2. Is there a way to increase the sample size? It’s 150,000 by default, and you say it takes billions of samples to see the dominance of x-risk work.
There will be! We hope to release an update in the following days, implementing the ability to change the sample size, and allowing billions of samples. This was tricky because it required some optimizations on our end.
3. Only going 1000 years into the future seems extremely short for x-risk interventions by default if we’re seriously entertaining expectational total utilitarianism and longtermism. It also seems several times too long for the “common-sense” case for x-risk reduction.
We were divided on selecting a reasonable default here, and I agree that a shorter default might be more reasonable for the latter case. This was more of a compromise solution, but I think we could pick either perspective and stick with it for the defaults.
That said, I want to emphasize that all default assumptions in CCM should be taken lightly, as we were focused on making a general tool, instead of refining (or agreeing upon) our own particular assumptions.
5. It seems the AI Misalignment Megaproject is more likely to fail (with the same probability of backfire conditional on failing) than the Small-scale AI Misalignment Project. Why is that? I would expect a lower chance of doing nothing, but a higher chance of success and a higher chance of backfire.
As with (3), I agree with your reasoning, and we’ll probably be updating some of these template projects soon, but I would encourage you to tweak these assumptions to match yours.
Hi Michael! Some answers:
There will be! We hope to release an update in the following days, implementing the ability to change the sample size, and allowing billions of samples. This was tricky because it required some optimizations on our end.
We were divided on selecting a reasonable default here, and I agree that a shorter default might be more reasonable for the latter case. This was more of a compromise solution, but I think we could pick either perspective and stick with it for the defaults.
That said, I want to emphasize that all default assumptions in CCM should be taken lightly, as we were focused on making a general tool, instead of refining (or agreeing upon) our own particular assumptions.
As with (3), I agree with your reasoning, and we’ll probably be updating some of these template projects soon, but I would encourage you to tweak these assumptions to match yours.