I am also a member of Altruisme Efficace France, the main EA organization in France, where I volunteer as translator, and AFT-Technoprog, an organization advocating for democratic transhumanist ideas.
Matrice Jacobinešøš³ļøāā§ļø
Karma: 1,144
I, er, do not think weāre bottlenecked in āattention brought to the most popular politician in the US [who happens to be an advocate for AI safety]ā (as opposed to, say, āattention brought to AI safety [by the most popular politician in the US]ā).
I very much expect a speaker at an EA conference talking about the benefits of torture would be quickly shown the door. More to the point, this goes double for a speaker saying EAs should ditch the ādoing good impartially based on reason and evidenceā thing and instead pick a Great Leader to never criticize and embark on a crusade to genocide the inferior races.
Is Bernieās AI sovereign wealth fund proposal good or bad for AI safety?
(Iām deliberately sidelining the details of how exactly to establish an AI SWF because I donāt think it is important this early in the conversation.)
On the pro side, a SWF is a good answer to intelligence curse issues. It may also give an higher chance of AI risks (ānear-termā or ālong-termā) being weighted into AIcosā decisions (particularly those who are supposed to be PBCs), for the same reason the LTFF and OpenAI Foundation are beneficial and dilution through IPOs might be dangerous and lead them to act more like any publicly listed company.
A more subtle pro would be that with the more immediate and intense social fear of corporate domination subsiding, this would leave room for the more complicated issues, including existential risk, to enter the public debate.
On the anti side, there has been an argument floating around that the government owning AI stocks might discourage it from taking measures that might hurt AI profits.
I think this argument is very weak, the economy is already quite dependent on AI companies doing well, and oil SWFs donāt seem to have been an issue for Norway and even the Gulf taking the green transition seriously.
Iām not even sure e.g. a pause would be a bad thing economically for AI companies? Training increasingly large models is the whole reason they canāt make a profit right now.
The more interesting anti argument is that, badly constructed (in particular, if the influence of the āunitary executiveā is stronger than the influence of the bipartisan, deliberative congress), this could serve as a move toward greater centralization into a small group, which would neutralize most of the pros I discussed earlier. This part is certainly more worrisome considering the current levels of corruption going on.
I didnāt knew about the seven principles of UU. Apparently those are:
1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Those seem quite a bit more fundamental than the ITN framework is for EA, and Iām sure there are more fundamental principles of EA that you would in fact get the same reaction if you said they should be ditched. (In fact, they would probably be basically the same ones?)
Unitarian Universalism: defers a lot more
ā¦ who are those leaders of Unitarian Universalism that UUs are deferring a lot more than EAs defer to Moskovitz, Karnofsky, MacAskill, Ord?
One area where we can see that the Lindy effect is empirically false is stock prices. If it were true, you could buy a portfolio of the 100 stocks that have gone up the most over the last 3 years, hold them for 3 years, and beat the S&P 500. But that doesnāt work.
ā¦ your link straightforwardly show the opposite? Momentum investing is moderately profitable in the first years before reverting to the mean as the momentum subside.
Similarly, you can find plenty work on the subject on the wiki page for the Lindy effect, notably connections with Zipfās law and the Pareto distribution. (The term āLindy effectā itself was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.)
Equity research analysts and institutional investors donāt approach financial modelling or earning estimates through blind extrapolation, or by applying a rule of thumb like the Lindy effect. They think causally, often in great detail, about companiesā future performance. And, even then, accurate forecasting is really hard.
True and neither Scott nor I said otherwise. You should have a broad prior distribution and after gaining more evidence about the gears level you should update. On the other hand it is also, uh, not true that quants can ever afford to be always strictly rigorous and not using rules of thumbs of similar caliber.
As Scott notes, the maximum-entropy heuristic if you make no hypothesis about the explanation for a statistical trend is Lindyās law, the trend continuing for as long as it continued so far. So you might expect both the Anthropic and the Jersey Mikeās trend to continue until ~2028, but not until 2050.
āOn the Promotion of Safe and Socially Beneficial Artificial Intelligenceā by @SethBaum from 2016
How would this address the criticisms raised of METRās methodology?
How would this not? It doesnāt use the same tasks nor does it use the same human baseliner panel as the HCAST dataset.
Soā¦ whatās the general take on the hantavirus outbreak?
Previous discussion on this forum about Vassar by @fenneko:
Bryk, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a ā5-year-old in a hot 20-year-oldās body.ā
Joseph says he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says, he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.
This was also Michael Vassar.
I know this because of a line from the TIME article:
āAnother woman, who dated the same man [the one who talked about pedophilia with Joseph] several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping.ā
And āthe same manā was, of course, Michael Vassar.
Jax talks about other people in public threads, but I think Vassar is the only one whose alleged behavior was illegal physical abuse rather than rudeness or weird vibes.
On the extreme end, five women, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, say men in the community committed sexual assault or misconduct against them [...] Women who reported sexual abuse, either to the police or community mediators, say they were branded as trouble and ostracized while the men were protected.
At least one of these is Vassar (possibly multiple, given how consistent he seems to be).
Vassar has been banned from EA events for many years, and SlateStarCodex meetups for at least a few years.
DoJ files showing Vassar successfully requested to visit Epsteinās private island in 2015: 1, 2, 3
It seems unfortunately plausible that despite technological progress toward alternatives to meat, humans have a revealed terminal preference for animal suffering, which mean that short of extinction we are on a default trajectory to astronomical suffering.
otoh, this is funny:
Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. āMost of the ones Iāve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,ā he said. He has his own Epstein ties, but he calls the Pledge an āEpstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.ā
Fully autonomous weapons seems to me to be a clear-cut case of differential acceleration in any case: not giving any kind of legitimate battlefield advantage for law-abiding democratic countries (human reflexes are top of the sigmoid; this is one of our main evolutionarily-selected skills for obvious reasons), but allowing authoritarians to establish a military dictatorship with minimal staff (historically āthe army is ultimately made up of ordinary people who can refuse to shoot their brethren and/āor shoot the dictator insteadā have been an important pressure valve), or to organize genocidal massacres with automated recognition of targeted civilians (i.e. the FLI Slaughterbots scenario).
Democracy promotion is a common interest of many causes. Itās highly unlikely we can do anything about (potentially, will ever be able to do anything about again) global poverty, factory farming, or existential risk, if all world powers become repressive autocracies squashing any sign of moral cosmopolitanism and freethought.
My first Fable benchmark was to one-shot turning `emacs -batch -l dunnet` into a graphical adventure game and it hit the safety guardrails bc one of the puzzles involve nitroglycerine š