Aspiring EA-adjacent trying to make the singularity further away
Pato
Karma: 145
Bettering social media platforms could be a top-tier systemic intervention.
My understanding is that EA put most systemic change / solutions S-rated in terms of impact but F-rated in terms of neglectedness and tractability.
Is this the case for social media? Is it super hard and attempted to make the platforms, either internally or through policy, to not maximize for engagement? What about popularizing (and building if necessary) platforms that reward for what would be “useful” for people (or society at large)?
Because I think it’s the most impactful systemic leverage I can think of. Unlike reforms to traditional media, entertainment, education and even politics, changes to them would reach most of the countries and most of the demographics in those countries. And we need to add to this that they are not just replacing those sources of influence to individuals (except education I guess?), but also replacing the last bastion of them: social circles.
People give ‘The Day After’ as an example of a movie that motivated nuclear disarmament and it would be good to have something similar for AIXR and I agree and I think there’s something important to learn about that case.
That movie and ‘Threads’ are about the catastrophe *happening*, and about how absolutely terrible that would be. It forces you to put yourself there and that makes a strong emotional impact.
I think this type of intuition pump is the most powerful of them; people get the most motivated to change their lives when they think about their last moments and what they could regret then. Same thing happens when people think of their loved ones dying; they feel motivated to tell them that they love them or protect them.
The end of the world is basically both of those things at once.
Making people put themselves in that scenario is something AIXR comms hasn’t tried much IMO. Only examples I remember are John Sherman once in his podcast and a book, and one tweet from Michael Trazzi.
When a lot of people (like me) say “#notallEAs” they are probably not saying it anecdotally to refer to themselves, as you are implying. They’re just pointing to the overlap. So I think that part of the post is misguided.
Even if the last question is misguided, if I, a supporter of PAI, were to consider myself an EA, why would that be?
There are several possible reasons: I changed my career plans because of it; I work and have been working thanks to EA funding (by working at PauseAI lmao); I’ve been in the EA hotel for a bunch of months and plan to go back to it or the PauseAI Hotel (which is right next to it); I’ve attended conferences, received grants, and read a couple of books; I check out the forum here and there, agree with the philosophy, agree with the median EA in models of the world and ethics more than with any other median X; I plan to donate to EA orgs soon and want to keep engaging with the community, etc.
The list seems pretty big in contrast to “but the core funders and leaders aren’t supporting the advocacy for an AI moratorium.”—
I also don’t think any of your arguments are good enough to justify disengaging with the EA movement if a specific person agrees with the philosophy and has only a handful of disagreements or problems with the EA median member/ movement. This applies to Rationalist spaces too, to a certain extent.
It’s not like there are better alternatives to it for people who are trying to figure out important things about the world and how to improve it.
Even if you think a lot of them have a huge bias in some specific regard, you can still interact with them with that in mind, and you are still less likely to find other biases in them than in any other big community by a large margin. You’re still much more likely to find people who are very knowledgeable + kind + smart + dedicated to doing good in EA than in any other space that I know of. People who can change your mind, fund part of your work, or help you on your path to having a better impact in the world in other ways.
It’s really good to be mindful of the ways some groups have some control over the community and their potential biases and personal interests. But if the response to that is disengaging with the community instead of defending your disagreements here and there, then you’re giving them more power.
I don’t think this framing that either everyone/ a majority in EA needs to support X tactic/ cause/ org or they’re all against it is fair or useful at all. As others have mentioned, there’s a bunch of overlap between PauseAI and EA, of people, of donors, of beliefs… I don’t think most of the opinions in the post represent the opinions of the people who I’ve met at PauseAI.
I’m surprised that a post that overgeneralizes so much while making a bunch of ad hominems attacks is net positive votes-wise.
“Models more powerful than GPT-4” are potential AGIs. That’s what all the big AI companies are trying to build. Capitalism will push for large context window agents that can replace the workforce. The further we are from that, the further we are from x-risks.
Can you give examples in politics where you think putting up a fight was worse than not doing anything?
And also, how common do you think that is?
So no one should work on the worlds with the shortest timelines? Should they be given up?
This seems cool, but as a data point: it took me like 25 minutes to reach page 4, and page 5 asked questions which I didn’t know the answer to so I didn’t complete the form.
I take more time than most people for most things, but extrapolating I think it would have taken me a loot more than “15 minutes” to fill out the 11 pages.
Is it me or there is too much filler on some posts? This could have been a quicktake: “If you distance yourself from Rationality, be careful to not distance yourself from rationality”.
Take a Minute by K’naan about the value of giving and epistemic humility lol
I recomend AISafety.com and, if you are looking for introductions in video/ audio form, I like this selection (in part because I contributed to it).
None of them are that technical though, and given that you mentioned your math knowledge, seems that’s what you’re interested on.
In that case, the thing that you have to know is that it is said that the field is “pre-paradigmatic”, so there’s not any type of consensus about how is the best way to think about the problems and therefore how would even the potential solutions would look like or come to be. But there’s work outside ML that is purely mathematical and related to agent foundations, and this introductory post that I’ve just found seems to explain all that stuff better than I could and would probably be more useful for you than the other links.
I think something like that could be great! I also wish learning about EA wouldn’t be that difficult or time consuming. About your questions:
For the people who don’t want to change careers because of EA, I think you can still share with them a list of ways they still can have a positive impact in the world, something like what PauseAI has. That shouldn’t have a big cost and it would possible to expand about it later.
Adding to what you wrote, other ways they can still have an impact are:
Changing their habits of consumption, like becoming vegan and reducing their pollution
Participating in the community, like in the forums or volunteering
Sharing the ideas and content, like the video/ course itself
Small everyday actions caused by learning more about EA, like expanding the moral circle, the causes and having a more rationalist mindset
Stop working or investing on risky things, like AI capabilities
I don’t think so.
Sadly I couldn’t respond to this post two weeks ago but here I go.
First of all I’m not sure I understand your position, but I think that you believe that if we push for other types of regulation either:
that would be enough to be safe from dangerous AI or
we’ll be able to slow down AI development enough to develop measures to be safe from dangerous AI
I’m confused between the two because you write
Advanced AI systems pose grave threats and we don’t know how to mitigate them.
That I understand as you believing we don’t have know those measures right now, but you also write
If a company developing an unprecedentedly large AI model with surprising capabilities can’t prove it’s safe, they shouldn’t release it.
That if we agree there’s no way to prove it then you’re pretty much talking about a pause.
If your point is the first one I would disagree with it and I think even OpenAI when they say we don’t know yet how to align a SI.
If your point is the second one, then my problem with that is that I don’t think that would give us close to the same amount of time than a pause. Also it could make most people believe risks from AI, including X-risks, are safeguarded now, and we could lose support because of that. And all of that would lead to more money in the industry that could lead to regulatory capture recursively.
All of that is also related to
it’s closer to what those of us concerned about AI safety ideally want: not an end to progress, but progress that is safe and advances human flourishing.
Which I’m not sure that it’s true. Of course this depends a lot in how much you think that the current work on alignment is close to being enough to make us safe. Are we going parallel enough to the precipice that we’ll be able to reach or steer in time to reach an utopia? Or are we going towards it and we will have some brief progress before falling? Would that be closer to the ideal? Anyways, the ideal is the enemy of the good or the truth or something.
Lastly, after arguing why a pause would be a lot better than other regulations, I’ll give you that of course it would be harder to get/ less “politically palatable” which is arguably the main point of the post. But I don’t how many orders of magnitude. With a pause you win over people who think safer AI isn’t enough or it’s just marketing from the biggest companies and nations. And also, talking about marketing, I think pausing AI is a slogan that can draw a lot more attention, which I think is good given that most people seem to want regulation.
it appears many EAs believe we should allow capabilities development to continue despite the current X-risks.
Where do you get this from?
Also, this:
have < ~ 0.1% chance of X-risk.
means p(doom) <~ 0.001
I think that by far the less intuitive thing about AI X-risk is why AIs would want to kill us instead of doing what they would be “programmed” to do.
I would give more importance to that part of the argument than the “intelligence is really powerful” part.
I think the bigger question is why haven’t we found other species elsewhere in the universe.
Then I see the question about whether they’ll kill us or not as a different one.
I really liked the axis that you presented and the comparision between a version of the community that is more cause oriented vs member oriented.
The only caveat that I have is that I don’t think we can define a neutral point in between them that allows you to classify communities as one type or the other.
Luckily, I think that is unnecesary because even though the objective of EA is to have the best impact in the world and not the greatest number of members, I think we all think the best decision is to have a good balance between cause and member oriented. So the question that we should ask is should EA be MORE big tent, weird, or do we have a good balance right now?
And to achieve that balance we can be more big tent in some aspects, moments and orgs and weirder in others.
I strongly agree with you and, as someone who thinks alignment is extremely hard (not just because of the technical side of the problem, but due the human values side too), I believe that a hard pause and studying how to augment human intelligence is actually the best strategy.
Got it, thanks.
Systemic change interventions should be mentioned as a category of things EA works on when introducing EA and categorizing EA work, outside the “countermeasure” interventions that are done to solve more specific problems (animal suffering, x-risks, global h&d, etc) and meta-work.
I think this would help clarify the idea that EA tries to analyze systemic change proposals and puts money and work on them sometimes.
They would include causes like improving institutional decision-making, happiness research, etc, and even new ideas like making AIs’ character good.
I think there are a lot of people who want to do good, but just if they think they’re fixing “the system”. We can attract these people and give them answers to what we believe is better to do and incorporate their ideas if good.
In principle, they are of course great because of the positive feedback loops that systems could provide and that could make the impact of the interventions grow exponentially. Maybe the community could be thinking more about them.