I’m an artist, writer, and human being.
To be a little more precise: I make video games, edit Wikipedia, and write here on LessWrong!
Yitz
Karma: 1,881
Yes, pretty much exactly this—paternalism is a great frame for thinking about how people seem to be perceiving what’s going on; even if you don’t personally experience that vibe, it seems a significant percentage of the population, if not a majority, do.
I’m tempted....
I hope the fact I like listening to songs where the singer role-plays as a supervillain isn’t affecting me that way lol
I understand not being interested in hearing negative outsider takes, but may I ask why it makes you sad to see negative quotes from Twitter here? For some context as to why I included those tweets, the worldview I’m coming from is one where outside perception can strongly affect our ability to carry out future plans (in governance, getting people to agree to shared safety standards, etc.), and as such it seems worth paying attention to the state of adversarial discourse in influential circles (especially when we can practically effect that discourse). If there’s good reason not to specifically quote from twitter, however, I’d be happy to remove it/relegate to footnotes/use different sources.
I have 1,733 Karma (as of typing this) and don’t feel like I’m particularly well-known on this forum, for some context
I opted out as well; it seems like the best course of action to take if I really don’t want to press the button
Public-facing Censorship Is Safety Theater, Causing Reputational Damage
I don’t have a direct answer to your question, so for now let’s say that AI will not in fact “want” anything if not explicitly asked. This seems plausible to me, but also totally irrelevant from a practical perspective—who’s going to build an entire freakin’ superintelligence, and then just never have it do do anything!? In order for a program to even communicate words or data to us it’s going to need to have some sort of drive to do so, since otherwise it would remain silent and we’d effectively have a very expensive silicon brick on our hands. So while in theory it may be possible to build an AI without wants, in practice there is always something an AI will be “trying to do”.
Strong upvote for the great question—I don’t have a definite answer for you, and would potentially be willing to concede the “universality” of human brains by your definition. I’m not sure how much that changes anything, though. For all practical purposes, I think we’re in agreement that, say, most complex computational problems can’t be solved by humans within a reasonable timeframe, but could be solved by a sufficiently large superintelligence fairly quickly.
Yep! I wasn’t really asking for medical advice, looking more for tips on how to deal with the social/psychological aspect of the experience, which is cause-irrelevant.
Yeah, Slifkin is great. If you want a steelmanned version of the view against his perspective btw, I recommend “Torah, Chazal, and Science,” by Rabbi Moshe Meiselman. He takes a really interesting fundamentalist, but also very scholarly view that I haven’t really heard spelled out explicitly elsewhere.
I hadn’t heard of periodontitis causing brain fog; I don’t think I have that, but interesting! I have had Covid, but for much longer than that have had similar symptoms (though it may have gotten worse recently). I do also have POTS (exact cause unknown, but clinically quite measurable symptoms), and am taking a whole bunch of medication for that, so there’s always potential for side effects there....my health life is complicated!
I’ve been having a week where it feels like my IQ has been randomly lowered by ~20 points or so. This happens to me sometimes, I believe as a result of chronic health stuff (hard to say for sure though), and it’s always really scary when that occurs. Much of my positive self-image relies on seeing myself as the sort of person who is capable of deep thought, and when I find myself suddenly unable to parse a simple paragraph, or reply coherently to a conversation, I just… idk, it’s (ironically enough) hard to put into words just how viscerally freaky it is to suddenly become (comparatively) stupid. Does anyone else here experience anything similar? If so, how do you deal with it?
There’s an ancient rabbinic saying that “The Torah spoke in the language of men”—that is, when faced with confusing language in the bible, one should look at what the common vernacular was at the time that it was written. I should note that historically not everyone has agreed with that thesis, but it’s the majority opinion in Orthodox Jewish circles when trying to figure out practical issues like this one. If you want to learn more about how Jewish theology treats this and similar issues dealing with animals and seemingly impossible legends, I highly recommend the writings of Rabbi Natan Slifkin (though his particular views are sometimes considered controversial).
I noticed that you began this post by saying
Occasionally people say “hey, alignment research has lots of money behind it now, why not fund basically everyone who wants to try it?”.
But then the rest of the post did not directly address this question. You point out that most of “everyone who wants to try it” will start out with some (probably) flawed ideas, but that doesn’t seem like a good argument for not funding them. After all, you yourself experienced the growth you want others to go through while being funded yourself. I’d expect someone who is able to spend more of their time doing research (due to being able to focus on it full-time) will likely reach intellectual maturity on the topic faster than someone who has to focus on making a living in another area as well.
Is it possible to contact the people who write the NEC? This might be the sort of thing where they’d say “oops, didn’t think of that” (or not, idk)
I like this in theory, but in practice I’d be really really concerned about this exacerbating existing power dynamics, where people with lower social status have a higher likelihood of being both judged for their outside-the-window statements as well as being affected by others statements (in a large group it’s increasingly likely there’s going to be somebody who’s against some sort of minority/subgroup/ideology present in the room, for example). There may also be enough social pressure that people won’t feel comfortable opting out of such an exercise (if it’s in a work-related conference, for instance), so I’d be very very careful about how you organize this.
I’ve thought something like this for a while (though you put it far better than I could), and I’m glad to see there are others in this space who feel the same. I think the rationalist community is often too quick to scoff at perceived cognitive fallacies, and only much later come back with a more understanding eye—people aren’t generally stupid, and there are often very good reasons for actions and behaviors which initially seem arbitrary.
Thanks for the detailed response, I really appreciate it! For the future I’ll see if I can link to more essays (over social media posts) when giving evidence about potentially important outside opinions. I’m going offline in a few minutes, but will try to add some links here as well when I get back on Sunday.
As for the importance of outside opinions that aren’t in essay form, I fully agree with you that some amount of critique is inevitable if you are doing good, impactful work. I also agree we should not alter our semi-private conversations on LessWrong and elsewhere to accommodate (bad-faith) critics. Things are different, however, when you are releasing a public-facing product, and talking about questionably defined “AI ethics” in a literal press release. There, everything is about perception, and you should expect people to be influenced heavily by your wording (if your PR folks are doing their jobs right 🙃).
Why should we care about the non-essay-writing-public? Well, one good reason is politics. I don’t know what your take is on AI governance, but a significant (essay-writing) portion of this community believes it to be important. In order to do effective work there, we will need to be in a position where politicians and business leaders in tech can work with us with minimal friction. If there is one thing politicians (and to a lesser degree some corporations) care about, it is general public perception, and while they are generally fine with very small minority pushback, if the general vibe in Silicon valley becomes “AI ethicists are mainly partisan, paternalistic censors,” then there becomes a very strong incentive not to work with us.
Unfortunately, I believe that the above vibe has been growing both on and offline as a result of actions which members of this community have had some amount of control over. We shouldn’t bend over backwards to accommodate critics, but if we can make our own jobs easier by, say, better communicating our goals in our public-facing work, why not do that?