I’m not sure this addresses Henry’s critiques? In general, every bullet listed under “I think EA has punched above its weight in many ways with respect to making AI go well” is a proxy somewhere in the middle of the ToC chain while his comment is more end-of-ToC focused as he’s skeptical of the proxies actually being beneficial, and none of these bullets address the counterfactuality he brought up. In particular, and for instance, you mentioned the founding of Redwood Research as an example of EA making AI go well despite Henry explicitly being skeptical of its impact so far:
AI Safety organisations like MIRI an Redwood Research have been operating for 25 and 5 years respectively. As an outsider I coudn’t point to any particular breakthrough they’ve made in AI alignment. Redwood seems to do some kinda interesting work on measuring rogue behaviour and creating checks. I dunno. Seems like any organisation trying to make a reliable AI product would be heavily incentivised to do this stuff regardless.
To be clear I’m not taking sides or anything, I’m just disheartened by what I perceive to be a lot of talking past each other between AIS advocates and skeptics on this forum, some of which seem easily preventable, like in this case.
Fair enough — I think I was trying to say something along the lines of “going through any specific example invites a lot of genuinely thorny and difficult questions about counterfactuality/sign of impact/attribution to EA” (and again many of these are hard to discuss on a public forum) but I think zooming out, you can see EAs fingerprints in various important places. I think this leads to an overall common-sense perspective that EA has helped improve the situation.
Also, I agree I pointed to work in the middle of the ToC chain, but that seems kind of reasonable to me given that AI is currently not that powerful and not really that scary. AI hasn’t yet been capable of causing a disaster, so it’s not really possible to have prevented one (yet).
On the specific example of Redwood Research is doing a lot of really valuable safety work. I think pioneering Control has been a fairly useful accomplishment, and I suspect if someone wanted to dig into the details, they’d find that it was fairly counterfactual.
I’m not sure this addresses Henry’s critiques? In general, every bullet listed under “I think EA has punched above its weight in many ways with respect to making AI go well” is a proxy somewhere in the middle of the ToC chain while his comment is more end-of-ToC focused as he’s skeptical of the proxies actually being beneficial, and none of these bullets address the counterfactuality he brought up. In particular, and for instance, you mentioned the founding of Redwood Research as an example of EA making AI go well despite Henry explicitly being skeptical of its impact so far:
To be clear I’m not taking sides or anything, I’m just disheartened by what I perceive to be a lot of talking past each other between AIS advocates and skeptics on this forum, some of which seem easily preventable, like in this case.
Fair enough — I think I was trying to say something along the lines of “going through any specific example invites a lot of genuinely thorny and difficult questions about counterfactuality/sign of impact/attribution to EA” (and again many of these are hard to discuss on a public forum) but I think zooming out, you can see EAs fingerprints in various important places. I think this leads to an overall common-sense perspective that EA has helped improve the situation.
Also, I agree I pointed to work in the middle of the ToC chain, but that seems kind of reasonable to me given that AI is currently not that powerful and not really that scary. AI hasn’t yet been capable of causing a disaster, so it’s not really possible to have prevented one (yet).
On the specific example of Redwood Research is doing a lot of really valuable safety work. I think pioneering Control has been a fairly useful accomplishment, and I suspect if someone wanted to dig into the details, they’d find that it was fairly counterfactual.