Frank_R

Karma: 176

Frank_R 29 Aug 2023 5:40 UTC
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on: Daniel Filan and I discuss suffering focused ethics and total utilitarianism [podcast + transcript]
Unfortunately, I have not found time to listen to the whole podcast; so maybe I am writing stuff that you have already said. The reason why everyone assumes that utility can be measured by a real number is the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem. If you have a relation of the kind “outcome x is worse than outcome y” that satisfies certain axioms, you can construct a utility function. One of the axioms is called continuity:
“If x is worse than y and y is worse than z, then there exists a probability p, such that a lottery where you receive x with a probability of p and z with a probability of (1-p), has the same preference as y.”
If x is a state of extreme suffering and you believe in suffering focused ethics, you might disagree with the above axiom and thus there may be no utility function. A loophole could be to replace the real numbers by another ordered field that contains infinite numbers. Then you could assign to x a utility of -Omega, where Omega is infinitely large.

Frank_R 8 Aug 2023 18:15 UTC
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on: An appeal to people who are smarter than me: please help me clarify my thinking about AI
Unfortunately, I do not have time for a long answer, but I can understand very well how you feel. Stuff that I find helpful is practising mindfulness and/or stoicism and taking breaks from internet. You said that you find it difficult to make future plans. In my experience, it can calm you down to focus on your career / family / retirement even if it is possible that AI timelines are short. If it turns out that fear of AI is the same as fear of grey goo in the 90s, making future plans is better anyway.

You may find this list of mental health suggestions helpful:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLLeGA7aGaJpgCkof/mental-health-and-the-alignment-problem-a-compilation-of

Be not afraid to seek help if you get serious mental health issues.

Frank_R 14 Jun 2023 15:45 UTC
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on: Collaboration in Science: Happier People <-> Better Research
I have switched from academia to software development and I can confirm most that you have written from my own experience. Although I am not very involved in the AI alignment community, I think that there may be similar problems as in academia; mostly because the people interested in AI alignment are geographically scattered and there are too few senior researchers to advise all the new people entering the field.

Frank_R 24 Oct 2022 7:22 UTC
4 points
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on: Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires
In my opinion, it is not clear if space colonization increases or decreases x-risk. See “Dark skies” from Daniel Deudney or the article “Space colonization and suffering risks: Reassessing the ‘maxipok rule’” by Torres for a negative view. Therefore, it is hard to say if SpaceX or Bezos Blue Origin are net-positive or negative.
Moreover, Google founded the life extension company Calico and Bezos invested in Unity Biotechnology. Although life extension is not a classical cause area of EA, it would be strange if the moral value of indefinite life extension was only a small positive or negative number.

Frank_R 27 Sep 2022 9:37 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: sjsjsj’s comment on: Ask Me Anything about parenting as an Effective Altruist
I want to add that sleep training is a hot-button issue among parents. There is some evidence that starting to sleep-train your baby too early can be traumatic. My advice is simply to gather evidence from different sources before making a choice.
Otherwise, I agree with Geoffrey Millers reply. Your working hours as a parent are usually shorter, but you learn how to set priorities and work more effectively.

Frank_R 7 Sep 2022 11:19 UTC
4 points
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on: A Case Against Strong Longtermism
Thank you for writing this post. I agree with many of your arguments and criticisms like yours deserve to get more attention. Nevertheless, I still call myself a longtermist; mainly for the following reasons:
- There exist longtermist interventions that are good with respect to a broad range of ethical theories and views about the far future, e.g. searching the waste water for unknown pathogens.
- Sometimes it is possible to gather further evidence for counter-intuitive claims. For example, you could experiment with existing large language models and search for signs of misaligned behaviour.
- There may exist unknown longtermist interventions that satisfy all of our criteria. Therefore, a certain amount of speculative thinking is OK as long as you keep in mind that most speculative theories will die.
All in all, you should keep the balance between too conservative and too speculative thinking.

Frank_R 30 Aug 2022 7:48 UTC
4 points
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on: The Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism
In my opinion, the philosophy that you have outlined should not be simply dismissed since it contains several important points. Many people in EA, including me, want to avoid the repugnant conclusion and do not think that wireheading is a valueable thing. Moreover, more holistic ethical theories may also lead to important insights. Sometimes an entity has emergent properties that are not shared by its parts.
I agree that it is hard to reconcile animal suffering with a Nietzschian world view. Whats even worse is that it may lead to opinions like “It does not matter if there is a global catastrophe as long as the elite survives”.
It could be possible to develop a more balanced philosophy with help of moral uncertainty or if you simple state that avoiding suffering and excellence are both important values. Finally, you could point out that it is not plausible that humankind is able to flourish although many humans suffer. After all, you cannot be healthy if most of your organs are sick.

Frank_R 14 Aug 2022 6:29 UTC
6 points
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on: Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils
I have thought about similar issues as in your article and I my conclusions are broadly the same. Unfortunately, I have not written anything down since thinking about longtermism is something I do beside my job and family. I have some quick remarks:
- Your conclusions in Section 6 are in my opinion pretty robust, even if you use a more general mathematical framework.
- It is very unclear if space colonization increases or decreases existential risk. The main reason is that it is probably technologically feasible to send advanced weapons across astronomical distances, while building trust across such distances is hard.
- Solving the AI alignment problem helps, but you need an exceptionally well aligned AI to realize the “time of perils”-scenario. If an AI does not “kill everyone immediately”, it is not clear if it is able to stick to positive human values for several million years and can coordinate with AIs in space colonies which may have different values.
Since I have seen so many positive reactions to your article, I am wondering if it has some impact if I try to find time to write more about my thoughts.

Frank_R 16 Jun 2022 6:28 UTC
10 points
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on: A central AI alignment problem: capabilities generalization, and the sharp left turn
In my opinion there is a probability of >10% that you are right, which means AGI will be developed soon and you have to solve some of the hard problems mentioned above. Do you have any reading suggestions for people who want to find out if they are able to make progress on these questions? On the MIRI website there is a lot of material. Something like “You should read this first.”, “This is intermediate important stuff.” and “This is cutting edge research.” would be nice.

Frank_R 3 Jun 2022 10:10 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: My list of effective altruism ideas that seem to be underexplored
Thank you for the link to the paper. I find Alexander Vilenkins theoretical work very interesting.

Frank_R 3 Jun 2022 6:55 UTC
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: My list of effective altruism ideas that seem to be underexplored
Let us assume that a typical large but finite volume contains $n$ happy simulations of you and $n \cdot 10^{- 100}$ suffering copies of you, maybe Boltzmann brains or simulations made by a malevolent agent. If the universe is infinite, you have infinitely many happy and infinitely suffering copies of you and it is hard how to interpret this result.

Frank_R 2 Jun 2022 6:40 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: My list of effective altruism ideas that seem to be underexplored
I see two problems with your proposal:
1. It is not clear if a simulation of you in a patch of spacetime that is not causally connected to our part of the universe is the same as you. If you care only about the total amount of happy experiences, this would not matter, but if you care about personal identity, it becomes a non-trivial problem.
2. You probably assume that the multiverse is infinite. If this is the case, you can simply assume that for every copy of you that lives for N years another copy of you that lives for N+1 years appears somewhere by chance. In that case there would be no need to perform any action.
I am not against your ideas, but I am afraid that there are many conceptual and physical problems that have to solved before. What is even worse is that there is no universally accepted method how to resolve this issues. So a lot of further research is necessary.

Frank_R 1 Jun 2022 6:56 UTC
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: My list of effective altruism ideas that seem to be underexplored
Thank you for your answers. With better brain preservation and a more detailed understanding of the mind it may be possible to resurrect recently deceased persons. I am more skeptical about the possibility to resurrect a peasant from the middle ages by simulating the universe backwards, but of course these are different issues.

Frank_R 31 May 2022 14:41 UTC
4 points
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on: My list of effective altruism ideas that seem to be underexplored
Could you elaborate why we have to make choices before space colonisation if we want to survive beyond the end of the last stars? Until now, my opinion is that we can can “start solving heat death” a billion years in the future while we have to solve AI alignment in the next 50 − 1000 years.
Another thought of mine is that it is probably impossible to resurrect the dead by computing how the state of each neuron of a deceased person was at the time of her/his death. I think, you need to measure the state of each particle in the present with a very high precision and/or the computational requirements for a backward simulation are much too high. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a detailed mathematical argument. This would be an interesting research project; even if the only outcome is that a small group of people should change their cause area.

Frank_R 31 May 2022 13:52 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Question Mark’s comment on: Which possible AI impacts should receive the most additional attention?
It should be mentioned that all (or at least most) ideas to survive the heat death of the universe involve speculative physics. Moreover, you have to deal with infinities. If everyone is suffering but there is one sentient being that experiences a happy moment every million years, does this mean that there is an infinite amount of suffering and an infite amount of happiness and the future is of neutral value? If any future with an infinite amount of suffering is bad, does this mean that it is good if sentient life does not exists forever? There is no obvious answer to these questions.

Frank_R 31 May 2022 13:42 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Question Mark’s comment on: Which possible AI impacts should receive the most additional attention?
Other S-risks that may or may not sound more plausible are suffering simulations (maybe an AI comes to the conclusion that a good way to study humans is to simulate earth at the time of the Black Death) or suffering subroutines (maybe reinforcement learners that are able to suffer enable faster or more efficient algorithms).

Frank_R 21 Apr 2022 9:55 UTC
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in reply to: Vanessa’s comment on: Hiring a mathematician to work on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda
I have noticed that there are two similar websites for mathematical jobs. www.mathjobs.org is operated by the American Mathematical Society and is mostly for positions at universities, although they list jobs at other research institutions, too. www.math-jobs.com redirects you to www.acad.jobs , which has a broader focus. They advertise also government and industry jobs and it is also for job offers in computer science and other academic disciplines.
You have to register on both websites as an employer for several hundreds of dollars before you can post a job offer. I do not know if this is to much. Both sites are probably among the top ten for math related research positions, although this is only based on my gut feelings. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you if it is possible to post remote only jobs. I hope this information helps.

Frank_R 20 Apr 2022 11:36 UTC
4 points
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on: Hiring a mathematician to work on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda
How much knowledge about AI alignment apart from the right mathematical background is necessary for this position? If the job is suitable for candidates without prior involvment in x-risks / longtermism / Effective Altruism, it may be a good idea to announce it at places as mathjobs.org.

Frank_R 24 Mar 2022 8:22 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: AndyMcKenzie’s comment on: Brain preservation to prevent involuntary death: a possible cause area
I forgot to mention that you should be careful about how brain preservation increases or decreases the probability for suffering or existential risks. On the one hand, many patients waiting for whole brain emulation (WBE) could be a reason to push forward WBE without thinking about the possible negative effects deeply enough. On the other hand, if there are reasons to believe that some people alive today could live for millenia, this may ecourage longterm thinking. Since I cannot determine the sign of the risk, I am cautiously for brain preservation because of the positive nearterm effects.

Frank_R 24 Mar 2022 7:50 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: AndyMcKenzie’s comment on: Brain preservation to prevent involuntary death: a possible cause area
I don’t disagree with you. Although I think that existential and global catastrophic risks are the most important cause area, there are good project ideas in the life extension community without easy access to venture capital. Since biological aging is a major source of suffering, life extension and brain preservation are worthwhile cause areas.