I am the director of Tlön, a small org that translates content related to effective altruism, existential risk, and global priorities research into multiple languages.
After living nomadically for many years, I recently moved back to my native Buenos Aires. Feel free to get in touch if you are visiting BA and would like to grab a coffee or need a place to stay.
Every post, comment, or wiki edit I authored is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Nope, it was Yudkowsky in a Facebook group about AI x-risk around 2015 or 2016. He specifically said he didn’t think deep learning was the royal road to AGI.
Would you be able to locate the post in question? If Yudkowsky did indeed say that, I would agree that it would constitute a relevant negative update about his overall prediction track record.
Three years later, this seems dead, unfortunately.
Do you think you would have become involved with EA if your name hadn’t been ‘Pablo’?
(But seriously, big kudos for the book. The Spanish-speaking EA community is fortunate to have such a personable and articulate ambassador!)
There is a monthly newsletter for updates in the Spanish-speaking EA community.
Gotcha, so to be clear, you’re saying: it would be better for the current post to have the relevant quotes from the references, but it would be even better to have summaries of the explanations?
Yes, that’s what I’m saying.
(I tend to think this is a topic where summaries are especially likely to lose some important nuance, but not confident.)
I defer to you, since I am not familiar with this topic. My above assessment was “on priors”.
Could you please clarify what you mean by this?
I was referring to the difference in value between a collection of references and a summary of the content of those references (as opposed to a mere collection of representative quotes).
I’d personally find this helpful, and I expect others will, too. If I consider the FAQs I’m familiar with and imagine alternative documents that consist of the questions and the references, but without the answers, I feel that their value decreases by at least 50%. Most of the added value comes from the synthesis, but some comes from removing the trivial inconvenience of having to open multiple links and locating the relevant passage(s).
I think Diana Fleischman was one of the first people in EA to advocate for a “bivalvegan” diet, back in 2013 or so, and has written some blog posts about it (e.g.).
Sure, who could possibly believe that all moral propositions are objectively true? My point was that moral realists typically believe that some axiological and some deontic claims are objectively true, and that if you are an anti-realist about the former and a realist about the latter, calling yourself a “moral realist” may fail to communicate your views accurately.
Morality is Objective
I do not like the expression ‘Morality is objective’, because it comprises both claims I’m very confident are not objective (“You ought not to kill”) and claims I’m very confident are objective (“Suffering is bad”). More generally, I am a moral anti-realist by default, but am forced to recognize that some moral claims are real—specifically, certain axiological claims—because their objective reality is revealed to me via introspection when I have the corresponding phenomenal experiences (such as the experience of being in agony).
This is basically my view, and I think ‘axiological realism’ is a great name for it.
Have you considered translating it in other major languages, especially those with large existing EA communities like German, French or Spanish, or EA potential?
As it happens, we contacted CEA a few days ago and offered to translate the website into various languages. Some of this material is already translated, but it would be great to have the entire website, with its appealing design, available on dedicated domains for all the main language communities.
Yeah, sorry: it was obvious to me that this was the intended meaning, after I realized it could be interpreted this way. I noted it because I found the syntactic ambiguity mildly interesting/amusing.
If you are like me, this comment will leave you perplexed. After a while, I realized that it should not be read as
Plausibly, best people who have ever lived is a much lower bar than best people who have ever lived.
but as
‘Plausibly best people who have ever lived’ is a much lower bar than ‘best people who have ever lived’.
Scott Alexander introduces the ‘noncentral fallacy’ as follows: “X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member.”
This post seems like an archetypal instance of the noncentral fallacy.
Intuitively, it seems we should respond differently depending on which of these three possibilities is true:
They think that what they are doing is negative for the world, but do it anyway, because it is good for themselves personally.
They do not think that what they are doing is negative for the world, but they believe this due to motivated cognition.
They do not think that what they are doing is negative for the world, and this belief was not formed in a way that seems suspect.
From an act consequentialist perspective, these differences do not matter intrinsically, but they are still instrumentally relevant.[1]
I don’t mean to suggest that any one of these possibilities is particularly likely, or they they are all plausible. I haven’t followed this incident closely. FWIW, my vague sense is that the Mechanize founders had all expressed skepticism about the standard AI safety arguments for a while, in a way that seems hard to reconcile with (1) or (2).
By the way, the name is ‘Jaime’, not ‘Jamie’. The latter doesn’t exist in Spanish and the two are pronounced completely differently (they share one phoneme out of five, when aligned phoneme by phoneme).
(I thought I should mention it since the two names often look indistinguishable in written form to people who are not aware that they differ.)
Thanks for the clarification. I didn’t mean to be pedantic: I think these discussions are often unclear about the relevant time horizon. Even Bostrom admits (somewhere) that his earlier writing about existential risk left the timeframe unspecified (vaguely talking about “premature” extinction).
On the substantive question, I’m interested in learning more about your reasoning. To me, it seems much more likely that Earth-originating intelligence will go extinct this century than, say, in the 8973th century AD (conditional on survival up to that century). This is because it seems plausible that humanity (or its descendants) will soon develop technology with enough destructive potential to actually kill all intelligence. Then the question becomes whether they will also successfully develop the technology to protect intelligence from being so destroyed. But I don’t think there are decisive arguments for expecting the offense-defense balance to favor either defense or offense (the strongest argument for pessimism, in my view, is stated in the first paragraph of this book review). Do you deny that this technology will be developed “over time horizons that are brief by cosmological standards”? Or are you confident that our capacity to destroy will be outpaced by our capacity to prevent from destruction?
The extinction of all Earth-originating intelligent life (including AIs) seems extremely unlikely.
Extremely unlikely to happen… when? Surely all Earth-originating intelligent life will eventually go extinct, because the universe’s resources are finite.
An additional reason EAs may not be playing the attention arms race is that they may be persuaded by the fidelity model of spreading ideas.