Thank you. We’re reflecting on this and will reach out to have a conversation soon.
toonalfrink
Karma: 1,263
Apologies, that was a knee-jerk reply. I take it back: we did disagree about something.
We’re going to take some time to let all of this criticism sink in.
Looks like I didn’t entirely succeed in explaining our plan.
My recommendation was very concretely “try to build an internal model of what really needs to happen for AI-risk to go well” and very much not “try to tell other people what really needs to happen for AI-risk”, which is almost the exact opposite.
And that’s also what we meant. The goal isn’t to just give advice. The goal is to give useful and true advice, and this necessarily requires a model of what really needs to happen for AI risk.
We’re not just going to spin up some interesting ideas. That’s not the mindset. The mindset is to generate a robust model and take it from there, if we ever get that far.
We might be talking to people in the process, but as long as we are in the dark the emphasis will be on asking questions.
EDIT: this wasn’t a thoughtful reply. I take it back. See Ruby’s comments below
To what extent are these just features of low-trust and high-trust environments?
Assuming that these dimensions are the same, here’s my incomplete list of things that modulate trust levels:
Group size (smaller is easier to trust)
Average emotional intelligence
The quality of group memes that relate to emotions
Scarcity mindsets
The level of similarity of group members
Group identity
Some of these might screen off others. This model suggests that groups with healthy discourse tend to be small, affluent, emotionally mature and aligned.
Apart from social effects I get the impression that there are also psychological factors that modulate the tendency to trust, including:
Independence (of those that disagree)
Ambiguity tolerance
Agreeableness
_______
Different answer: one thing that I’ve seen work is to meet someone offline. People tend to be a lot more considerate after that
Still I think this line of thinking is extremely important because it means that people won’t agree with any proposal for a morality that isn’t useful for them, and keeping this in mind makes it a lot easier to propose moralities that will actually be adopted.
I agree with your conclusion, but feel like there’s some nuance lacking. In three ways.
1.
It seems that indeed a lot of our moral reasoning is confused because we fall for some kind of moral essentialism, some idea that there is an objective morality that is more than just a cultural contract that was invented and refined by humans over the course of time.
But then you reinstall this essentialism into our “preferences”, which you hold to be grounded in your feelings:
Human flourishing is good because the idea of human flourishing makes me smile. Kicking puppies is bad because it upsets me.
We recursively justify our values, and this recursion doesn’t end at the boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness. Your feelings might appear to be your basic units of value, but they’re not. This is obvious if you consider that our observation about the world often change our feelings.
Where does this chain of justifications end? I don’t know, but I’m reasonably sure about two things:
1) The bedrock of our values are probably the same for any human being, and any difference between conscious values is either due to having seen different data, but more likely due to different people situationally benefitting more under different moralities. For example a strong person will have “values” that are more accepting of competition, but that will change once they become weaker.
2) While a confused ethicist is wrong to be looking for a “true” (normative) morality, this is still better than not searching at all because you hold your conscious values to be basic. The best of both worlds is an ethicist that doesn’t believe in normative morality, but still knows there is something to be learned about the source of our values.
2.
Considering our evolutionary origins, it seems very unlikely to me that we are completely selfish. It seems a lot more likely to me that the source of our values is some proxy of the survival and spread of our genes.
You’re not the only one who carries your genes, and so your “selfish” preferences might not be completely selfish after all
3.
We’re a mashup of various subagents that want different things. I’d be surprised if they all had the same moral systems. Part of you might be reflective, aware of the valence of your experience, and actively (and selfishly) trying to increase it. Part of you will reflect your preferences for things that are very not-selfish. Other parts of you will just be naive deontologists.
Does that still lead to good outcomes though? I found that being motivated by my social role makes me a lot less effective because signalling and the actual thing come apart considerably. At least for the short term.
Sure.
It starts with the sense that, if something doesn’t feel viscerally obvious, there is something left to be explained.
It’s a bottom up process. I don’t determine that images will convince me, then think of some images and play them in front of me so that they will hopefully convince my s1.
Instead I “become” my s1, take on a skeptical attitude, and ask myself what the fuss is all about.
Warning: the following might give you nightmares, if you’re imaginative enough.
In this case, what happened was something like “okay, well I guess at some point we’re going to have pretty strong optimizers. Fine. So what? Ah, I guess that’s gonna mean we’re going to have some machines that carry out commands for us. Like what? Like *picture of my living room magically tidying itself up*. Really? Well yeah I can see that happening. And I suppose this magical power can also be pretty surprising. Like *blurry picture/sense of surprising outcome*. Is this possible? Yeah like *memory of this kind of surprise*. What if this surprise was like 1000x stronger? Oh fuck...”
I guess the point is that convincing a person, or a subagent, can be best explained as an internal decision to be convinced, and not as an outside force of convincingness. So if you want to convince a part of you that feels like something outside of you, then first you have to become it. You do this by sincerely endorsing whatever it has to say. Then if the part of you feels like you, you (formerly it) decide to re-evaluate the thing that the other subagent (formerly you) disagreed with.
A bit like internal double crux, but instead of going back and forth you just do one round. Guess you could call it internal ITT.
Have you lost your purpose?
which confuses me because it seems like worrying about being embarrassed is worrying about impressions?
What I meant to say is that I can tell that my work isn’t going to be very good from next year’s standards, which are better standards because they’re more informed
[Question] What is a good moment to start writing?
I expect that there are metrics that screen off gender so we can have better predictions and also circumvent the politics of doing anything related to gender
[Question] What features of people do you know of that might predict academic success?
My impression is that money can only lower prestige if the amount is low relative to an anchor.
For example a $3000 prize would be high prestige if it’s interpreted as an award, but low prestige if it’s interpreted as a salary.
Besides the subsystems making their own predictions, there might also be a meta-learning system keeping track of which other subsystems tend to make the most accurate predictions in each situation, giving extra weight to the bids of the subsystem which has tended to perform the best in that situation.
This is why I eat junk food, sans guilt. I don’t want my central planning subagent to lose influence over unimportant details. Spend your weirdness points wisely.
Yeah, otherwise you’re not narrowing down one person’s beliefs, but possibly going back and forth.
I’d expect that option to be bad overall. I might just be justifying an alief here, but it seems to me that closing a set of people off entirely will entrench you in your beliefs.
We have dorms that are purely dedicated to short term paying guests. This allows us to honestly tell people that they’re always welcome. I think that’s great.
The funniest part is that I have a friend who really talks like this. We often listen to what he has to say intently to try to parse any meaning from it, but it seems like he’s either too far beyond us or just mad (I’d say both). Guess I have a new nickname for him
Because some people might already be at this level, and I worry that I’m just adding noise to their signal.
Maybe my question is this: given that, every year, I unexpectedly learn important considerations that discredit my old beliefs, how can I tell that my models are further along this process than those written by others?