CEO of Convergence.
David_Kristoffersson
Karma: 363
I have this fresh in my mind as we’ve had some internal discussion on the topic at Convergence. My personal take is that “consciousness” is a bit of a trap subject because it bakes in a set of distinct complex questions, people talk about it differently, it’s hard to peer inside the brain, and there’s slight mystification because consciousness feels a bit magical, from the inside. Sub-topics include but are not limited to: 1. Higher-order though. 2. Subjective experience. 3. Sensory integration. 3. Self-awareness. 4. Moral patienthood.
My recommendation is to try and talk in terms of these sub-topics as much as possible rather than the fuzzy, differently understood, and massive concept “consciousness”.
Is contributing to this work useful/effective? Well, I think it will be more useful if, when one works in this domain (or domains), one has specific goals (more in the direction of “understand self-awareness” or “understand moral patienthood” than “understand consciousness”) and one does them for specific purposes.
My personal take is that the current “direct AI risk reduction work” that has the highest value is AI strategy and AI governance. And hence, I would reckon that “consciousness”-work that has clear bearing on AI strategy and AI governance can be impactful.
AI Clarity: An Initial Research Agenda
Announcing Convergence Analysis: An Institute for AI Scenario & Governance Research
AI Safety Microgrant Round
BERI is doing an awesome service for university-affiliated groups, I hope more will take advantage of it!
Would you really call Jakub’s response “hostile”?
Thanks for posting this. I find it quite useful to get an overview of how the EA community is being managed and developed.
Happy to see the new institute take form! Thanks for doing this, Maxime and Konrad. International long-term governance appears very high-leverage to me. Good luck, and I’m looking forward to see more of your work!
Some “criticisms” are actually self-fulfilling prophecies
EAs are far too inclined to abandon high-EV ideas that are <50% likely to succeed
Over-relying on outside views over inside views.
Picking the wrong outside view / reference class, or not even considering the different reference classes on offer.
Strong upvote for these.
What I appreciate the most about this post is simply just the understanding it shows for people in this situation.
It’s not easy. Everyone has their own struggles. Hang in there. Take some breaks. You can learn, you can try something slightly different, or something very different. Make sure you have a balanced life, and somewhere to go. Make sure you have good plan B’s (e.g., myself, I can always go back to the software industry). In the for-profit and wider world, there are many skills you can learn better than you would working at an EA org.
Great idea and excellent work, thanks for doing this!
This gets me wondering what other kinds of data sources could be integrated (on some other platform, perhaps). And, I guess you could fairly easily do statistics to see big picture differences between the data on the different sites.
Thanks Linch; I actually missed that the prediction had closed!
Metaculus: Will quantum computing “supremacy” be achieved by 2025? [prediction closed on Jun 1, 2018.]
While I find it plausible that it will happen, I’m not personally convinced that quantum computers will be practically very useful due the difficulties in scaling them up.
Excellent points, Carl. (And Stefan’s as well.) We would love to see follow-up posts exploring nuances like these, and I put them into the Convergence list of topics worth elaborating.
Sounds like you got some pretty great engagement out of this experiment! Great work! This exact kind of project, and the space of related ideas seems well worth exploring further.
The five people that we decided to reject were given feedback about their translations as well as their motivation letters. We also provided two simple call-to-actions to them: (1) read our blog and join our newsletter, and (2) follow our FB page and attend our public events. None of these five people have so far done these actions to our awareness.
Semi-general comment regarding rejections: I think, overall, rejection is a sensitive matter. And if we do want rejected applicants (to stipends, jobs, projects, …) to try more or to maintain their interest in the specific project and in EA overall, we need to take a lot of care. I’m, for example, concerned that the difficulty of getting jobs at EA orgs and the situation of being rejected from them discourages many people from engaging closer with EA. Perhaps just being sympathetic and encouraging enough will do a lot of good. Perhaps there’s more we could do.
Variant of Korthon’s comment:
I never look at the “forum favorites” section. It seems like it’s looked the same forever and it takes up a lot of screen real estate without any use for me!
Vision of Earth fellows Kyle Laskowski and Ben Harack had a poster session on this topic at EA Global San Francisco 2019: https://www.visionofearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Vision-of-Earth-Asteroid-Manipulation-Poster.pdf
They were also working on a paper on the topic.
Thank you for this article, Michael! I like seeing the different mainline definitions of existential risk and catastrophe alongside each other, and having some common misunderstandings clarified.
Just a minor comment:
That said, at least to me, it seems that “destruction of humanity’s longterm potential” could be read as meaning the complete destruction. So I’d personally be inclined to tweak Ord’s definitions to:
An existential catastrophe is the destruction of the vast majority of humanity’s long-term potential.
An existential risk is a risk that threatens the destruction of the vast majority of humanity’s long-term potential.[4]
Ord was presumably going for brevity in his book, and I think his definition succeeds quite well! I don’t think generally adding 4 words to Ord’s short nice definition would be worth it. There’s other details that could be expanded on as well (like how we can mostly consider the definition in Bostrom 2012 to be a more expanded one). Expanding helps with discussing a particular point, though.
I think this is an excellent initiative, thank you, Michael! (Disclaimer: Michael and I work together on Convergence.)
An assortment of thoughts:
More and more studious estimates of x-risks seem clearly very high value to me due to how much the likelihood of risks and events affect priorities and how the quality of the estimates affect our communication about these matters.
More estimates should generally should increase our common knowledge of the risks, and individually, if people think about how to make these estimates, they will reach a deeper understanding of the questions.
Breaking down the causes of one’s estimates is generally valuable. It allows one to improve one’s estimates, understanding of causation, and to discuss them in more detail.
More estimates can be bad if low quality estimates swamp out better quality ones somehow.
Estimates building on new (compared to earlier estimates) sources of information are especially interesting. Independent data sources increase our overall knowledge.
I see space for someone writing an intro post on how to do estimates of this type better. (Scott Alexander’s old posts here might be interesting.)
I like this principles-first approach! I think it’s really valuable to have a live discussion that starts from “How do we do the most good?”, even if I am kind of all-in on one cause. (Kind of: I think most causes tie together: making the future turn out well.) I think it’d be a valuable use of the time of you folks to try and clarify and refine your approach, philosophy, and incentives further, using the comments here as one input.