested in this subject might also want to consult Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006) on the ethical, religious, and legal arguments surrounding abolition.
That policy has to do with bringing new editors into a dispute among editors to shout down the other side, or to influence a vote or consensus-seeking process. It doesn’t disparage inviting new editors to join a WikiProject or similar constructive effort, even if the topic of that effort may be controversial somewhere.
It is said that a certain prince, after observing that other less-fortunate circumstances were much more likely than his own, went on to become the Buddha — a position even less likely than his original one.
I’m more worried about the one that decides that dropping big rocks on Earth is its version of an orgasm.
Edited to add: I see a confused reaction, so I’ll explain the joke. niplav’s comment is a reference to a remark by Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long. Mine is a reference to the sapient AI in a different Heinlein novel.)
Of course the full quote uses a “not just X but Y and Z”, a perfectly cromulent construction which has become notorious slop sign.