Lazily pursuing earn-to-give. Very excited about AI Safety, GHD, and the weirder parts of animal welfare.
dan.pandori 🔸
Karma: 844
Your comment is an unsolicited request on an unrelated post.
In my opinion this is strongly against forum norms. I suspect the forum’s messaging function blocked you because this seems like spam.
If you want folks to engage in this experiment (which seems possibly interesting!), you should make a standalone post for it.
I admire the hustle and hope you succeed.
But as many others have said, this is a recipe for burnout. If a friend said they intended to do this, I would try quite hard to talk them down.
Sure, if you can directly measure what you actually want (positive impact), that is of course best :)
There’s lots of talk about how more EA-aligned funding will attract grifters. The Robin Hanson in me wondered what expensive or hard-to-fake signals exist for (human) alignment.
The first ideas that came to mind:
donating a kidney
vegan/vegetarian
non-profit work
donating a lot to effective charities
community engagement
I don’t know whether folks should weight these highly in funding decisions. Probably they all collapse under sufficient pressure.
I feel like I’ve got a moral obligation to have true beliefs insofar as that leads to me having a positive impact.
If I had lower agency or power, I would whole heartedly endorse being ignorant & happy. Folks can of course choose for themselves here.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Anthony.
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Fair point that the sequences do not strongly default towards inaction. I think the evidence gains from action mean that it ‘is’ favored, but this is an empirical prediction about the world, which I think you disagree with.
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If increased information reduces our unawareness, that decreases the relevance of cluelessness arguments, no? In particular, the set of actions with overlapping credal sets would be reduced, and so there would be more dominated actions we could rule out for consideration. Unless you’re making an argument that the information learned is too small to meaningfully constrain our predictions in expectation. In which case sure, that’s an empirical claim I disagree with, but it is logically consistent.
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I think most importantly we have an empirical disagreement about both how clueless we are of the longterm impacts of our actions, and how difficult it is to reduce that cluelessness. I’m trying to think about cruxes that might resolve that.
I think you disagree that increased predictive capability in shorter time horizons generalizes to long-time horizons [1]. For me, seeing bad short & medium term predictions ‘would’ cause me to give more credence to unawareness arguments. But you seem to have prevented the opposite evidence from swaying you in the other direction (unless I’m misunderstanding).
Like, what is something you could see happen tomorrow that would make you say ‘whoa, we actually can know the long-term consequences of our actions’? Would it take something as extreme as https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3?
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ptQsRsreA5JWZEAF4/open-nuclear-winter-fable-written-satire
If you want to give it a read. IMO funnier than the Anthropic parody (although some parts miss), less funny than Open Asteroid Impact.
OOC, have you asked Fable to try to write a satire with ‘Open Asteroid Impact’ as a reference class? I had it do one for ALLFED, and IMO it was pretty funny. Much funnier than ‘METR Time Horizon 2.0’ (although I’m not sure how hard this post was optimizing for humor), pretty comparable to Open Asteroid Impact.
If you’ve tried this yourself with Fable and still feel it comes up short, that would be a little surprising to me.
Happy to share the example if you’d like, IMO it had a good degree of joke substructure. IE, strongly funny individual lines, good references, relevant puns.
It’s also very possible that the humor is of a variety that quickly saturates & you’re already saturated on it. Similar to how most folks find ‘Cards Against Humanity’ pretty funny the first time you play it, and then it goes downhill extremely sharply.
“The graph lists Microsoft Excel 1.0, but the benchmarks must have been run on a modern version of Excel. The worksheet limit of Excel 1.0 was only 16,384 rows rather than 1,048,576, plus it lacked many of the functions of modern Excel, so it would presumably fail more tasks.”
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Personally I thought this was a B- shitpost. If it was just a quick take of exactly the tldr text I would give it a B+. So IMO not bad, but I think I also read less LLM text than you so I’m probably not annoyed as quickly by it.
Thanks for putting this together! IMO it is very helpful, and encouraged me to look at IFP’s proposal program.
Do you see cluelessness to be decreasing, steady, or increasing?
As in, are we getting better are predicting longterm outcomes or do you think we are no better than centuries ago?
One vote for decreasing cluelessness: improved epistemic practices such as RCTs, peer review, more advanced statistics, and prediction markets. There used to be many actions which we were deeply unsure about the near-term consequences of (ex. is bleeding this patient a good idea), and now our best predictions seem justifiably more confident. The evidence for improved long-term predictions seems less obvious, but still directionally improving.
Thanks! And very much my bad for missing the instructions, apologies!
Ah thanks! Presumably I can just submit this via the form then, or am I SOL?
I think making predictions (and learning how they go) for the short & medium term future will help us be much more calibrated on our predictions for the long-term future. So all the work on prediction markets etc probably give us better insight there.
I’m not sold on some sort of Great Reflection style pause, but it also doesn’t seem like a crazy idea.
I frankly have not thought hard about how acausal influence changes how we should act. I don’t have good recommendations. Being kind & having a wide circle of empathy feels pretty robustly good, but I won’t pretend to have justified that from the lens of acausal negotiations.
Yeah that’s a totally fair take. I generally agree that reading AI writing triggers an ‘oh brother’ feeling for me these days.
I asked Fable to be more terse & uploaded the edited essay. I personally find this triggers less of my ‘oh brother’ feelings, but it might still be annoying to you.
I am highly conflicted about posting an entirely AI generated post like this. I decided to post as-is because:
IMO the basic argument (taking actions is how you learn about the world) is correct. It is worth posting for that alone.
I could change up the prose & re-write to hide the AI generated nature, but for what purpose? Fable wrote this, not me. Changing the prose feels intellectually dishonest, even if the AI-isms sometimes bother me.
I read many of the Longtermist essay submissions, and IMO this is better than many. So I don’t think I’m meaningfully diluting the quality of the submission pool.
Its explicitly allowed by the contest rules, so YOLO.
I’m a software engineer, and the norms around AI generated works have rapidly moved much more favorably to them. IE, AI code generally follows local stylistic norms, tests itself, and is locally correct. IMO this generalizes to prose.
I’d be very curious to hear from folks who believe that this submission is lower than average quality, and have specific reasons why (other than just that it was AI generated).
The Learning Trap: What Simulated Clueless Agents Reveal About the Unawareness Argument
[6] If strange situations result in me saving money having more net-expect-impact this year than donating, I’m allowed to do so. Didn’t expect this to come up. Less than a 1% increase in savings, I won’t beat myself up about it.
There are good strategic reasons to avoid AI art (because people get incensed). As an activist, one of your goals is to influence public perception. For many campaigns, using AI art is going to be net negative for your cause, because they’ll associate your cause with something they dislike.
I don’t agree with the object level reasons to avoid AI art, but that doesn’t change the strategic considerations.