Superforecaster, former philosophy PhD, Giving What We Can member since 2012. Currently trying to get into AI governance.
David Mathersđ¸
Karma: 6,104
âbut it seems to me that all the cluelessness arguments against consequentialism also undermine other decision-making systems as well.â
This seems important. Why do you think that?
I find it somewhat hard to take âbut what if itâs good for third world children themselves to dieâ all that seriously as an objection. I think most anti-natalist philosophers would deny this. Isnât Benatarâs view that is bad for people to come into existence, but itâs often better for their lives to continue once they have started. In general anti-natalists are not usually utilitarians, classical or negative.
Wasnât Dario Amodei one of the earliest signers of the GWWC pledge? Long before Anthropic existed? That makes him quite atypical amongst very rich people right? Though for what itâs worth I would probably bet against him giving most of his wealth away, even if he has pledge to do that.
For what itâs worth, whilst I find arguing with Yarrow quite stressful, and I definitely donât always agree with her, and sometimes think sheâs a bit reluctant to concede, I donât think a ban was a good idea. Her comments are usually substantive, people who donât want to engage with them can just ignore, critical perspectives are always valuable etc. In some cases, sheâs actually spotted pretty important stuff that people had missed, i.e. that Waymoâs still have humans in the loop, or a problem in a Forecasting Research Institute study that I cited during one our arguments.
Thanks, I follow you now.
I donât quite follow, can you spell out the reasoning a bit more?
They way to deal with the vagueness of âAGIâ is to think about substitutability for human labour in an imaginary world where no regulatory barriers prevent this.
What made you convinced the threat is serious?
The expert survey results are also just compatible with âshort timelinesâ, strictly speaking, if that means âAI that can do any work a human can for similar costâ. If economists think that even that wonât produce explosive growth but just a modest speed up, then they will not necessarily predict super-high growth by 2050 even if you specify that AGI arrives in 2030.
What about the risk we spread wild animal suffering to other planets?
InÂcreasÂing Model Weight SeÂcuÂrity Might InÂcenÂtivize Racing
One reason to think we might not find anything morally valuable that distinct from what we already know about is that our concept of morality is made to fit with the stuff we already know about.
I have a much more positive feelings about EAs than rationalists, and I think this is quite normal for people who came to EA from outside rationalism. I mean, I actually liked the vast majority of rationalists Iâve met a lot-when I worked in a rationalist office in Prague it had a lovely culture-but I think only about .5 of rationalists like EA as an idea, and my suspicion is that âdislikes EAâ amongst rationalists correlates fairly heavily with âhas political views that make me uncomfortableâ.
One thing it might be useful for people to look at here when reflecting on the causes of the failure was how much experience the HR team had of working outside of EA organizations. If the answer is âvery littleâ then maybe bringing in more experienced non-EA pros would help, but if the answer is âa decent amountâ itâs less likely that will prevent future errors on its own.
Might they just be lying about the numbers?
Iâm not sure democracy arguments work that well for military stuff. The people who military actions are going to be deployed against are extremely obvious stakeholders, but they get no input into any feasible âdemocraticâ process that determines what the US military does, and procedural democracy is compatible with the US doing literally anything to non-citizens to advance US interests. Given that, attempting to restrain the US military in ways that are legal and non-deceptive doesnât seem that procedurally dubious to me.
There is absolutely no necessity for anyone to be âmonstersâ in order for the picture painted in Frances post to be accurate and her anger justified though.
All your contributions in this thread seem to be marked by the idea that people would have to be unusually bad in some way to fail to deal well with sexual harassment. But I donât see why we should be particularly confident that the base rate of orgs dealing badly with sexual misconduct, in ways that-*correctly*-look really bad to outsiders when the facts come out is all that low. There have been numerous cases where schools, universities, religious institutions etc. have covered up far worse conduct than Rileyâs: i.e. sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church as one example among many. Now, of course, we typically donât hear about the cases where sexual harassment or abuse was promptly identified and the perpetrator fired/âimprisoned, unless the perpetrator was independently famous. And there are a lot of people and institutions in the world, so maybe those cases are way more common. But I donât see any particular reason to be confident of that.
More importantly. this isnât even EAâs first scandal where a major org themselves admitted they dealt badly with sexual misconduct: https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââ4CBoJ5jgmGfdMFnAE/ââev-investigation-into-owen-and-community-health In the face of that, I donât see why we should find it particularly implausible that in another case, an EA org dealt badly with sexual misconduct.
But also, people are generally very good at avoiding believing things that are extremely inconvenient for them, without really noticing they are doing it, and without conscious malice. Most of us are much better at doing this in my view than we think we are. When HR originally received Rileyâs doc, they had a choice between 1) trying to start sexual harassment proceedings against him, and 2) overlooking the fact that what he had written about Frances was wholly inappropriate, and possibly malicious, and concentrating on his own complaints. Doing 2) was no doubt made easier by the fact that the doc was apparently not âaboutâ Frances specifically. Now, if they took choice 1), that was a lot of hassle and unpleasantness for them:
A) Potentially having to directly punish Riley. People donât generally like significantly deliberately harming people they know, and have no personal beef with, and will avoid it if they can. This is maybe especially true of the kind of friendly people personish person who wants to work in HR, although that is only a guess on my part.
B) Having to deal with Riley potentially portraying any investigation of him as retaliatory for his complaints. Even a completely baseless accusation of that is likely to be a huge stress for the people on the receiving end of it. This is likely to have been particularly unpleasant with the kind of person who writes a massive doc giving his detailed personal opinions on multiple colleagues, including for at least one person their mental health, sexual victimization and his own romantic feelings for them, because anyone who does something that inappropriate and obsessive canât be trust to act normally during a complaints process. This is true even if Riley is in fact a vulnerable, naive person with no malicious intentions, let alone if he is actually vengeful.
C) Having to either upset Frances by informing her about the doc, and having an excruciatingly awkward conversation with her about it, or alternatively NOT inform her even while disciplining Riley, and admit to themselves that they are concealing from Frances that one of her colleagues has sexually harassed her.
On the other hand, if they take choice 2) and just fail to recognize how inappropriate the stuff Riley said about Frances was, then they can realistically hope that Frances never finds out, and they donât have to upset Riley or Frances, or having any awkward conversations about rape and sexualization of rape victims with anyone or face the consequences of being accused or retaliating against a complainant. They could just hope that Frances never found out about the doc, something that may well have happened if Riley himself had not shown it beyond HR. (Unless the person who informed Frances was themselves in HR anyway). Then they could avoid any stress or hurt feelings. Once the CEO and the COO found out, they also had the same incentives to get this wrong, but with the additional incentive that they could decide to defer to HRâs judgments, since they are the orgs experts on well, HR issues.
I say all this not to excuse anyone at CEA. If this is the psychological dynamics of what happened-which I obviously donât know-thatâs not all that exculpatory. Not dealing with sexual harassment properly because you want to avoid awkwardness/âfuss/âpunishment and youâre in HR or management, is like not running into a burning building as a firefighter because you donât want to get burnt: itâs your job to get past this stuff! But claims that Francesâ account requires an implausible level of malice or incompetence on the part of multiple people seem wrong to me..
Itâs implausible if this is what happened that Riley would have provided a long detailed description of the rape rather than just mentioning itâs occurrence. If Frances was mischaracterizing the document so badly it didnât contain such a description then Zachary could have said that and he hasnât.
Anthropic arenât objecting to killbots as a matter of principle though, they are just saying the tech isnât reliable yet. The stand on surveillance seems principled and I absolutely admire Amodei for risking his business to do the right thing, but letâs avoid deceiving ourselves about what his stance actually is.
What current negative effects are you worried about? What measures do you want taken against them?