An eccentric dreamer in search of truth and happiness for all. I formerly posted on Felicifia back in the day under the name Darklight and still use that name on Less Wrong. I’ve been loosely involved in Effective Altruism to varying degrees since roughly 2013.
Joseph_Chu
Karma: 575
Speaking of coolness, this may be a very obscure thing, but I remember there was a series of Japanese light novels called Durarara that got turned into an anime. In the story, there’s a group of online do-gooder vigilantes known as “The Dollars” who basically are weaponized 4chan (sorta like Anonymous but sillier and doing things offline) except for good instead of evil. The Dollars would secretly help people and coordinate to fight these IRL gangs in the story, using their numbers and anonymity (unlike the other gangs with colours, The Dollars were “colourless”).
Interestingly, the relative success of the anime led several fans to create copycat websites including this one (password is: baccano), based on the chat website in the story, and fans coalesced around some of them and attempted to mimick The Dollars for a while (mostly while the anime was still airing). Basically, this consisted of mostly idealistic, half-hearted, and not very effective attempts at anonymous acts of kindness called “missions” that would be posted on the Dollars forum. But the fact that this even happened at all, and that the website forum was frequented by fans from all over the world was, to me at least, quite interesting.
I think, in some ways, the EA movement resembles this in the sense of being sorta united around a forum, and consisting of people all over the world trying to do good. The difference is that rather than being an emotional, fun thing based on a silly pop culture reference, EA is very, very serious and focused on real world effectiveness (and is also more top-down).
Perhaps, having some of the stylish fun of “The Dollars” group could help EA reach a crowd that we’d normally never touch. I don’t really know how we’d go about this, but it’s an idea anyway.
Like, I could imagine something along the lines of there being some kind of work of fiction (i.e. a novel, a TV show, maybe a web serial?) that has a bunch of EA characters doing cool things that save the world, that if done well, could be a great recruitment tool of sorts.
Oh, thanks for the clarification! I totally missed that difference.
Given how the “bottom half” of China’s population is, to my admittedly cursory knowledge, mostly the poor rural farmers and migrant workers who have benefited a lot less from China’s recent economic growth, and are likely a big reason why China’s GDP per capita is still a fair bit lower than most western developed countries despite the shiny new city skylines, it makes sense that including that segment would make a big difference in the evaluation.
Thanks again! That actually makes me update on my earlier evaluation of the utilitarian impact of China a lot.
This post somewhat resonates with me, as I’m also sort of an old hand, albeit I’ve always been more on the periphery of EA, and sometimes consider myself EA-adjacent rather than full on EA (even though I’ve done a bunch of EA-ish things like donate to AMF/Give Directly and attend an EA Global).
I’ve been around long enough to see a bunch of the early EAs who were part of the old Felicifia forums become more or less leaders in the movement (i.e. Peter Wildeford), as well as some sorta fade into obscurity (i.e. Brian Tomasik?). It’s interesting to see, and I’m happy for the former, and a bit sad about the latter.
Weirdly, I’ve also moved a bit further leftish on the political spectrum in recent years, and this has led me to feel conflicted about EA, as it’s very much a western liberal movement, and my sympathy for socialism seems to be an awkward fit nowadays. Though, admittedly I tend to oscillate at times, so this may be temporary.
And yeah, as I’ve mentioned before in other comments, I do feel like the movement is more geared towards the young university elite as well.
Just some thoughts, I guess.
As I mentioned in another comment, while China ranks in the middle on the World Happiness Report, it actually ranked highest on the IPSOS Global Happiness Report from 2023, which was the last year that China was included in the survey.
I’m curious what you think of Geoffrey Hinton’s recent comments during his interview with Jon Stewart, where he said that in a recent trip to China, he met with a member of the Politburo and found that this person was very serious about the concerns of AI safety and AI takeover and that Hinton felt that China was more likely to do things about it than the U.S.
Also, while it’s definitely true that China hasn’t embraced most western liberal values like multiparty democracy, rule of law, and human rights, you can debate some of the finer points and argue that, for instance, the Marxist intellectual tradition is western in origin, and that China’s alternative to western liberalism is a strange mixture of Marxism and Confucianism.
And, it might be noted regarding ethnic minorities that while separatism is severely punished, minorities that conform to the existing system are often rewarded with, for instance, extra points on the university entrance examination system (Gaokao), as a form of affirmative action.
Back to moral philosophy, the nature of Chinese moral philosophy seems to be more practical than analytical. Probably the most analytical moral philosophy to come out of China was Mohism, which considering how much it predates it, is very, very similar to Utilitarianism in being an overall consequentialist framework with an emphasis on human equality and the greatest good. Interestingly, some of the CCP literature in the past has tried to emphasize Mohism as some kind of forerunner to modern Marxism.
In terms of the future going well, I think the strongest argument for a CCP aligned AGI being beneficial would be that some kind of post-scarcity communism is likely to achieve more human flourishing than the techno-feudalism that western capitalism could potentially devolve into with the AGI company leaders owning everything and the rest of us surviving on basic income that exists at the whim of these AGI owners.
The CCP, for all its faults, is nominally still a communist party, and so is more likely to, given an actual chance to succeed at it, introduce post-scarcity communism that spreads the benefits of AGI in a generally egalitarian way. Though, obviously a possible failure state is that the party instead monopolizes AGI’s benefits and we still get techno-feudalism, albeit state-run instead of private.
Also, while China ranks in the middle on the World Happiness Report, it actually ranked highest on the IPSOS Global Happiness Report from 2023, which was the last year that China was included in the survey.
As for the lack of charitable donations, there are probably a number of reasons for this. Certain scandals involving the Red Cross have in the past made people weary of donating. And, probably more significantly, Chinese cultural expectations mean that a lot of what would be charitable work in the west is expected to be done by either family or the government. I personally have tried to convince some Chinese nationals to donate to, for instance, AMF, and their response is usually along the lines of this being the local government’s responsibility. There is definitely a strain of collectivism in China that contrasts with the individualism of western liberal democracies.
So, I think, a CCP led AI future would probably be notably different than a western led one, but I’m unclear on whether this would actually be that much worse. At the end of the day, both would, ideally, be led by humans and human-aligned ASI.
As an EA and a Christian… I find Thiel’s apparent views and actions to me resemble what the Bible says an Antichrist is, more than EA by far. He is hypocritically calling EA totalitarian while simultaneously, deeply supporting what amounts to technofascism in the U.S.
It is bizarre to me how unchristian his version of libertarianism is, with what seems like a complete indifference, if not utter disdain, towards the poor and downtrodden who Jesus sought to help. Thiel seems to be so far from the spirit of Christian values (at least as I understand them) that I have a hard time imagining what could be further from it.
I could go on, but people like this, who call themselves Christian and yet appear to be the polar opposite of what a good Christian ought to be (again, in my opinion) infuriate me to the point that I have trouble expressing things without getting angry, so I’ll stop here.
The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low
I’m not very confident in this view, but I’m philosophically somewhat against encouraging Earning-To-Give as it can justify working at what I see as unethical high paying jobs (i.e. finance, the oil industry, AI capabilities, etc.) and pretending you can simply offset it with enough donations. I think actions like this condone the unethical, making it more socially acceptable and creating negative higher order effects, and that we shouldn’t do this. It’s also a slippery slope and entails ends justifies the means thinking, like what SBF seems to have thought, and I think we should be cautious about potentially following such an example.
I also, separately, think that we should respect the autonomy of the people making decisions about their careers, and that those who want to EtG and who have the personal fit for it are likely already doing that, and suggesting more people should do so is somewhat disrespectful of the autonomy and ability to make rational, moral decisions of those who choose otherwise.
Quick question! What’s the best way to handle having long gaps on your resume?
So, I used to be a research scientist in AI/ML at Huawei Canada (circa 2017-2019), which on paper should make me a good candidate for AI technical safety work. However, in recent years I pivoted into game development, mostly because an EA friend and former moral philosophy lecturer pitched the idea of a Trolley Problem game to me and my interviews with big tech had gone nowhere (I now have a visceral disdain for Leetcode). Unfortunately, the burn rate of the company now means I can’t be paid anymore, so I’m looking around at other things again.
Back in 2022, I went to EA Global Washington DC and got some interviews with AI safety startups like FAR and Generally Intelligent, but couldn’t get past the technical interviews. As such, I’m not sure I’m actually qualified to be an AI safety technical researcher. I also left Huawei in part due to mental health issues making it difficult to work in such a high stress environment.
I’ve also considered doing independent AI safety research, and applied to the LTFF before and been rejected without feedback. I also applied to 80,000 Hours a while back and was also rejected.
Regularly reading the EA Forums and Less Wrong makes me continue to think AI safety work is the most important thing I could do, but at the same time, I have doubts I won’t mess up and waste people’s time and money that could go to more capable people and projects. I also have a family now, so I can’t just move to the Bay Area/London and burn my life for the cause either.
What should I do?
I should point out that the natural tendency for civilizations to fall appears to apply to subsets of the human civilization, rather than the entirety of humanity historically. While locally catastrophic, these events were not existential, as humanity survived and recovered.
I’d also argue that the collapse of a civilization requires far more probabilities to go to zero and has greater and more complex causal effects than all time machines just failing to work when tried.
And, the reality is that at this time we do not know if the Non-Cancel Principle is true or false, and whether or not the universe will prevent time travel. Given this, we face the dilemma that if we precommit to not developing time travel and time travel turns out to be possible, then we have just limited ourselves and will probably be outcompeted by a civilization that develops time travel instead of us.
Ah, that makes sense! Thanks for the clarification.
Why would the only way to prevent timeline collapse be to prevent civilizations from achieving black hole-based time travel? Why not just have it so that whenever such time travel is attempted, any attempts to actually change the timeline simply fail mysteriously and events end up unfolding as they did regardless?
Like, you could still go back as a tourist and find out if Jesus was real, or scan people’s brains before they die and upload them into the future, but you’d be unable to make any changes to history, and anything you did would actually end up bringing about the events as they originally occurred.
I also don’t see how precommitting to anything will escape the “curse”. The universe isn’t an agent we can do acausal trade with. Applying the Anthropic Principle, we either are not the type of civilization that will ever develop time travel, or there is no “curse” that prevents civilizations like ours from developing time travel. Otherwise, we already shouldn’t exist as a civilization.
So, it seems like most of the existential risks from time travel are only if the Non-Cancel Principle you described is false? It also seems like the Non-Cancel Principle also prevents most time paradoxes, so that seems like strong evidence towards it being true?
It seems like the Non-Cancel Principle would lead to only two possible ways time travel could go about. Either everything “already happened” and so time travel can only cause events to happen as they did (i.e. Tenet), meaning no actual changes or new timelines are possible (no free will), or alternatively, time travel branches the timeline, creating new timelines in a multiverse of possible worlds (in which case, where did the energy for this timeline come from if Conservation of Energy holds?).
I find the latter option more interesting for science fiction, but I think the former probably makes more sense from a physics perspective. I would really like to be wrong on this though, because useful time travel would be really cool and possibly the most important and valuable technology that one could have (that or ASI).
Anyway, interesting write up! I’ve personally spent a lot of time thinking about time travel and its possible mechanics, as it’s a fascinating concept to me.
P.S. This is Darklight from Less Wrong.
I mean, that innate preference for oneself isn’t objective in the sense of being a neutral outsider view of things. If you don’t see the point of having an objective “point of view of the universe” view about stuff, then sure, there’s no reason to care about this version of morality. I’m not arguing that you need to care, only that it would be objective and possibly truth tracking to do so, that there exists a formulation of morality that can be objective in nature.
I guess the main intuitional leap that this formulation of morality takes is the idea that if you care about your own preferences, you should care about the preferences of others as well, because if your preferences matter objectively, theirs do as well. If your preferences don’t matter objectively, why should you care about anything at all?
The principle of indifference as applied here is the idea that given that we generally start with maximum uncertainty about the various sentients in the universe (no evidence in any direction about their worth or desert), we should assign equal value to each of them and their concerns. It is admittedly an unusual use of the principle.
You could argue that if moral realism is true, that even if our models of morality are probably wrong, you can be less wrong about them by acquiring knowledge about the world that contains relevant moral facts. We would never be certain they are correct, but we could be more confident about them in the same way we can be confident about a mathematical theory being valid.
I guess I should explain what my version of moral realism would entail.
Morality to my understanding is, for a lack of a better phrase, subjectively objective. Given a universe without any subjects making subjective value judgments, nothing would matter (it’s just a bunch of space rocks colliding and stuff). However, as soon as you introduce subjects capable of experiencing the universe and having values and making judgments about the value of different world states, we have the capacity to make “should” statements about the desirability of given possible world states. Some things are now “good” and some things are now “bad”, at least to a given subject. From an objective, neutral, impartial point of view, all subjects and their value judgments are equally important (following the Principle of Indifference aka the Principle of Maximum Entropy).
Thus, as long as anyone anywhere cares about something enough to value or disvalue it, it matters objectively. The statement that “Alice cares about not feeling pain” and its hedonic equivalent “Alice experiences pain as bad” is an objective moral fact. Given that all subjects are equal (possibly in proportion to degree of sentience, not sure about this), then we can aggregate these values and select the world state that is most desirable overall (greatest good for the greatest number).
The rest of morality, things like universalizable rules that generally encourage the greatest good in the long run, are built on top of this foundation of treating the desires/concerns/interests/well-being/happiness/Eudaimonia of all sentient beings throughout spacetime equally and fairly. At least, that’s my theory of morality.
So, regarding the moral motivation thing, moral realism and motivational internalism are distinct philosophical concepts, and one can be true without the other also being true. Like, there could be moral facts, but they might not matter to some people. Or, maybe people who believe things are moral are motivated to act on their theory of morality, but the theory isn’t based on any moral facts but are just deeply held beliefs.
The latter example could be true regardless of whether moral realism is true or not. For instance, the psychopath might -think- that egoism is the right thing to do because their folk morality is that everyone is in it for themselves and suckers deserve what they get. This isn’t morality as we might understand it, but it would function psychologically as a justification for their actions to them (so they sleep better at night and have a more positive self-image) and effectively be motivating in a sense.
Even -if- both moral realism and motivational internalism were true, this doesn’t mean that people will automatically discover moral facts and act on them reliably. You would basically need to have perfect information and be perfectly rational for that to happen, and no one has these traits in the real world (except maybe God, hypothetically).
Ah, good catch! Yeah, my flavour of moral realism is definitely naturalist, so that’s a clear distinction between myself and Bentham, assuming you are correct about what he thinks.
I’ll admit I kinda skimmed some of Bentham’s arguments and some of them do sound a bit like rhetoric that rely on intuition or emotional appeal rather than deep philosophical arguments.
If I wanted to give a succinct explanation for my reasons for endorsing moral realism, it would be that morality has to do with what subjects/sentients/experiencers value, and these things they value, while subjective in the sense that they come from the perceptions and judgments of the subjects, are objective in the sense that these perceptions and in particular the emotions or feelings experienced because of them, are true facts about their internal state (i.e. happiness and suffering, desires and aversions, etc.). These can be objectively aggregated together as the sum of all value in the universe from the perspective of an impartial observer of said universe.
One thing we could do to help EA seem more cool without compromising at all on truth and intellectual integrity is to emphasize that what we’re doing is actually heroic. Like, we are literally saving lives (bednets) and protecting the helpless (animals) and trying to save the world from potential doom (AI safety).
That leans into our altruist angle. I think we could also lean into the effectiveness angle by comparing ourselves to heroic characters in fiction who use their intelligence to outwit the bad guys. I’m thinking BBC’s Sherlock, Spock from Star Trek, Lelouch from Code Geass, Tony Stark aka Iron Man, HPMOR, etc. In fact, EAs are kinda like combining Tony Stark’s genius with the sense of morality and decency of Steve Rogers aka Captain America.
We are like Lawful Good D&D Paladins in the sense of championing a righteous cause, and D&D Wizards in the sense of using our intelligence to solve the problems.
So, I think we should lean into the idea that being EA is heroic. We’re trying to save the world. Many of us make real sacrifices (10% to charity, veganism, career pivots, etc.) to make the world a better place.
As for villains, I mean, there are many we could point to other than just Altman. Elon Musk is basically a caricature at this point. Not only is he racing to ASI with the least safety of any of the frontier competitors, but as leader of DOGE he cut USAID and essentially killed or at least abandoned all the people depending on that. Another obvious choice would be an unaligned ASI itself.
But I think, it’s actually more important to show us as the heroes we are, than to name villains. People get mad at villains. People connect with heroes.
You might argue with AI safety in particular that it already sounds too sci-fi. I think, we can’t avoid that, and we may as well take advantage of the tropes that our culture has to make the connections that can be made that resonate with people. Heroes saving the world is a lot more exciting and cool a frame than maximizing impact through targeted donations and direct work sounds, but in effect, in the real world, they are the same thing.
This is not PR or spinning facts. At the risk of sounding cheesy, our efforts really are heroic, and we deserve for our society and culture to appreciate that, and recognize that they too, can become heroes in our world.