On the one hand, I also wish Shulman would go into more detail on the “Supposing we’ve solved alignment and interpretability” part. (I still balk a bit at “in democracies” talk, but less so than I did a couple years ago.) On the other hand, I also wish you would go into more detail on the “Humans don’t benefit even if you ‘solve alignment’” part. Maybe there’s a way to meet in the middle??
Zack_M_Davis(Zack M. Davis)
Karma: 15,433
It seems pretty plausible to me that if AI is bad, then rationalism did a lot to educate and spur on AI development. Sorry folks.
What? This apology makes no sense. Of course rationalism is Lawful Neutral. The laws of cognition aren’t, can’t be, on anyone’s side.
The philosophical ideal can still exert normative force even if no humans are spherical Bayesian reasoners on a frictionless plane. The disjunction (“it must either the case that”) is significant: it suggests that if you’re considering lying to someone, you may want to clarify to yourself whether and to what extent that’s because they’re an enemy or because you don’t respect them as an epistemic peer. Even if you end up choosing to lie, it’s with a different rationale and mindset than someone who’s never heard of the normative ideal and just thinks that white lies can be good sometimes.
I definitely do not agree with the (implied) notion that it is only when dealing with enemies that knowingly saying things that are not true is the correct option
There’s a philosophically deep rationale for this, though: to a rational agent, the value of information is nonnegative. (Knowing more shouldn’t make your decisions worse.) It follows that if you’re trying to misinform someone, it must either the case that you want them to make worse decisions (i.e., they’re your enemy), or you think they aren’t rational.
white lies or other good-faith actions
What do you think “good faith” means? I would say that white lies are a prototypical instance of bad faith, defined by Wikipedia as “entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another.”
Frustrating! What tactic could get Interlocutor un-stuck? Just asking them for falsifiable predictions probably won’t work, but maybe proactively trying to pass their ITT and supplying what predictions you think their view might make would prompt them to correct you, à la Cunningham’s Law?
How did you chemically lose your emotions?
Senior MIRI leadership explored various alternatives, including reorienting the Agent Foundations team’s focus and transitioning them to an independent group under MIRI fiscal sponsorship with restricted funding, similar to AI Impacts. Ultimately, however, we decided that parting ways made the most sense.
I’m surprised! If MIRI is mostly a Pause advocacy org now, I can see why agent foundations research doesn’t fit the new focus and should be restructured. But the benefit of a Pause is that you use the extra time to do something in particular. Why wouldn’t you want to fiscally sponsor research on problems that you think need to be solved for the future of Earth-originating intelligent life to go well? (Even if the happy-path plan is Pause and superbabies, presumably you want to hand the superbabies as much relevant prior work as possible.) Do we know how Garrabrant, Demski, et al. are going to eat??
Relatedly, is it time for another name change? Going from “Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence” to “Machine Intelligence Research Institute” must have seemed safe in 2013. (You weren’t unambiguously for artificial intelligence anymore, but you were definitely researching it.) But if the new–new plan is to call for an indefinite global ban on research into machine intelligence, then the new name doesn’t seem appropriate, either?
Simplicia: I don’t really think of “humanity” as an agent that can make a collective decision to stop working on AI. As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible that the world’s power players could be convinced to arrange a pause. That might be a good idea! But not being a power player myself, I tend to think of the possibility as an exogenous event, subject to the whims of others who hold the levers of coordination. In contrast, if alignment is like other science and engineering problems where incremental progress is possible, then the increments don’t need to be coordinated.
Simplicia: The thing is, I basically do buy realism about rationality, and realism having implications for future powerful AI—in the limit. The completeness axiom still looks reasonable to me; in the long run, I expect superintelligent agents to get what they want, and anything that they don’t want to get destroyed as a side-effect. To the extent that I’ve been arguing that empirical developments in AI should make us rethink alignment, it’s not so much that I’m doubting the classical long-run story, but rather pointing out that the long run is “far away”—in subjective time, if not necessarily sidereal time. If you can get AI that does a lot of useful cognitive work before you get the superintelligence whose utility function has to be exactly right, that has implications for what we should be doing and what kind of superintelligence we’re likely to end up with.
In principle, yes: to the extent that I’m worried that my current study habits don’t measure up to school standards along at least some dimensions, I could take that into account and try to change my habits without the school.
But—as much as it pains me to admit it—I … kind of do expect the social environment of school to be helpful along some dimensions (separately from how it’s super-toxic among other dimensions)?
When I informally audited Honors Analysis at UC Berkeley with Charles Pugh in Fall 2017, Prof. Pugh agreed to grade my midterm (and I did OK), but I didn’t get the weekly homework exercises graded. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also didn’t finish all of the weekly homework exercises.
I attempted a lot of them! I verifiably do other math stuff that the vast majority of school students don’t. But if I’m being honest and not ideological about it (even though my ideology is obviously directionally correct relative to Society’s), the social fiction of “grades” does look like it sometimes succeeds at extorting some marginal effort out of my brain, and if I didn’t have my historical reasons for being ideological about it, I’m not sure I’d even regret that much more than I regret being influenced by the social fiction of GitHub commit squares.
I agree that me getting the goddamned piece of paper and putting it on a future résumé has some nonzero effect in propping up the current signaling equilibrium, which is antisocial, but I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is large enough to worry about, especially given the tier of school and my geriatric condition. The story told by the details of my résumé is clearly “autodidact who got the goddamned piece of paper, eventually.” No one is going to interpret it as an absurd “I graduated SFSU at age 37 and am therefore racially superior to you” nobility claim, even though that does work for people who did Harvard or MIT at the standard age.
Seconding this. A nonobvious quirk of the system where high-karma users get more vote weight is that it increases variance for posts with few votes: if a high-karma user or two who don’t like you see your post first, they can trash the initial score in a way that doesn’t reflect “the community’s” consensus. I remember the early karma scores for one of my posts going from 20 to zero (!). It eventually finished at 131.
(Thanks to John Wentworth for playing Doomimir in a performance of this at Less Online yesterday.)
The Standard Analogy
Passing the onion test is better than not passing it, but I think the relevant standard is having intent to inform. There’s a difference between trying to share relevant information in the hopes that the audience will integrate it with their own knowledge and use it to make better decisions, and selectively sharing information in the hopes of persuading the audience to make the decision you want them to make.
An evidence-filtering clever arguer can pass the onion test (by not omitting information that the audience would be surprised to learn was omitted) and pass the test of not technically lying (by not making false statements) while failing to make a rational argument in which the stated reasons are the real reasons.
going into any detail about it doesn’t feel like a useful way to spend weirdness points.
That may be a reasonable consequentialist decision given your goals, but it’s in tension with your claim in the post to be disregarding the advice of people telling you to “hoard status and credibility points, and [not] spend any on being weird.”
Whatever they’re trying to do, there’s almost certainly a better way to do it than by keeping Matrix-like human body farms running.
You’ve completely ignored the arguments from Paul Christiano that Ryan linked to at the top of the thread. (In case you missed it: 1 2.)
The claim under consideration is not that “keeping Matrix-like human body farms running” arises as an instrumental subgoal of “[w]hatever [AIs are] trying to do.” (If you didn’t have time to read the linked arguments, you could have just said that instead of inventing an obvious strawman.)
Rather, the claim is that it’s plausible that the AI we build (or some agency that has decision-theoretic bargaining power with it) cares about humans enough to spend some tiny fraction of the cosmic endowment on our welfare. (Compare to how humans care enough about nature preservation and animal welfare to spend some resources on it, even though it’s a tiny fraction of what our civilization is doing.)
Maybe you think that’s implausible, but if so, there should be a counterargument explaining why Christiano is wrong. As Ryan notes, Yudkowsky seems to believe that some scenarios in which an agency with bargaining power cares about humans are plausible, describing one example of such as “validly incorporat[ing] most all the hopes and fears and uncertainties that should properly be involved, without getting into any weirdness that I don’t expect Earthlings to think about validly.” I regard this statement as undermining your claim in the post that MIRI’s “reputation as straight shooters [...] remains intact.” Withholding information because you don’t trust your audience to reason validly (!!) is not at all the behavior of a “straight shooter”.
it seems to me that Anthropic has so far failed to apply its interpretability techniques to practical tasks and show that they are competitive
Do you not consider the steering examples in the recent paper to be a practical task, or do you think that competitiveness hasn’t been demonstrated (because people were already doing activation steering without SAEs)? My understanding of the case for activation steering with unsupervisedly-learned features is that it could circumvent some failure modes of RLHF.
I think I’m judging that schoolwork that’s sufficiently similar to the kind of intellectual work that I want to do anyway (or that I can otherwise get selfish benefit out of) gets its cost discounted. (It doesn’t have to be exactly the same.) And that commuting on the train with a seat is 70% similar to library time. (I wouldn’t even consider a car commute.)
For the fall semester, I’d be looking at “Real Analysis II”, “Probability Models”, “Applied and Computational Linear Algebra”, and (wait for it …) “Queer Literatures and Media”.
That schedule actually seems … pretty good? “Real Analysis II” with Prof. Schuster is the course I actually want to take, as a legitimate learning resource and challenge, but the other two math courses don’t seem worthless and insulting. “Queer Literatures and Media” does seem worthless and insulting, but might present an opportunity to troll the professor, or fodder for my topic-relevant blog and unfinished novella about a young woman hating going to SFSU.
As for judgement, I think I’m integrating a small judgement-density over a large support of time and Society. The immediate trigger for me even considering this might have been that people were arguing about school and Society on Twitter in way that brought up such rage and resentment in me. Somehow, I think I would be more at peace if I could criticize schooling from the position of ”… and I have a math degree” rather than ”… so I didn’t finish.” That peace definitely wouldn’t be worth four semesters, but it might be worth two.
This is awful. What do most of these items have to do with acquiring the map that reflects the territory? (I got 65, but that’s because I’ve wasted my life in this lame cult. It’s not cool or funny.)