Kevin Lacker

Karma: 50

Kevin Lacker 6 Nov 2025 23:06 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: jacquesthibs’s comment on: jacquesthibs’s Shortform
I don’t think you need a vision for how to solve the entire alignment problem yourself. It’s setting the bar too high. When you start a startup, you can’t possibly have the whole plan laid out up front. You’re going to change it as you go along, as you get feedback from users and discover what people really need.
What you can do is make sure that your startup’s incentives are aligned correctly at the start. Solve your own alignment. The most important questions here are, who is your customer? and how do you make money?
For example, if you make money by selling e-commerce ads against a consumer product, the incentives on your company will inevitably push you toward making a more addictive, more mass-market product.
For another example, if you make money by selling services to companies training AI models, your company’s incentives will be to broaden the market as much as possible, help all sorts of companies train all sorts of AI models, and offer all the sorts of services they want.
In the long run, it seems like companies often follow their own natural incentives, more than they follow the personal preferences of the founder.
All of this makes it tricky to start a pro-alignment company but I think it is worth trying because when people do create a successful company it creates a nexus of smart people and money to spend that can attack a lot of problems that aren’t possible in the “nonprofit research” world.

Kevin Lacker 19 Dec 2023 17:36 UTC
3 points
1
on: How have you become more hard-working?
In high school, college, and graduate school I was not very hard working. But when I left school and started working in the tech industry I suddenly became very hard working. At first, I was surrounded by hard workers who were very smart, and I was very competitive, so I wanted to be one of the best. Over time, these other hard workers became my friends, and since we were all working together on hard projects, other people came to depend on me. If I said I would have X done by the end of the week, and I didn’t get it done, my friends would be disappointed. But if I got X done and also got Y done, my friends would be excited and proud of me.
In school none of my friends ever really cared whether I got something done or not. Everyone is just working on their own thing.
Once I spent several years being very hard working I got into the habit and it became easier for me to also work hard in situations like startups where I had to rely on myself more to drive things forwards. Then, once you get good at working hard, you often want to create an environment that makes everyone else work hard, too.
So my main advice is to find a job where your coworkers are both very smart and very hard working.

Kevin Lacker 23 Jun 2022 20:44 UTC
6 points
0
on: Nonprofit Boards are Weird
I think you actually do not have very much power as a board member. During normal operations, you can give advice to the CEO, but you have no power beyond the “access to the CEO”. If the CEO resigns or is being forced out, you briefly have an important power, but it is a very narrow power, the ability to find and vote in a replacement CEO.
The position is very public and respected so it may feel like “a lot of power” but quite often even a mid level employee at the organization has more real power over the direction of the company than a board member does.

Kevin Lacker 21 Nov 2020 6:20 UTC
7 points
0
on: AGI Predictions
I suspect this question is misworded:
Will there be a 4 year interval in which world GDP growth doubles before the first 1 year interval in which world GDP growth doubles?
Do you mean in which world GDP doubles? World GDP growth doubles when it goes from, say, 0.5% yearly growth to 1% yearly growth.
Personally, I suspect world GDP is most likely to next double in a period after a severe war or depression, so you might want to rephrase to avoid that scenario if that isn’t what you’re thinking about.

Kevin Lacker 21 Nov 2020 0:38 UTC
6 points
0
on: Persuasion Tools: AI takeover without AGI or agency?
I believe there already is a powerful AI persuasion tool: the Facebook algorithm. It is attempting to persuade you to stay on Facebook, to keep reading Facebook so that their “engagement” metrics are optimized. Indeed, many of the world’s top AI researchers are employed in building this tool. So far it is focused much more on ranking than on text generation, but if AI text generation improves to the extent that it’s interesting for humans to read, I would expect Facebook to incorporate that into newsfeed. AI-generated “news summaries” might be one area that this happens first.

Kevin Lacker 21 Nov 2020 0:32 UTC
3 points
0
on: Hiding Complexity
I don’t think the metaphor about writing code works. You say, “Imagine a company has to solve a problem that takes about 900,000 lines of code.” But in practice, a company never possesses that information. They know what problem they have to solve, but not how many lines of code it will take. Certainly not when it’s on the order of a million lines.
For example, let’s say you’re working for a pizza chain that already does delivery, and you want to launch a mobile app to let people order your food. You can decompose that into parts pretty reasonably—you need an iOS app, you need an Android app, and you need an API into your existing order management system that the mobile apps can call. But how are you going to know how many lines of code those subproblems are? It probably isn’t helpful to think about it in that way.
The factoring into subproblems also doesn’t quite make sense in this example: “Your team still has to implement 300k lines of code, but regardless of how difficult this is, it’s only marginally harder than implementing a project that consists entirely of 300k lines.” In this case, if you entirely ignore the work done by other teams, the Android app will actually get harder, because you can’t just copy over the design work that’s already been done by the iOS team. I feel like all the pros and cons of breaking a problem into smaller parts are lost by this high-level way of looking at it.
My null hypothesis about this area of “factored cognition” would be that useful mechanisms of factoring a problem into multiple smaller problems are common, but they are entirely dependent on the specific nature of the problem you are solving.

Kevin Lacker 21 Nov 2020 0:15 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: How do you evaluate whether a $500 donation to a project that you know well is a good idea?
I would not spend $500 on such an event because an event held by my local rationality community doesn’t seem very important to me. You may have a different opinion about your $500 and your local rationality community and that’s fine.

Kevin Lacker 20 Nov 2020 7:04 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Should we postpone AGI until we reach safety?
We could in theory try to kill all AI researchers (or just go whole hog and try to kill all software engineers, better safe than sorry /s).
I think this is a good way of putting it. Many people in the debate refer to “regulation”. But in practice, regulation is not very effective for weaponry. If you look at how the international community handles dangerous weapons like nuclear weapons, there are many cases of assassinations, bombing, and war in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. This is what it would look like if the world was convinced that AI research was an existential threat—a world where work on AI happens in secret, in private military programs, with governments making the decisions, and participants are risking their lives. Probably the US and China would race to be the first one to achieve AGI dominance, gambling that they would be able to control the software they produced.

Kevin Lacker 20 Nov 2020 1:01 UTC
1 point
0
on: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism and Medicare for All?
If the government is going to mandate something, it should also pay for it.
This isn’t really how government mandates work. The government mandates that you wear seat belts in cars, but it doesn’t pay for seat belts. The government mandates that all companies going public follow the SEC regulations on reporting, but it doesn’t pay for that reporting to happen. The government mandates that restaurants regularly clean up the floor, but it doesn’t pay for janitors. The government mandates that you wear clothes in public, but it doesn’t buy you clothes. Etc, etc.
So I think your intuition is simple, but it largely does not map to reality.

Kevin Lacker 20 Nov 2020 0:58 UTC
LW: 5 AF: 2
0
AF
on: Inner Alignment in Salt-Starved Rats
Now, for the rats, there’s an evolutionarily-adaptive goal of “when in a salt-deprived state, try to eat salt”. The genome is “trying” to install that goal in the rat’s brain. And apparently, it worked! That goal was installed! And remarkably, that goal was installed even before that situation was ever encountered!
I don’t think this is remarkable. Plenty of human activities work this way, where some goal has been encoded through evolution. For example, heterosexual teenage boys often find teenage girls to be attractive and want to get them naked, even before they have ever managed to do it successfully, without a true conscious understanding of their eventual goals. Or babies know to seek out nipple-shaped objects, before they have ever interacted with a nipple.

Kevin Lacker 20 Nov 2020 0:49 UTC
8 points
0
on: How do you evaluate whether a $500 donation to a project that you know well is a good idea?
It just really depends on what the project is. If there were some generic way to evaluate all $500 donations, then some centralized organization would be doing that already. You have to use your own personal, human judgment.

Kevin Lacker 20 Nov 2020 0:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: otto.barten’s comment on: Should we postpone AGI until we reach safety?
You can change the world, sure, but not by making a heartfelt appeal to the United Nations. You have to be thoughtful, which means you pick tactics with some chance of success. Appealing to stop AI work is out of the political realm of possibility right now.

Kevin Lacker 20 Nov 2020 0:39 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: What could one do with truly unlimited computational power?
The first algorithm I would use is this, to solve problems of mimicking a function with provided inputs and outputs:
For all possible programs of length less than X, run that program on the inputs for time Y. Then measure how close it comes to the outputs. The closest program is then your model.
This takes time O(Y*2^X) so it’s impractical in the world we live in, but in this hypothetical world it would work pretty well. This only solves the “classification” or “modeling” type of machine learning problems, rather than reinforcement learning per se, but that seems pretty good to start.
For reinforcement learning, it just depends what you’d want to do in general. I would not just build a general AI and give it access to the internet, any more than I would bring an army of teenagers over to my house and give them access to my car and wallet. If you really had a super-powerful AI then I think the best way of increasing its practical capabilities over time while controlling it would be like any other technology—start a tech company, raise money, think of a business model, and just see what happens. That strategy seems way more likely that you could retain control over the technology and continue to express your own moral judgment over time. Compare to, for example, the scientists developing nuclear weapons, who quickly lost control to politicians. Maybe you could build a new search engine—that seems like it could be a lot better with real AI behind it.

Kevin Lacker 19 Nov 2020 7:45 UTC
0 points
0
on: Should we postpone AGI until we reach safety?
It seems like there is very little chance that you could politically stop work on AGI. Who would you appeal to—China, the U.S., and the United Nations would all have to agree? There just isn’t anywhere near the political consensus necessary for it. The general consensus is that any risk is very small, that it’s the sort of thing only a few weirdos on the internet worry about. That consensus would have to change before it makes any sense to ask questions like, should we postpone all AGI research indefinitely. I think we need to accept that worry about AGI is a fringe belief, and therefore we should pursue strategies that can have an impact despite it being a fringe belief.

Kevin Lacker 17 Nov 2020 7:52 UTC
6 points
0
on: Propinquity Cities So Far
Isn’t this what real estate developers do? You buy up some land somewhere that is a combination of inexpensive and desirable, like Dallas or Jacksonville. Then you attract people by building housing there. The land is cheap, you just have to move to the exurbs in a red state. You can set up a homeowners association with a wide variety of rules, although I suspect that the optimal ones may be closer to the way homeowners associations currently operate, rather than the decisionmaking procedures you propose here. But it has been a flexible enough process to build things like carless cities or cities aimed at the needs of senior citizens.

Kevin Lacker 12 Nov 2020 8:21 UTC
4 points
0
on: What could one do with truly unlimited computational power?
You could probably make drastic improvements in AI, because you could do extremely expensive things like modeling any function by minimizing its Kolmogorov complexity. I bet you could develop superhuman AI within a day, if given access to a computer with 2^2^100 clock speed.

Kevin Lacker 11 Nov 2020 21:19 UTC
3 points
0
on: Ongoing free money at PredictIt
I started the process to accept this free money, but once I read enough of the fine print I bailed. Basically, if PredictIt is taking a 5% cut of my withdrawals, then I’m going to lose money if it so happens that I can’t get enough of this contract. It feels more like even-money gambling, where I lose if the PredictIt market happens to lose liquidity by the time they verify me, and I win if I actually fill out all the forms in time. If there were more money at stake, maybe I’d work a bit harder to jump through all the hoops, but it just isn’t worth it to riskily earn $20.

Kevin Lacker 11 Nov 2020 8:11 UTC
4 points
0
on: What Would Advanced Social Technology Look Like?
The most important social technology we have is government. Government has a very important role: to prevent members of the same country from killing each other. The biggest flaw in our current government technology is that we have no good system for coming to agreement among the 200-ish countries in the world. We have had the UN for the past 75 years, but there have still been plenty of wars and plenty of fears of nuclear war, and there’s still a good chance of nuclear war in the future. Nations still spend large amounts of money on armies that are essentially wasted from the point of view of humanity overall.
A more advanced social technology would prevent war among countries, at far less expense than the current expenditures on armies, but more importantly with a lower chance of global nuclear war. We need some political way to consistently resolve international conflicts without having them spill over into war. It’s somewhere between legal technology, mechanism design, and coordination technology on your list.