Derek Shiller

• Derek Shiller 12 May 2019 17:05 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Thoughts on the welfare of farmed insects

  Nice summary of the issues.
  
  A couple of related thoughts:
  
  There are some reasons to think that insects would not be especially harmed by factory farming, in the way that vertebrates are. It is plausible that the largest source of suffering in factory farms come from the stress produced by lack of enrichment and unnatural and overcrowded conditions. Even if crickets are phenomenally conscious AND can suffer, they might not be capable of stress or capable of stress in the same sort of dull over-crowded conditions as vertebrates. Given their ancient divergence in brain structures, their very different life styles, and their comparatively minuscule brains, it is reasonable to be skeptical that they feel environment induced stress. Death is conceivably such a short portion of their life that even a relatively painful death won’t tip the balance.
  
  If crickets are not harmed by the conditions of factory farms, they might instead benefit from factory farming. It seems possible that the average factory farmed cricket might have a net positive balance of good experiences vs bad experiences. In that case, it might be better to raise crickets in factory farm conditions than to produce equivalent amounts of non-sentient meat alternatives. The risks are not entirely on the farming side.

• Derek Shiller 17 May 2021 11:59 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Sav­ing Aver­age Utili­tar­i­anism from Tarsney - Self-Indi­ca­tion As­sump­tion can­cels solip­sis­tic swamp­ing.

  Interesting application of SIA, but I wonder if it shows too much to help average utilitarianism.

  SIA seems to support metaphysical pictures in which more people actually exist. This is how you discount the probability of solipsism. But do you think you can simultaneously avoid the conclusion that there are an infinite number of people?

  This would be problematic: if you’re sure that there are an infinite number of people, average utilitarianism won’t offer much guidance because you almost certainly won’t have any ability to influence the average utility.

• Derek Shiller 18 May 2021 12:20 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: wuschel’s comment on: Sav­ing Aver­age Utili­tar­i­anism from Tarsney - Self-Indi­ca­tion As­sump­tion can­cels solip­sis­tic swamp­ing.

  I agree that there are challenges for each of them in the case of an infinite number of people. My impression is that total utilitarianism can handle infinite cases pretty respectably, by supplementing the standard maxim of maximizing utility with a dominance principle to the effect of ‘do what’s best for the finite subset of everyone that you’re capable of affecting’, though it also isn’t something I’ve thought about too much either. I initially was thinking that average utilitarians can’t make a similar move without undermining it’s spirit, but maybe they can. However, if they can, I suspect they can make the same move in the finite case (‘just focus on the average among the population you can affect’) and that will throw off your calculations. Maybe in that case, if you can only affect a small number of individuals, the threat from solipsism can’t even get going.

  In any case, I would hope that SIA is at least able to accommodate an infinite number of possible people, or the possibility of an infinite number of people, without becoming useless. I take it that there are an infinite number of epistemically possible people, and so this isn’t just an exercise.

Notes on the risks and benefits of kid­ney dona­tion

• Derek Shiller 27 Nov 2021 12:53 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: ElliotJDavies’s comment on: Notes on the risks and benefits of kid­ney dona­tion

  My logic is (deferring judgment to medical professions) just the amount of effort and money that is spent on facilitating kidney donations, despite the existence of dialysis, indicates that experts think the cost/​benefit ration is a good one. One reason I feel safe in this deference is because the field of medicine seems to have strong “loss aversion”. I.e. Doctors seem strongly concerned about direct actions that cause harm, even if it is for the greater good.

  The cynical story I’ve heard is that insurance providers cover it because it is cheaper than years of dialysis and doctors provide it because it pays well. Some doctors are hesitant about it, particularly for non-directed donors, but they aren’t the ones performing it.

  I do think that is overly cynical: there are clear advantages to the recipient that make transplantation very desirable. Dialysis is a pain, and not without its risks. Quality of life definitely goes up. Life expectancy probably goes up a fair bit too. If I had to make a guess, I’d guess donation produced something like 3-8 QALYs on average for the primary beneficiary, at a cost of about .5 QALYs for the donor. That is a pretty reasonable altruistic trade, but it isn’t saving a life at the cost of a surgery and a few weeks recovery.

• Derek Shiller 24 Dec 2021 16:32 UTC

  9 points

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  on: Why don’t gov­ern­ments seem to mind that com­pa­nies are ex­plic­itly try­ing to make AGIs?

  Are you sure that they don’t mind? I would be surprised if intelligence agencies weren’t keeping some track of the technical capabilities of foreign entities, and I’d be unsurprised if they were also keeping track of domestic entities as well. If they thought we were six months away from transformative AGI, they could nationalize it or shut it down.

• Derek Shiller 7 Feb 2022 17:15 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: finm’s comment on: Split­ting the timeline as an ex­tinc­tion risk intervention

  Importantly (as I’m sure you’re aware), no amount of world slicing is going to increase the expected value of the future (roughly all the branches from here)

  What makes you think that? So long as value can change with the distribution of events across branches (as perhaps with the Mona Lisa) the expected value of the future could easily change.

• Derek Shiller 11 Feb 2022 12:20 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Sim­plify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk”

  But also, we’re dealing with probabilities that are small but not infinitesimal. This saves us from objections like Pascal’s Mugging—a 1% chance of AI x-risk is not a Pascal’s Mugging.

  It seems to me that the relevant probability is not the chance of AI x-risk, but the chance that your efforts could make a marginal difference. That probability is vastly lower, possibly bordering on mugging territory. For x-risk in particular, you make a difference only if your decision to work on x-risk makes a difference to whether or not the species survives. For some of us that may be plausible, but for most, it is very very unlikely.

• Derek Shiller 11 Feb 2022 13:19 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Greg_Colbourn’s comment on: Sim­plify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk”

  I’m not disagreeing with the possibility of a significant impact in expectation. Paying Pascals’ mugger is promising in expectation. The thought is that in order to make a marginal difference to x-risk, there needs to be some threshold for hours/​money/​etc under which our species will be wiped out and over which our species will survive, and your contributions have to push us over that threshold.

  X-risk, at least where the survival of the species is concerned, is an all or nothing thing. (This is different than AI alignment, where your contributions might make things a little better or a little worse.)

• Derek Shiller 11 Feb 2022 13:22 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Sim­plify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk”

  Let me clarify that I’m not opposed to paying Pascal’s mugger. I think that is probably rational (though I count myself lucky to not be so rational).

  But the idea here is that x-risk is all or nothing, which translates into each person having a very small chance of making a very big difference. Climate change can be mitigated, so everyone working on it can make a little difference.

• Derek Shiller 11 Feb 2022 13:53 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Greg_Colbourn’s comment on: Sim­plify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk”

  the probabilities are of the order of 10^-3 to 10^-8, which is far from infinitesimal

  I’m not sure what the probabilties are. You’re right that they are far from infinitesimal (just as every number is!): still, the y may be close enough to warrant discounting on whatever basis people discount Pascal’s mugger.

  what is important is reducing the risk to an acceptable level

  I think the risk is pretty irrelevant. If we lower the risk but still go extinct, we can pat ourselves on the back for fighting the good fight, but I don’t hink we should assign it much value. Our effect on the risk is instrumentally valulable for what it does for the species.

  Also I don’t understand the comment on AI Alignment

  The thought was that it is possible to make a difference between AI being pretty well and very well aligned, so we might be able to impact whether the future is good or great, and that is worth pursuing regardless of its relation to existential risk.

• Derek Shiller 14 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC

  8 points

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  on: Some thoughts on veg­e­tar­i­anism and veganism

  Insofar as we are all imperfect and have to figure out which ways to prioritize improving on, it isn’t obvious that we should treat veganism as a priority. That said, I think there is an important difference between what it makes sense to do and how it makes sense to feel. It makes sense to feel horrified by factory farming and disgusted by factory farmed meat if you care about the suffering of animals. It makes sense to respond to suffering inflicted on your behalf with sadness and regret.

  Effective altruists should generally be vegan, not (just) because it is the right thing to do, but because that behavior follows naturally from the right way to feel. This is not to say that you should try to change how you feel if you’re not inclined to at least a little sadness at the sight of a dead chicken’s body on your plate, but something has gone wrong.

• Derek Shiller 5 Mar 2022 18:16 UTC

  3 points

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  on: The Fu­ture Fund’s Pro­ject Ideas Competition

  Authoritative Statements of EA Views

  Epistemic Institutions

  In academia, law, and government, it would be helpful to have citeable statements of EA relevant views presented in an authoritative and unbiased manner. Having such material available lends gravitas to proposals that help address related problems and provides greater justification in taking those views for granted.

  (This is a variation on ‘Expert polling for everything’ focused on providing authority of views to non-experts. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness is a good example.)

• Derek Shiller 12 Apr 2022 12:42 UTC

  10 points

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  on: Con­scious­ness, coun­ter­fac­tual ro­bust­ness and absurdity

  That seems unphysical, since we’re saying that even if something made no actual physical difference, it can still make a difference for subjective experience.

  The neuron is still there, so its existing-but-not-firing makes a physical difference, right? Not firing is as much a thing a neuron can do as firing. (Also, for what it’s worth, my impression is that cognition is less about which neurons are firing and more about what rate they are firing at and how their firing is coordinated with that of other neurons.)

  But neurons don’t seem special, and if you reject counterfactual robustness, then it’s hard to see how we wouldn’t find consciousness everywhere, and not only that, but maybe even human-like experiences, like the feeling of being tortured, could be widespread in mundane places, like in the interactions between particles in walls.

  The patterns of neural firing involved in conscious experiences are surely quite complicated. Why think that we would find similar patterns anywhere outside of brains?

• Derek Shiller 12 Apr 2022 23:44 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Con­scious­ness, coun­ter­fac­tual ro­bust­ness and absurdity

  Yes, it’s literally a physical difference, but, by hypothesis, it had no influence on anything else in the brain at the time, and your behaviour and reports would be the same. Empty space (or a disconnected or differently connected neuron) could play the same non-firing neuron role in the actual sequence of events. Of course, empty space couldn’t also play the firing neuron role in counterfactuals (and a differently connected neuron wouldn’t play identical roles across counterfactuals), but why would what didn’t happen matter?

  I can get your intuition about your case. Here is another with the same logic in which I don’t have the corresponding intuition:

  Suppose that instead of just removing all non-firing neurons, we also remove all neurons both before they are triggered and after they trigger the next neurons in the sequence. E.g. you brain consists of neurons that magically pop into existence just in time to have the right effect on the next neurons that pop into existence in the sequence, and then they disappear back into nothing. We could also go a level down and have your brain consist only in atoms that briefly pop into existence in time to interact with the next atoms.

  Your behavior and introspective reports wouldn’t change—do you think you’d still be conscious?

• Derek Shiller 12 Apr 2022 23:58 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Con­scious­ness, coun­ter­fac­tual ro­bust­ness and absurdity

  But there are many ordered subsets of merely trillions of interacting particles we can find, effectively signaling each other with forces and small changes to their positions.

  In brains, patterns of neural activity stimulate further patterns of neural activity. We can abstract this out into a system of state changes and treat conscious episodes as patterns of state changes. Then if we can find similar causal networks of state changes in the wall, we might have reason to think they are conscious as well. Is this the idea? If so, what sort of states are you imagining to change in the wall? Is it the precise configurations of particles? I expect a lot of the states you’ll identify to fulfill the relevant patterns will be arbitrary or gerrymandered. That might be an important difference that should make us hesitate before ascribing conscious experiences to walls.

• Derek Shiller 26 Apr 2022 11:31 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Key ques­tions about ar­tifi­cial sen­tience: an opinionated guide

  Computational functionalism about sentience: for a system to have a given conscious valenced experience is for that system to be in a (possibly very complex) computational state. That assumption is why the Big Question is asked in computational (as opposed to neural or biological) terms.

  I think it is a little quick to jump from functionalism to thinking that consciousness is realizable in a modern computer architecture if we program the right functional roles. There might be important differences in how the functional roles are implemented that rules out computers. We don’t want to allow just any arbitrary gerrymandered states to count as an adequate implementation of consciousness’s functional roles; the limits to what is adequate are underexplored.

  Suppose that Palgrave Macmillan produced a 40 volume atlas of the bee brain, where each neuron is drawn on some page (in either a firing or silent state) and all connections are accounted for. Every year, they release a new edition from a momentary time slice later, updating all of the firing patterns slightly after looking at the patterns in the last edition. Over hundreds of years, a full second of bee brain activity is accounted for. Is the book conscious? My intuition is NO. There are a lot of things you might think are going wrong here—maybe the neurons printed on each page aren’t doing enough causal work in generating the next edition, maybe the editions are too spatially or temporally separated, etc. I could see some of these explanations as applying equally to contemporary computer architectures.

• Derek Shiller 11 Jun 2022 18:11 UTC

  11 points

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  on: ‘Con­se­quen­tial­ism’ is be­ing used to mean sev­eral differ­ent things

  My impression is that EAs also often talk about ethical consequentialism when they mean something somewhat different. Ethical consequentialism is traditionally a theory about what distinguishes the right ways to act from the wrong ways to act. In certain circumstances, it suggests that lying, cheating, rape, torture, and murder can be not only permissible, but downright obligatory. A lot of people find these implications implausible.

  Ethical consequentialists often think what they do because they really care about value in aggregate. They don’t just want to be happy and well off themselves, or have a happy and well off family. They want everyone to be happy and well off. They want value to be maximized, not distributed in their favor.

  A moral theory that gets everyone to act in ways that maximize value will make the world a better place. However, it is consistent to think that consequentialism is wrong about moral action and to nonetheless care primarily about value in aggregate. I get the impression that EAs are more attached to the latter than the former. We generally care that things be as good as they can be. We have less a stake in whether torture is a-ok if the expected utility is positive. The EA attitude is more of a ‘hey, lets do some good!’ and less of a ‘you’re not allowed to fail to maximize value!’. This seems like an important distinction.

The im­por­tance of get­ting digi­tal con­scious­ness right

• Derek Shiller 13 Jun 2022 12:08 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: The im­por­tance of get­ting digi­tal con­scious­ness right

  I was imagining that the consensus would concern conditionals. I think it is feasible to establish what sets of assumptions people might naturally make, and what views those assumptions would support. This would allow a degree of objectivity without settling the right theory. It might also involve assigning probabilities, or ranges of probabilities to view themselves, or to what it is rational for other researchers to think about different views.

  So we might get something like the following (when researchers evaluate gpt6):

  There are three major groups of assumptions, a, b, and c.

  • Experts agree that gpt6 has a 0% probability of being conscious if a is correct.

  • Experts agree that the rational probability to assign to gpt6 being conscious if b is correct falls between 2 and 20%.

  • Experts agree that the rational probability to assign to gpt6 being conscious if c is correct falls between 30 and 80%