Lukas_Gloor

Karma: 6,757

Lukas_Gloor Jun 24, 2024, 12:06 AM
6 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Truth-seeking vs Influence-seeking—a narrower discussion
.I don’t really think it’s this. I think it is “I don’t want people associating me with people or ideas like that so I’d like you to stop please”.
It might be what you say for some people, but that doesn’t ring true for my case (at all). (But also, compared to all the people who complained about stuff at Manifest or voiced negative opinions from the sidelines as forum users, I’m pretty sure I’m in the 33% that felt the least strongly and had fewer items to pick at.)
But let’s take your case, that means you think that on the margin some notion of considerateness/kindness/agreeableness is more important than truth-seeking. Is that right?
I don’t like this framing/way of thinking about it.
For one thing, I’m not sure if I want to concede the point that it is the “maximally truth-seeking” thing to risk that a community evaporatively cools itself along the lines we’re discussing.
Secondly, I think the issues around Manifest I objected to weren’t directly about “what topics are people allowed to talk about?.”

If some person with a history of considerateness and thoughtfulness wanted to do a presentation on HBD at Manifest, or (to give an absurd example) if Sam Harris (who I think is better than average at handling delicate conversations like that) wanted to interview Douglas Murray again in the context of Manifest, I’d be like “ehh, not sure that’s a good idea, but okay...” And maybe also “Well, if you’re going to do this, at least think very carefully about how to communicate about why you’re talking about this/what the goal of the session is.” (It makes a big difference whether the framing of the session is “We know this isn’t a topic most people are interested in, but we’ve had some people who are worried that if we cannot discuss every topic there is, we might lose what’s valuable about this community, so this year, we decided to host a session on this; we took steps x, y, and z to make sure this won’t become a recruiting ground for racists;” or whether the framing is “this is just like every other session.”) [But maybe this example is beside the point, I’m not actually sure whether the objectionable issue was sessions on HBD/intelligence differences among groups, or whether it was more just people talking about it during group conversations.]

By contrast, if people with a history of racism or with close ties to racists attend the conference and it’s them who want to talk about HBD, I’m against it. Not directly because of what’s being discussed, but because of how and by whom. (But again, it’s not my call to make and I’m just stating what I would do/what I think would lead to better outcomes.)
(I also thought people who aren’t gay using the word “fag” sounded pretty problematic. Of course, this stuff can be moderated case-by-case and maybe a warning makes more sense than an immediate ban. Also, in fairness, it seems like the conference organizers would’ve agreed with that and they simply didn’t hear the alleged incident when it allegedly happened.)

Lukas_Gloor Jun 23, 2024, 1:30 PM
67 points
20 ∶ 0
on: Truth-seeking vs Influence-seeking—a narrower discussion
“Influence-seeking” doesn’t quite resonate with me as a description of the virtue on the other end of “truth-seeking.”

What’s central in my mind when I speak out against putting “truth-seeking” above everything else is mostly a sentiment of “I really like considerate people and I think you’re driving out many people who are considerate, and a community full of disagreeable people is incredibly off-putting.”

Also, I think considerateness axis is not the same as the decoupling axis. I think one can be very considerate and also great at decoupling; you just have to be able to couple things back together as well.

Lukas_Gloor Jun 21, 2024, 11:23 AM
14 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
Good points! It seems good to take a break or at least move to the meta level.
I think one emotion that is probably quite common in discussions about what norms should be (at least in my own experience) is clinging. Quoting from Joe Carlsmith’s post on it:
Clinging, as I think about it, is a certain mental flavor or cluster of related flavors. It feels contracted, tight, clenched, and narrow. It has a kind of hardness, a “not OK-ness,” and a (sometimes subtle) kind of desperation. It sees scarcity. It grabs. It sees threat. It pushes away. It carries seeds of resentments and complaints. [...]
Often, in my experience, clinging seems to hijack attention and agency. It makes it harder to think, weigh considerations, and respond. You are more likely to flail, or stumble around, or to “find yourself” doing something rather than choosing to do it. And you’re more likely, as well, to become pre-occupied by certain decisions — especially if both options involve things you’re clinging in relation to — or events. Indeed, clinging sometimes seems like it treats certain outcomes as “infinitely bad,” or at least bad enough that avoiding them is something like a hard constraint. This can cause consequent problems with reasoning about what costs to pay to avoid what risks.
Clinging is also, centrally, unpleasant. But it’s a particular type of unpleasant, which feels more like it grabs and restricts and distorts who you are than e.g. a headache.
In the midst of feeling like a lot is at stake and one’s values are being threatened, we may often try to push the social pendulum in our desired direction as hard as possible. However, that will have an aggravating and polarizing effect on the debate because the other side will see your attitude and think, “this person is not making any concessions whatsoever, and it seems like even though the social pendulum is already favorable to them, they’ll keep pushing against us!”
So, to de-escalate these dynamics, it seems valuable to acknowledge the values that are at stake for both sides, even just to flag that you’re not in favor of pushing the pendulum as far as possible.
For instance, maybe this would already feel more relaxed if the side that is concerned about losing what’s valuable regarding “truth-seeking” can acknowledge that there is a bar also for them, that, if they thought they were dealing with people full of hate or people who advocate for views that predictably cause harm to others (while being aware of this but advocating for those views because of a lack of concern for the affected others), the “truth-seeking” proponents will indeed step in and not tolerate it. Likewise, the other side could maybe acknowledge that it’s bad when people get shunned just based on superficial associations/vibes (to give an example of something that I think is superficial: saying “sounds like they’re into eugenics” as though this should end the discussion, without pointing out any way in which what the person is discussing is hateful, lacks compassion, or is otherwise likely to cause harm). This is bad not just for well-intentioned individuals who might get unfairly ostracized, but also bad for discourse in general because people won’t speak their minds any longer.

Lukas_Gloor Jun 20, 2024, 7:35 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dicentra’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
Well said.
I meant to say the exact same thing, but seem to have struggled at communicating.
I want to point out that my comment above was specifically reacting to the following line and phrasing in timunderwood’s parent comment:
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we’ve actually looked at the data.
My point (and yours) is that this quoted passage would be clearer if it said “genetic group differences” instead of “racism.”

Lukas_Gloor Jun 20, 2024, 12:55 PM
4 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: timunderwood’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
I agree with this diagnosis of the situation. At the same time, I feel like it’s the wrong approach to make it a scientific proposition whether racism is right or not. It should never be right, no matter the science. (I know this is just talking semantics, but I think it adds a bunch of moral clarity to frame it in this way, that science can never turn out to support racism.) As I said here, the problem I see with the HBD crowd is that they think their opinions on the science justifies certain other things or that it’s a very important topic.

Lukas_Gloor Jun 20, 2024, 12:41 PM
13 points
4 ∶ 1
on: Against the Guardian’s hit piece on Manifest
I agree the article was pretty bad and unfair, and I agree with most things you say about cancel culture.
But then you lose me when you imply that racism is no different than taking one of the inevitable counterintuitive conclusions in philosophy thought experiments. (I’ve previously had a lengthy discussion on this topic in this recent comment thread.)
If I were an organizer of a conference where I wanted having interesting and relevant ideas being discussed, I’d still want there to be a bar for attendees to avoid the problem Scott Alexander pointed out (someone else recently quoted this in this same context, so hat tip to them, but I forget the name of the person):
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I’d be in favor of having the bar be significantly lower than many outrage-prone people are going to be comfortable with, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a bar that is basically “if you’re interesting, you’re good, no matter what else.”
In any case, that’s just how I would do it. There are merits to having groups with different bars.
(In the case of going for a very low one, I think it could make sense to think about the branding and whether it’s a good idea to associate forecasting in particular with a low filter.)
Basically, what I’m trying to say is I’d like to be on your side here because I agree with many things you’re saying and see where you’re coming from, but you’re making it impossible for me to side with you if you think there’s no difference between biting inevitable bullets in common EA thought experiments vs “actually being racist” or “recently having made incredibly racist comments.”
I don’t think I’m using the adjective ‘racist’ here in a sense that is watered down or used in an inflationary sort of way; I think I’m trying to be pretty careful about when I use that word. FWIW, I also think that the terminology “scientific racism” that some people are using is muddling the waters here. There’s a lot of racist pseudoscience going around, but it’s not the case that you can say that every claim about group differences is definitely pseudoscience (it would be a strange coincidence if all groups of all kinds had no statistical differences in intelligence-associated genes). However, the relevant point is group differences don’t matter (it wouldn’t make a moral difference no matter how things shake out because policies should be about individuals and not groups) and that a lot of people who get very obsessed with these questions are actually racist, and the ones who aren’t (like Scott Alexander, or Sam Harris when he interviewed Charles Murray on a podcast) take great care to distance themselves from actual racists in what they say about the topic and what conclusions they want others to draw from discussion of it. So, I think if someone were to call Scott Alexander and Sam Harris “scientifically racist,” then that seems like it’s watering down racism discourse because I don’t think those people’s views are morally objectionable, even though it is the case that many people’s views in that cluster are morally objectionable.

Lukas_Gloor Jun 20, 2024, 12:32 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: TheAthenians’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
I think generally though it’s easy to misunderstand people, and if people respond to clarify, you should believe what they say they meant to say, not your interpretation of what they said.
Depends on context. Not (e.g.) if someone has a pattern of using plausible deniability to get away with things (I actually don’t know if this applies to Hanania) or if we have strong priors for suspecting that this is what they’re doing (arguably applies here for reasons related to his history; see next paragraph).
If someone has a history of being racist, but they say they’ve changed, it’s IMO on them to avoid making statements that are easily interpreted as incredibly racist. And if they accidentally make such an easily misinterpretable statement, it’s also on them to immediately clarify what they did or didn’t mean.
Generally, in contexts that we have strong reason to believe that they might be adversarial, incompetence/stupidity cannot be counted continuously as a sufficient excuse, because adversaries will always try to claim it as their excuse, so if you let it go through, you give full coverage to all malefactors. You need adversarial epistemology. Worst-case scenario, you’ll judge harshly some people who happen to merely be incompetent in ways that, unfortunately, exactly help provide cover to bad actors. But [1] even though many people make mistakes or can seem incompetent at times, it’s actually fairly rare that incompetence looks exactly the same as what a bad actor would do for more sinister, conscious reasons (and then claim incompetence as an excuse), and [2], sadly enough, a low rate of false positives seems the lesser evil here for the utilitarian calculus because we’re in an adversarial context where harms conditional on being right are asymmetrically larger than harms on being wrong. (Of course, there’s also an option like “preserve option value and gather further info,” which is overall preferable, and I definitely like that you reached out to Hanania in that spirit. I’m not saying we should all have made up our minds solely based on that tweet; I’m mostly just saying that I find it pretty naive to immediately believe the guy just because he said he didn’t mean it in a racist way.)

Lukas_Gloor Jun 19, 2024, 9:08 PM
13 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
I made the following edit to my comment above-thread:
[Edit: To be clear, by “HBD crowd” I don’t mean people who believe and say things like “intelligence is heritable” or “embryo selection towards smarter babies seems potentially very good if implemented well.” I thought this was obvious, but someone pointed out that people might file different claims under the umbrella “HBD”.]
I’m not sure this changes anything about your response, but my perspective is that a policy of “let’s not get obsessed over mapping out all possible group differences and whether they’re genetic” is (by itself) unlikely to start us down a slippery slope that ends in something like Lyssenkoism.
For illustration, I feel like my social environment has tons of people with whom you can have reasonable discussions about e.g., applications of embryo selection, but they mostly don’t want to associate with people who talk about IQ differences between groups a whole lot and act like it’s a big deal if true. So, it seems like these things are easy to keep separate (at least in some environments).

Also, I personally think the best way to make any sort of dialogue saner is NOT by picking the most controversial true thing you can think of, and then announcing with loudspeakers that you’re ready to die on that hill. (In a way, that sort of behavior would even send an “untrue” [in a “misdirection” sense discussed here] signal: Usually people die on hills that are worthy causes. So, if you’re sending the signal “group differences discourse is worth dying over,” you’re implicitly signalling that this is an important topic. But, as I argued, I don’t think it is, and creating an aura of it being important is part of what I find objectionable and where I think the label “racist” can be appropriate, if that’s the sort of motivation that draws people to these topics. So, even in terms of wanting to convey true things, I think it would be a failure of prioritization to focus on this swamp of topics.)

Lukas_Gloor Jun 19, 2024, 2:03 PM
57 points
10 ∶ 3
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
I’m personally very turned off by the HBD crowd.

[Edit: To be clear, by “HBD crowd” I don’t mean people who believe and say things like “intelligence is heritable” or “embryo selection towards smarter babies seems potentially very good if implemented well.” I thought this was obvious, but someone pointed out that people might file different claims under the umbrella “HBD”.]

For me, it’s not necessarily because I think they’re wrong about most factual claims that they’re making.

Instead, I’m turned off by the attitude of these being important questions to focus intellectual pursuits on. The existence and origin of group differences seem to me obviously not of great practical importance, so I feel like when people obsess over this, I’m suspicious that it’s coming either from a place of edginess/wanting to feel superior to those who “cannot face the truth”, or (worse) a darker place of entitlement and wanting to externalize bad feelings about one’s own life by blaming some outgroup that has received “undeserved” support.

When thinking about how to make the world better for humans (excluding non-human animals for the moment), I see basically three major cause areas (very simplified):

(1) Evidence-based, immediate-outcome-focused interventions that improve things on some legible metric, like school attendance, medicines successfully administered, etc.

(2) Longer-term structural reform via politics.

(3) Focusing on technological breakthroughs and risks that either improve or worsen things for everyone.

If someone is interested in (1), HBD doesn’t change anything about evidence-based progress on legible metrics. We’d continue to want to support evidence-based interventions in all kinds of contexts that make things better for individuals on some concrete variables. (The focus on evidence-based metrics is great because it helps us sideline a lot of politics-inspired storytelling that turns out to be wrong, such as the claim that poor people will make poor choices if you give them money [GiveDirectly example].)

If someone is interested in (3), they’ll hopefully understand that a lot of things that are pressing problems today will either no longer matter in 1-20 years because we’re all dead, or they’ll be more easily solvable with the help of aligned powerful AIs and radical technologically-aided re-structuring of society.

Lastly, if someone is interested in (2), then good luck: It seems like the EA community has failed to find convincing interventions in this area. If you know of some intervention that would be extremely cost-effective, but in-your-opinion false beliefs about HBD are the only crux that stands in the way from us doing the intervention, then that would sound interesting to talk about. But this isn’t the case, is it? I think structural reform is intrinsically hard.

I can see how HBD questions might have some tangential relevance for policy reform, but emphasis on tangential, and I also think that we’re so far away from doing sensible things under (2) that this seems unlikely to be an important crux. (Also, if I were to prioritize something in this space, it would be meta-level interventions like improving the news landscape.)

In this context of structural reform, I should flag that I’m also very much against wokeism, and I agree that there are parallels to Lysenkoism. But I don’t think “being against wokeism” implies “we should be interested in HBD questions.” In fact, I think I am against both of these for related reasons. I think it’s often not productive to view everything in terms of “group vs group.” I think we should spend resources on causes where we can point to concrete benefits for individuals, no matter their group. There’s so much to do on that front already so that other things feel like a bit of a distraction, both in general, but also especially when considering the mind-killing effects of political controversies.

So, to summarize, your comment about HBD being important seems very wrong to me.

Edit: I guess a steelman of your point is that you’re not necessarily saying HBD is in itself important, you’re just saying it would be bad to actively deny it (presumably because this would lend momentum to wokeism or new types of Lyssenkoism). I have more sympathies with that, but the way I see it, it’s more like maybe HBD and wokeism are two sides of a toxic dynamic where it would be better if we could get back to other concerns.
What links here?
- Lukas_Gloor's comment on Why so many “racists” at Manifest? by Austin (Jun 20, 2024, 12:55 PM; 4 points)

Lukas_Gloor Jun 13, 2024, 1:34 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pat Myron 🔸’s comment on: Lukas_Gloor’s Shortform
The point I wanted to make in the short form was directed at a particular brand of skeptic.
When I said,
Something has gone wrong if people think pausing can only make sense if the risks of AI ruin are >50%.
I didn’t mean to imply that anyone who opposes pausing would consider >50% ruin levels their crux.
Likewise, I didn’t mean to imply that “let’s grant 5% risk levels” is something that every skeptic would go along with (but good that your comment is making this explicit!).
For what it’s worth, if I had to give a range for how much I think people I, at the moment, epistemically respect to the highest extent possible, can disagree on this question today (June 2024), I would probably not include credences <<5% in that range (I’d maybe put it a more like 15-90%?). (This is of course subject to change if I encounter surprisingly good arguments for something outside the range.) But that’s a separate(!) discussion, separate from the conditional statement that I wanted to argue for in my short form. (Obviously, other people will draw the line elsewhere.)
On the 80k article, I think it aged less well than what one maybe could’ve written at the time, but it was written at a time when AI risk concerns still seemed fringe. So, just because it in my view didn’t age amazingly doesn’t mean that it was unreasonable at the time. At the time, I’d have probably called it “lower than what I would give, but seems within the range of what I consider reasonable.”

Lukas_Gloor Jun 12, 2024, 3:32 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Lukas_Gloor’s Shortform
Yeah, I agree. I wrote about timing considerations here; I agree this is an important part of the discussion.

Lukas_Gloor Jun 12, 2024, 1:29 PM
3 points
2 ∶ 2
on: Lukas_Gloor’s Shortform
[AI pause can be the best course of action even if the baseline risk of AI ruin were “only” 5%]

Some critics of pausing frontier AI research argue that AI pause would be an extreme measure (curtailing tech progress, which has historically led to so much good) that is only justifiable if we have very high confidence that the current path leads to ruin.

On the one hand, I feel like the baseline risk is indeed very high (I put it at 70% all-things-considered).

At the same time, I’m frustrated that there’s so much discussion of “is the baseline risk really that high?” compared to “is not pausing really the optimal way for us to go into this major civilizational transition?”

I feel like arguing about ruin levels can be distraction from what should be a similarly important crux. Something has gone wrong if people think pausing can only make sense if the risks of AI ruin are >50%.

The key question is: Will pausing reduce the risks?

Even if the baseline risk were “only” 5%, assuming we have a robust argument that pausing for (say) five years will reduce it to (say) 4%, that would clearly be good! (It would be very unfortunate for the people who will die preventable deaths in the next five years, but pausing would still be better on net, on these assumptions.)

So, what assumptions would have to be true that continuing ahead is better than pausing?

(Also, if someone is worried that there are negative side effects from pausing, such as that it’ll be politically/societally hard to re-start things later on after alignment research made breakthroughs or if some Western-values unaligned country is getting closer to building TAI themselves, that’s a discussion worth having! However, then we have to look at “the best implementation of pausing we can realistically get if we advocate for the smartest thing,” and not “a version of pausing that makes no attempts whatsoever to reduce bad side effects.”)

Lukas_Gloor Jun 12, 2024, 12:59 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: dstudioscode’s comment on: Population Ethics Without Axiology: A Framework
That’s good.
2.The author distinguishes between “utilitarianism as a personal goal” versus utilitarianism as the single true morality everyone must adopt.
And I argue (or link to arguments in previous posts) that the latter interpretation isn’t defensible. Utilitarianism as the true morality would have to be based on an objective axiology, but there’s likely no such thing (only subjective axiologies).

Maybe also worth highlighting is that the post contains an argument about how we can put person-affecting views on more solid theoretical grounding. (This goes more into the weeds, but it’s a topic that comes up a lot in EA discourse.) Here’s a summary of that argument:
- The common arguments against person-affecting views seem to be based on the assumption, “we want an overarching framework that tells us what’s best for both existing/sure-to-exist and possible people at the same time.”
- However, since (so I argue) there’s no objective axiology, it’s worth asking whether this is maybe too steep of a requirement?
- Person-affecting views seem well-grounded if we view them as a deliberate choice between two separate perspectives, where the non-person affecting answer is “adopt a subjective axiology that tells us what’s best for newly created people,” and the person-affecting answer is “leave our axiology under-defined.”
- Leaving one’s subjective axiology under-defined means that many actions we can take that affect new people will be equally “permissible.”
- Still, this doesn’t mean “anything goes,” since we’ll still have some guidance from minimal morality: On the context of creating new people/beings, minimal morality implies that we should (unless it’s unreasonably demanding) not commit actions that are objectionable according to all plausible subjective axiologies.
- Concretely, this means that it’s permissible to do a range of things even if they are neither what’s best on anti-natalist grounds, nor what’s best on totalist grounds, as long as we don’t do something that’s bad on both these grounds.

Lukas_Gloor Jun 3, 2024, 4:25 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Repugnance and replacement
However, I suspect we should pick A instead. With Z available, A+ seems too unfair to the contingent people and too partial to the necessary/present people. Once the contingent people exist, Z would have been better than A+. And if Z is still an option at that point, we’d switch to it. So, anticipating this reasoning, whether or not we can later make the extra people better off later, I suspect we should rule out A+ first, and then select A over Z.
I can imagine myself as one of the original necessary people in A. If we picked A+, I’d judge that to be too selfish of us and too unkind to the extra people relative to the much fairer Z. All of us together, with the extra people, would collectively judge Z to have been better. From my impartial perspective, I would then regret the choice of A+. On the other hand, if we (the original necessary people) collectively decide to stick with A to avoid Z and the unkindness of A+ relative to Z, it’s no one else’s business. We only hurt ourselves relative to A+. The extra people won’t be around to have any claims.
Well said! I think that’s what a well-constructed account of person-affecting views should say, and I think we can indeed say that without running into contradictions or other counterintuitive conclusions elsewhere (but it’s worth working this out in detail). The rationale I would give is something like the following. “If we decide to create new people (which is never in itself important, but we might still want to do it for various reasons), it’s important that we take into consideration the interests of these new people. This rules out some ways of creating new people [like A+ when Z is available] where they’re worse off than they could be, at no compensatory moral gain.”
Some people might think it’s strange that the acceptability of A+ depends on whether Z is also available. However, I think that’s actually okay, and we can see that it is okay if we think about common sense practical examples: I’d say it’s acceptable today, even for people who aren’t particulary rich/generally best-positioned to give their children the best lives, for people to have children. (Assuming they’re doing their best to have the happiest children that they can, and if we can expect the children to be happy on average). However, imagine a utopia where everyone is “rich” (or better yet: where money no longer matters because there’s an abundance of everything) and well-positioned to give their children the best lives. In that utopia, it would be wrong to create children with unnecessarily restricted access to the utopia’s resources, who will then only be as well off as the average child in our reality in 2024.
So, most people already believe that the ethics around having children are sensitive to the parents’ means and their available options. (In the example with populations A, A+, and Z, we can think of the people in “A” as the “parent population.” The parent population in A has the means to have lots of children at welfare level 3, but in A+, they decide to only have these children at welfare level 1 instead for comparatively trivial self-oriented gain. That doesn’t seem okay, but it would be okay if A+ was them doing the best they could.)

Lukas_Gloor Jun 1, 2024, 2:43 PM
19 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Lukas_Gloor’s Shortform
This is still in brainstorming stage; I think there’s probably a convincing line of argument for “AI alignment difficulty is high at least on priors” that includes the following points:
- Many humans don’t seem particularly aligned to “human values” (not just thinking of dark triad traits, but also things like self-deception, cowardice, etc.)
- There’s a loose analogy where AI is “more technological progress,” and “technological progress” so far hasn’t always been aligned to human flourishing (it has solved or improved a lot of long-term problems of civilization, like infant mortality, but has also created some new ones, like political polarization, obesity, unhappiness from constant bombardement with images of people who are richer and more successful than you, etc.). So, based on this analogy, why think things will somehow fall into place with AI training so that the new forces that be will for once become aligned?
- AI will accelerate everything, and if you accelerate something that isn’t set up in a secure way, it goes off the rails (“small issues will be magnified”).

Lukas_Gloor May 28, 2024, 1:12 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: My Skeptical Opinion on the Repugnant Conclusion
My guess is that, even then, there’ll be a lot of people for whom it remains counterintuitive. (People may no longer use the strong word “repugnant” to describe it, but I think many will still find it counterintuitive.)

Which would support my point that many people find the repugnant conclusion counterintuitive not (just) because of aggregation concerns, but also because they have the intuition that adding new people doesn’t make things better.

Lukas_Gloor May 28, 2024, 12:30 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: My Skeptical Opinion on the Repugnant Conclusion
I just meant that my impression was that person-affecting views seem fairly orthogonal to the Repugnant Conclusion specifically. I imagine that many person-affecting believers would agree with this. Or, I assume that it’s very possible to do any combination of [strongly care about the repugnant conclusion] | [not care about it], and [have person-affecting views] and [not have them].

The (very briefly explained) example I mentioned is meant as something like,
Say there’s a trolly problem. You could either accept scenario (A): 100 people with happy lives are saved, or (B) 10000 people with sort of decent lives are saved.

My guess was that this would still be an issue in many person-affecting views (I might well be wrong here though, feel free to correct me!). To me, this question is functionally equivalent to the Repugnant Conclusion.
I’m pretty confident you’re wrong about this. (Edit: I mean, you’re right if you call it “repugnant conclusion” whenever we talk about choosing between a small very happy population and a sufficiently larger less happy one; however, my point is that it’s no coincidence that people most often object to favoring the larger population over the smaller one in contexts of population ethics, i.e., when the populations are not already both in existence.)
I’ve talked to a lot of suffering-focused EAs. Of the people who feel strongly about rejecting the repugnant conclusion in population ethics, at best only half feel that aggregation is altogether questionable. More importantly, even in those that feel that aggregation is altogether questionable, I’m pretty sure that’s a separate intuition for them (and it’s only triggered when we compare something as mild as dust specks to extremes like torture). Meaning, they might feel weird about “torture vs dustspecks,” but they’ll be perfectly okay with “there comes a point where letting a trolley run over a small paradise is better than letting it run over a sufficiently larger population of less happy (but still overall happy) people on the other track.” By contrast, the impetus of their reaction to the original repugnant conclusion comes from the following. When they hear a description of “small-ish population with very high happiness,” their intuition goes “hmm, that sounds pretty optimal,” so they’re not interested in adding costs just to add more happiness moments (or net happy lives) to the total.

To pass the Ideological Turing test for most people who don’t want to accept the repugnant conclusion, you IMO have to engage with the intuition that it isn’t morally important to create new happy people. (This is also what person-affecting views try to build on.)
I haven’t done explicit surveys of this, but I’m still really confident that I’m right about this being what non-totalists in population ethics base their views on, and I find it strange that pretty much* every time totalists discuss the repugnant conclusion, they don’t seem to see this.
(For instance, I’ve pointed this out here on the EA forum at least once to Gregory Lewis and Richard Yetter-Chappell (so you’re in good company, but what is going on?))

*For an exception,this post by Joe Carlsmisth doesn’t mention the repugnant conclusion directly, but it engages with what I consider to be more crux-y arguments and viewpoints in relation to it.

Lukas_Gloor May 19, 2024, 9:33 PM
24 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Project idea: AI for epistemics
Somewhat relatedly, what about using AI to improve not your own (or your project’s) epistemics, but improve public discourse? Something like “improve news” or “improve where people get their info on controversial topics.”

Edit: To give more context, I was picturing something like training LLMs to pass ideological turing tests and then create a summary of the strongest arguments for and against, as well as takedowns of common arguments by each side that are clearly bad. And maybe combine that with commenting on current events as they unfold (to gain traction), handling the tough balance of having to compete in the attention landscape while still adhering to high epistemic standards. The goal then being something like “trusted source of balanced reporting,” which you can later direct to issues that matter the most (after gaining traction earlier by discussing all sorts of things).

Lukas_Gloor May 19, 2024, 8:48 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Don’t panic: 90% of EAs are good people
Off the cuff answers that may change as I reflect more:
- Maybe around 25% of people in leadership positions in the EA ecosystem qualify? Somewhat lower for positions at orgs that are unusually “ambitious;” somewhat higher for positions that are more like “iterate on a proven system” or “have a slow-paced research org that doesn’t involve itself too much in politics.”
- For the ambitious leaders, I unfortunately have no examples where I feel particularly confident, but can think of a few examples where I’m like “from a distance, it looks like they might be good leaders.” I would count Holden in that category, even though I’d say the last couple of years seem suboptimal in terms of track record (and also want to flag that this is just a “from a distance” impression, so don’t put much weight on it).
- Why we’re bad at identifying: This probably isn’t the only reason, but the task is just hard. If you look at people who have ambitious visions and are willing to try hard to make them happen, they tend to be above-average on dark triad traits. You probably want someone who is very much not high on psychopathic traits, but still low enough on neuroticism that they won’t be anxious all the time. Similarly, you want someone who isn’t too high on narcissism, but they still need to have that ambitious vision and belief in being exceptional. You want someone who is humble and has inner warmth so they will uplift others along the way, so high on honesty-humility factor, but that correlates with agreeableness and neuroticism – which is a potential problem because you probably can’t be too agreeable in the startup world or when running an ambitious org generally, and you can’t be particularly neurotic.
  - (Edit) Another reason is, I think people often aren’t “put into leadership positions” by others/some committee; instead, they put themselves there. Like, usually there isn’t some committee with a great startup idea looking for a leader; instead, the leader comes with the vision and accumulates followers based on their conviction. And most people who aren’t in leadership positions simply aren’t vigilant or invested enough to care a lot about who becomes a leader.
I think incentives matter, but I feel like if they’re all that matters, then we’re doomed anyway because “Who will step up as a leader to set good incentives?” In other words, the position “incentives are all that matters” seems self-defeating, because to change things, you can’t just sit on the sidelines and criticize “the incentives” or “the system.” It also seems too cynical: just because, e.g., lots of money is at stake, that doesn’t mean people who were previously morally motivated and cautious about their motivations and trying to do the right thing, will suddenly go off the rails.
To be clear, I think there’s probably a limit for everyone and no person is forever safe from corruption, but my point is that it matters where on the spectrum someone falls. Of the people that are low on corruptibility, even though most of them don’t like power or would flail around helplessly and hopelessly if they had it, there are probably people who have the right mix of traits to create, maintain and grow pockets of sanity (well-run, well-functioning organizations, ecosystems, etc.).

Lukas_Gloor May 19, 2024, 2:54 PM
9 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ofer’s comment on: Don’t panic: 90% of EAs are good people
If you’re saying “it takes more than good intentions to not get corrupted,” I agree.

But then the question is, “Is Dario someone who’s unusually unlikely to get corrupted?”

If you’re saying “it doesn’t matter who you put in power; bad incentives will corrupt everything,” then I don’t agree.

I think people differ a lot wrt how easily they get corrupted by power (or other bad incentive structures). Those low on the spectrum tend to shape the incentives around them proactively to create a culture that rewards what they don’t want to lose about their good qualities.