So8res

Karma: 3,537

So8res 1 Mar 2023 8:20 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Enemies vs Malefactors
(I agree; thanks for the nuance)

So8res 7 Feb 2023 21:52 UTC
99 points
22 ∶ 0
in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: A personal reflection on SBF
Do you think EA’s self-reflection about this is at all productive, considering most people had even less information than you?
I don’t have terribly organized thoughts about this. (And I am still not paying all that much attention—I have much more patience for picking apart my own reasoning processes looking for ways to improve them, than I have for reading other people’s raw takes :-p)
But here’s some unorganized and half-baked notes:
I appreciated various expressions of emotion. Especially when they came labeled as such.
I think there was also a bunch of other stuff going on in the undertones that I don’t have a good handle on yet, and that I’m not sure about my take on. Stuff like… various people implicitly shopping around proposals about how to readjust various EA-internal political forces, in light of the turmoil? But that’s not a great handle for it, and I’m not terribly articulate about it.
There’s a phenomenon where a gambler places their money on 32, and then the roulette wheel comes up 23, and they say “I’m such a fool; I should have bet 23”.
More useful would be to say “I’m such a fool; I should have noticed that the EV of this gamble is negative.” Now at least you aren’t asking for magic lottery powers.
Even more useful would be to say “I’m such a fool; I had three chances to notice that this bet was bad: when my partner was trying to explain EV to me; when I snuck out of the house and ignored a sense of guilt; and when I suppressed a qualm right before placing the bet. I should have paid attention in at least one of those cases and internalized the arguments about negative EV, before gambling my money.” Now at least you aren’t asking for magic cognitive powers.
My impression is that various EAs respond to crises in a manner that kinda rhymes with saying “I wish I had bet 23”, or at best “I wish I had noticed this bet was negative EV”, and in particular does not rhyme with saying “my second-to-last chance to do better (as far as I currently recall) was the moment that I suppressed the guilt from sneaking out of the house”.
(I think this is also true of the general population, to be clear. Perhaps even moreso.)
I have a vague impression that various EAs perform self-flagellation, while making no visible attempt to trace down where, in their own mind, they made a misstep. (Not where they made a good step that turned out in this instance to have a bitter consequence, but where they made a wrong step of the general variety that they could realistically avoid in the future.)
(Though I haven’t gone digging up examples, and in lieu of examples, for all I know this impression is twisted by influence from the zeitgeist.)
My guess is that most EAs didn’t make mental missteps of any import.
And, of course, most folk on this forum aren’t rushing to self-flagellate. Lots of people who didn’t make any mistake, aren’t saying anything about their non-mistakes, as seems entirely reasonable.
I think the scrupulous might be quick to object that, like, they had some flicker of unease about EA being over-invested in crypto, that they should have expounded upon. And so surely they, too, erred.
And, sure, they’d’ve gotten more coolness points if they’d joined the ranks of people who aired that concern in advance.
And there is, I think, a healthy chain of thought from there to the hypothesis that the community needs better mechanisms for incentivizing and aggregating distributed knowledge.
(For instance: some people did air that particular concern in advance, and it didn’t do much. There’s perhaps something to be said for the power that a thousand voices would have had when ten didn’t suffice, but an easier fix than finding 990 voices is probably finding some other way to successfully heed the 10, which requires distinguishing them from the background noise—and distinguishing them as something actionable—before it’s too late, and then routing the requisite action to the people who can do something about it. etc.)
I hope that some version of this conversation is happening somewhere, and it seems vaguely plausible that there’s a variant happening behind closed doors at CEA or something.
I think that maybe a healthier form of community reflection would have gotten to a public and collaborative version of that discussion by now. Maybe we’ll still get there.
(I caveat, though, that it seems to me that many good things die from the weight of the policies they adopt in attempts to win the last war, with a particularly egregious example that springs to mind being the TSA. But that’s getting too much into the object-level weeds.)
(I also caveat that I in fact know a pair of modestly-high-net-worth EA friends who agreed, years ago, that the community was overexposed to crypto, and that at most one of them should be exposed to crypto. The timing of this thought is such that the one who took the non-crypto fork is now significantly less comparatively wealthy. This stuff is hard to get right in real life.)
(And I also caveat that I’m not advocating design-by-community-committee when it comes to community coordination mechanisms. I think that design-by-committee often fails. I also think there’s all sorts of reasons why public attempts to discuss such things can go off the rails. Trying to have smaller conversations, or in-person conversations, seems eminently reasonable to me.)
I think that another thing that’s been going on is that there are various rumors around that “EA leaders” knew something about all this in advance, and this has caused a variety of people to feel (justly) perturbed and uneasy.
Insofar as someone’s thinking is influenced by a person with status in their community, I think it’s fair to ask what they knew and when, as is relevant to the question of whether and how to trust them in the future.
And insofar as other people are operating the de-facto community coordination mechanisms, I think it’s also fair to ask what they knew and when, as is relevant to the question of how (as a community) to fix or change or add or replace some coordination mechanisms.
I don’t particularly have a sense that the public EA discourse around FTX stuff was headed in a healthy and productive direction.
It’s plausible to me that there are healthy and productive processes going on behind closed doors, among the people who operate the de-facto community coordination mechanisms.
Separately, it kinda feels to me like there’s this weird veil draped over everything, where there’s rumors that EA-leader-ish folk knew some stuff but nobody in that reference class is just, like, coming clean.
This post is, in part, an attempt to just pierce the damn veil (at least insofar as I personally can, as somebody who’s at least EA-leader-adjacent).
I can at least show some degree to which the rumors were true (I run an EA org, and Alameda did start out in the offices downstairs from ours, and I was privy to a bunch more data than others) versus false (I know of no suspicion that Sam was defrauding customers, nor have I heard any hint of any coverup).
One hope I have is that this will spark some sort of productive conversation.
For instance, my current hypothesis is that we’d do well to look for better community mechanisms for aggregating hints and acting on them. (Where I’m having trouble visualizing ways of doing it that don’t also get totally blindsided by the next crisis, when it turns out that the next war is not exactly the same as the last one. But this, again, is getting more into the object-level.)
Regardless of whether that theory is right, it’s at least easier to discuss in light of a bunch of the raw facts. Whether or not everybody was completely blindsided, vs whether we had a bunch of hints that we failed to assemble, vs whether there was a fraudulent conspiracy we tried to cover up, matters quite a bit as to how we should react!
It’s plausible to me that a big part of the reason why the discussion hasn’t yet produced Nate!legible fruit, is because it just wasn’t working with all that many details. This post is intended in part to be a contribution towards that end.
(Though I of course also entertain the hypotheses that there’s all sorts of different forces pushing the conversation off the rails (such that this post won’t help much), and the hypothesis that the conversation is happening just fine behind closed doors somewhere (such that this post isn’t all that necessary).)
(And I note, again, that insofar as this post does help the convo, Rob Bensinger gets a share of the credit. I was happy to shelve this post indefinitely, and wouldn’t have dug it out of my drafts folder if he hadn’t argued that it had a chance of rerailing the conversation.)
What links here?
- Elizabeth's comment on EV investigation into Owen and Community Health by EV US Board (31 Jan 2024 7:13 UTC; 12 points)

So8res 7 Feb 2023 19:18 UTC
17 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: vaniver’s comment on: A personal reflection on SBF
Good point! Currently, I think the “pry more” lesson is supposed to account for a bunch of this.
Since making this update, I have in fact pried more into friends’ lives. In at least one instance I found some stuff that worried me, at which point I was naturally like “hey, this worries me; it pattern-matches to some bad situations I’ve seen; I feel wary and protective; I request an opportunity to share and/or put you in touch with people who’ve been through putatively-analogous situations (though I can also stfu if you’re sick of hearing people’s triggered takes about your life situation.)” And, as far as I can tell, that was a useful/helpful thing to have done in that situation (and didn’t involve any changes to my drama policy).
That said, that situation wasn’t one where the right move involved causing ripples in the community (e.g. by publicly airing concerns about what went down at Alameda). If we fight the last war again, my hope is that I’d be doing stuff more like “prod others to action”, or perhaps “plainly state aloud what I think” (as I’m doing now with this post).
There is something about this post that feels very “neutral tone” to me, and that makes it feel at home within my “don’t give drama the attention it needs to breathe” policy. I think my ability to have good effects by prying more & prodding more & having more backbone doesn’t require changes to my drama policy. (And perhaps the policy has shifted around somewhat, without me noticing it? Doesn’t feel like it, though.)
I am of course open to arguments that I’m failing to learn a lesson about my drama policy.

So8res 10 Jul 2017 22:46 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Daniel_Dewey’s comment on: My current thoughts on MIRI’s “highly reliable agent design” work
Can you give an example or two of failure modes or “categories of failure modes that are easy to foresee” that you think are addressed by some HRAD topic? I’d thought previously that thinking in terms of failure modes wasn’t a good way to understand HRAD research.

I want to steer clear of language that might make it sound like we’re saying:
- X ‘We can’t make broad-strokes predictions about likely ways that AGI could go wrong.’
- X ‘To the extent we can make such predictions, they aren’t important for informing research directions.’
- X ‘The best way to address AGI risk is just to try to advance our understanding of AGI in a general and fairly undirected way.’
The things I do want to communicate are:
- All of MIRI’s research decisions are heavily informed by a background view in which there are many important categories of predictable failure, e.g., ‘the system is steering toward edges of the solution space’, ‘the function the system is optimizing correlates with the intended function at lower capability levels but comes uncorrelated at high capability levels’, ‘the system has incentives to obfuscate and mislead programmers to the extent it models its programmers’ beliefs and expects false programmer beliefs to result in it better-optimizing its objective function.’
- The main case for HRAD problems is that we expect them to help in a gestalt way with many different known failure modes (and, plausibly, unknown ones). E.g., ‘developing a basic understanding of counterfactual reasoning improves our ability to understand the first AGI systems in a general way, and if we understand AGI better it’s likelier we can build systems to address deception, edge instantiation, goal instability, and a number of other problems’.
- There usually isn’t a simple relationship between a particular open problem and a particular failure mode, but if we thought there were no way to predict in advance any of the ways AGI systems can go wrong, or if we thought a very different set of failures were likely instead, we’d have different research priorities.
What links here?
- Plausible cases for HRAD work, and locating the crux in the “realism about rationality” debate by riceissa (LessWrong; 22 Jun 2020 1:10 UTC; 85 points)

So8res 8 Jul 2017 21:10 UTC
28 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My current thoughts on MIRI’s “highly reliable agent design” work
Thanks for this solid summary of your views, Daniel. For others’ benefit: MIRI and Open Philanthropy Project staff are in ongoing discussion about various points in this document, among other topics. Hopefully some portion of those conversations will be made public at a later date. In the meantime, a few quick public responses to some of the points above:

2) If we fundamentally “don’t know what we’re doing” because we don’t have a satisfying description of how an AI system should reason and make decisions, then we will probably make lots of mistakes in the design of an advanced AI system.

3) Even minor mistakes in an advanced AI system’s design are likely to cause catastrophic misalignment.

I think this is a decent summary of why we prioritize HRAD research. I would rephrase 3 as “There are many intuitively small mistakes one can make early in the design process that cause resultant systems to be extremely difficult to align with operators’ intentions.” I’d compare these mistakes to the “small” decision in the early 1970s to use null-terminated instead of length-prefixed strings in the C programming language, which continues to be a major source of software vulnerabilities decades later.

I’d also clarify that I expect any large software product to exhibit plenty of actually-trivial flaws, and that I don’t expect that AGI code needs to be literally bug-free or literally proven-safe in order to be worth running. Furthermore, if an AGI design has an actually-serious flaw, the likeliest consequence that I expect is not catastrophe; it’s just that the system doesn’t work. Another likely consequence is that the system is misaligned, but in an obvious ways that makes it easy for developers to recognize that deployment is a very bad idea. The end goal is to prevent global catastrophes, but if a safety-conscious AGI team asked how we’d expect their project to fail, the two likeliest scenarios we’d point to are “your team runs into a capabilities roadblock and can’t achieve AGI” or “your team runs into an alignment roadblock and can easily tell that the system is currently misaligned, but can’t figure out how to achieve alignment in any reasonable amount of time.”

This case does not revolve around any specific claims about specific potential failure modes, or their relationship to specific HRAD subproblems. This case revolves around the value of fundamental understanding for avoiding “unknown unknown” problems.

We worry about “unknown unknowns”, but I’d probably give them less emphasis here. We often focus on categories of failure modes that we think are easy to foresee. As a rule of thumb, when we prioritize a basic research problem, it’s because we expect it to help in a general way with understanding AGI systems and make it easier to address many different failure modes (both foreseen and unforeseen), rather than because of a one-to-one correspondence between particular basic research problems and particular failure modes.

As an example, the reason we work on logical uncertainty isn’t that we’re visualizing a concrete failure that we think is highly likely to occur if developers don’t understand logical uncertainty. We work on this problem because any system reasoning in a realistic way about the physical world will need to reason under both logical and empirical uncertainty, and because we expect broadly understanding how the system is reasoning about the world to be important for ensuring that the optimization processes inside the system are aligned with the intended objectives of the operators.

A big intuition behind prioritizing HRAD is that solutions to “how do we ensure the system’s cognitive work is being directed at solving the right problems, and at solving them in the desired way?” are likely to be particularly difficult to hack together from scratch late in development. An incomplete (empirical-side-only) understanding of what it means to optimize objectives in realistic environments seems like it will force designers to rely more on guesswork and trial-and-error in a lot of key design decisions.

I haven’t found any instances of complete axiomatic descriptions of AI systems being used to mitigate problems in those systems (e.g. to predict, postdict, explain, or fix them) or to design those systems in a way that avoids problems they’d otherwise face.

This seems reasonable to me in general. I’d say that AIXI has had limited influence in part because it’s combining several different theoretical insights that the field was already using (e.g., complexity penalties and backtracking tree search), and the synthesis doesn’t add all that much once you know about the parts. Sections 3 and 4 of MIRI’s Approach provide some clearer examples of what I have in mind by useful basic theory: Shannon, Turing, Bayes, etc.

My perspective on this is a combination of “basic theory is often necessary for knowing what the right formal tools to apply to a problem are, and for evaluating whether you’re making progress toward a solution” and “the applicability of Bayes, Pearl, etc. to AI suggests that AI is the kind of problem that admits of basic theory.” An example of how this relates to HRAD is that I think that Bayesian justifications are useful in ML, and that a good formal model of rationality in the face of logical uncertainty is likely to be useful in analogous ways. When I speak of foundational understanding making it easy to design the right systems, I’m trying to point at things like the usefulness of Bayesian justifications in modern ML. (I’m unclear on whether we miscommunicated about what sort of thing I mean by “basic insights”, or whether we have a disagreement about how useful principled justifications are in modern practice when designing high-reliability systems.)
What links here?

So8res 29 Oct 2016 19:00 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gregory Lewis🔸’s comment on: MIRI Update and Fundraising Case
Under whatever constraints Open Phil provided, I’d have sent the ‘best by academic lights’ papers I had.

We originally sent Nick Beckstead what we considered our four most important 2015 results, at his request; these were (1) the incompatibility of the “Inductive Coherence” framework and the “Asymptotic Convergence in Online Learning with Unbounded Delays” framework; (2) the demonstration in “Proof-Producing Reflection for HOL” that a non-pathological form of self-referential reasoning is possible in a certain class of theorem-provers; (3) the reflective oracles result presented in “A Formal Solution to the Grain of Truth Problem,” “Reflective Variants of Solomonoff Induction and AIXI,” and “Reflective Oracles”; (4) and Vadim Kosoy’s “Optimal Predictors” work. The papers we listed under 1, 2, and 4 then got used in an external review process they probably weren’t very well-suited for.

I think this was more or less just an honest miscommunication. I told Nick in advance that I only assigned an 8% probability to external reviewers thinking the “Asymptotic Convergence…” result was “good” on its own (and only a 20% probability for “Inductive Coherence”). My impression of what happened is that Open Phil staff interpreted my pushback as saying that I thought the external reviews wouldn’t carry much Bayesian evidence (but that the internal reviews still would), where what I was trying to communicate was that I thought the papers didn’t carry very much Bayesian evidence about our technical output (and that I thought the internal reviewers would need to speak to us about technical specifics in order to understand why we thought they were important). Thus, we were surprised when their grant decision and write-up put significant weight on the internal reviews of those papers (and they were surprised that we were surprised). This is obviously really unfortunate, and another good sign that I should have committed more time and care to clearly communicating my thinking from the outset.

Regarding picking better papers for external review: We only put out 10 papers directly related to our technical agendas between Jan 2015 and Mar 2016, so the option space is pretty limited, especially given the multiple constraints Open Phil wanted to meet. Optimizing for technical impressiveness and non-obviousness as a stand-alone result, I might have instead gone with Critch’s bounded Löb paper and the grain of truth problem paper over the AC/IC results. We did submit the grain of truth problem paper to Open Phil, but they decided not to review it because it didn’t meet other criteria they were interested in.

If MIRI is unable to convince someone like Dewey, the prospects of it making the necessary collaborations or partnerships with the wider AI community look grim.

I’m less pessimistic about building collaborations and partnerships, in part because we’re already on pretty good terms with other folks in the community, and in part because I think we have different models of how technical ideas spread. Regardless, I expect that with more and better communication, we can (upon re-evaluation) raise the probability of Open Phil staff that the work we’re doing is important.

More generally, though, I expect this task to get easier over time as we get better at communicating about our research. There’s already a body of AI alignment research (and, perhaps, methodology) that requires the equivalent of multiple university courses to understand, but there aren’t curricula or textbooks for teaching it. If we can convince a small pool of researchers to care about the research problems we think are important, this will let us bootstrap to the point where we have more resources for communicating information that requires a lot of background and sustained scholarship, as well as more of the institutional signals that this stuff warrants a time investment.

I can maybe make the time expenditure thus far less mysterious if I mention a couple more ways I erred in trying to communicate my model of MIRI’s research agenda:
1. My early discussion with Daniel was framed around questions like “What specific failure mode do you expect to be exhibited by advanced AI systems iff their programmers don’t understand logical uncertainty?” I made the mistake of attempting to give straight/non-evasive answers to those sorts of questions and let the discussion focus on that evaluation criterion, rather than promptly saying “MIRI’s research directions mostly aren’t chosen to directly address a specific failure mode in a notional software system” and “I don’t think that’s a good heuristic for identifying research that’s likely to be relevant to long-run AI safety.”
1. I fell prey to the transparency illusion pretty hard, and that was completely my fault. Mid-way through the process, Daniel made a write-up of what he had gathered so far; this write-up revealed a large number of miscommunications and places where I thought I had transmitted a concept of mine but Daniel had come away with a very different concept. It’s clear in retrospect that we should have spent a lot more time with me having Daniel try to explain what he thought I meant, and I had all the tools to predict this in foresight; but I foolishly assumed that wouldn’t be necessary in this case.
(I plan to blog more about the details of these later.)

I think these are important mistakes that show I hadn’t sufficiently clarified several concepts in my own head, or spent enough time understanding Daniel’s position. My hope is that I can do a much better job of avoiding these sorts of failures in the next round of discussion, now that I have a better model of where Open Phil’s staff and advisors are coming from and what the review process looks like.

(I am correct in that Yuan previously worked for you, right?)

Yeah, though that was before my time. He did an unpaid internship with us in the summer of 2013, and we’ve occasionally contracted him to tutor MIRI staff. Qiaochu’s also a lot socially closer to MIRI; he attended three of our early research workshops.

Unless and until then, I remain sceptical about MIRI’s value.

I think that’s a reasonable stance to take, and that there are other possible reasonable stances here too. Some of the variables I expect EAs to vary on include “level of starting confidence in MIRI’s mathematical intuitions about complicated formal questions” and “general risk tolerance.” A relatively risk-intolerant donor is right to wait until we have clearer demonstrations of success; and a relatively risk-tolerant donor who starts without a very high confidence in MIRI’s intuitions about formal systems might be pushed under a donation threshold by learning that an important disagreement has opened up between us and Daniel Dewey (or between us and other people at Open Phil).

Also, thanks for laying out your thinking in so much detail—I suspect there are other people who had more or less the same reaction to Open Phil’s grant write-up but haven’t spoken up about it. I’d be happy to talk more about this over email, too, including answering Qs from anyone else who wants more of my thoughts on this.

So8res 27 Oct 2016 16:26 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gregory Lewis🔸’s comment on: MIRI Update and Fundraising Case
Thanks for the response, Gregory. I was hoping to see more questions along these lines in the AMA, so I’m glad you followed up.

Open Phil’s grant write-up is definitely quite critical, and not an endorsement. One of Open Phil’s main criticisms of MIRI is that they don’t think our agent foundations agenda is likely to be useful for AI alignment; but their reasoning behind this is complicated, and neither Open Phil nor MIRI has had time yet to write up our thoughts in any detail. I suggest pinging me to say more about this once MIRI and Open Phil have put up more write-ups on this topic, since the hope is that the write-ups will also help third parties better evaluate our research methods on their merits.

I think Open Phil’s assessment that the papers they reviewed were ‘technically unimpressive’ is mainly based on the papers “Asymptotic Convergence in Online Learning with Unbounded Delays” and (to a lesser extent) “Inductive Coherence.” These are technically unimpressive, in the sense that they’re pretty easy results to get once you’re looking for them. (The proof in “Asymptotic Convergence...” was finished in less than a week.) From my perspective the impressive step is Scott Garrabrant (the papers’ primary author) getting from the epistemic state (1) ‘I notice AIXI fails in reflection tasks, and that this failure is deep and can’t be easily patched’ to:
- (2) ‘I notice that one candidate for “the ability AIXI is missing that would fix these deep defects” is “learning mathematical theorems while respecting patterns in whether a given theorem can be used to (dis)prove other theorems.”’
- (3) ‘I notice that another candidate for “the ability AIXI is missing that would fix these deep defects” is “learning mathematical theorems while respecting empirical patterns in whether a claim looks similar to a set of claims that turned out to be theorems.”’
- (4) ‘I notice that the two most obvious and straightforward ways to formalize these two abilities don’t let you get the other ability for free; in fact, the obvious and straightforward algorithm for the first ability precludes possessing the second ability, and vice versa.’
In contrast, I think the reviewers were mostly assessing how difficult it would be to get from 2/3/4 to a formal demonstration that there’s at least one real (albeit impractical) algorithm that can actually exhibit ability 2, and one that can exhibit ability 3. This is a reasonable question to look at, since it’s a lot harder to retrospectively assess how difficult it is to come up with a semiformal insight than how difficult it is to formalize the insight; but those two papers weren’t really chosen for being technically challenging or counter-intuitive. They were chosen because they help illustrate two distinct easy/straightforward approaches to LU that turned out to be hard to reconcile, and also because (speaking with the benefit of hindsight) conceptually disentangling these two kinds of approaches turned out to be one of the key insights leading to “Logical Induction.”

I confess scepticism at this degree of inferential distance, particularly given the Open Phil staff involved in this report involved several people who previously worked with MIRI.

I wasn’t surprised that there’s a big inferential gap for most of Open Phil’s technical advisors—we haven’t talked much with Chris/Dario/Jacob about the reasoning behind our research agenda. I was surprised by how big the gap was for Daniel Dewey, Open Phil’s AI risk program officer. Daniel’s worked with us before and has a lot of background in alignment research at FHI, and we spent significant time trying to understand each other’s views, so this was a genuine update for me about how non-obvious our heuristics are to high-caliber researchers in the field, and about how much background researchers at MIRI and FHI have in common. This led to a lot of wasted time: I did a poor job addressing Daniel’s questions until late in the review process.

I’m not sure what prior probability you should have assigned to ‘the case for MIRI’s research agenda is too complex to be reliably communicated in the relevant timeframe.’ Evaluating how promising basic research is for affecting the long-run trajectory of the field of AI is inherently a lot more complicated than evaluating whether AI risk is a serious issue, for example. I don’t have as much experience communicating the former, so the arguments are still rough. There are a couple of other reasons MIRI’s research focus might have more inferential distance than the typical alignment research project:
- (a) We’ve been thinking about these problems for over a decade, so we’ve had time to arrive at epistemic states that depend on longer chains of reasoning. Similarly, we’ve had time to explore and rule out various obvious paths (that turn out to be dead ends).
- (b) Our focus is on topics we don’t expect to jibe well with academia and industry, often because they look relatively intractable and unimportant from standard POVs.
- (c) ‘High-quality nonstandard formal intuitions’ are what we do. This is what put us ahead of the curve on understanding the AI alignment problem, and the basic case for MIRI (from the perspective of people like Holden who see our early analysis and promotion of the alignment problem as our clearest accomplishment) is that our nonstandard formal intuitions may continue to churn out correct and useful insights about AI alignment when we zero in on subproblems. MIRI and FHI were unusual enough to come up with the idea of AI alignment research in the first place, so they’re likely to come up with relatively unusual approaches within AI alignment.
Based on the above, I think the lack of mutual understanding is moderately surprising rather than extremely surprising. Regardless, it’s clear that we need to do a better job communicating how we think about choosing open problems to work on.

I note the blogging is by people already in MIRI’s sphere of influence/former staff, and MIRI’s previous ‘blockbuster result’ in decision theory has thus far underwhelmed)

I don’t think we’ve ever worked with Scott Aaronson, though we’re obviously on good terms with him. Also, our approach to decision theory stirred up a lot of interest from professional decision theorists at last year’s Cambridge conference; expect more about this in the next few months.

is not a promissory note that easily justifies an organization with a turnover of $2M/year, nor fundraising for over a million dollars more.

I think this is a reasonable criticism, and I’m hoping our upcoming write-ups will help address this. If your main concern is that Open Phil doesn’t think our work on logical uncertainty, reflection, and decision-theoretic counterfactuals is likely to be safety-relevant, keep in mind that Open Phil gave us $500k expecting this to raise our 2016 revenue from $1.6-2 million (the amount of 2016 revenue we projected absent Open Phil’s support) to $2.1-2.5 million, in part to observe the ROI of the added $500k. We’ve received around $384k in our fundraiser so far (with four days to go), which is maybe 35-60% of what we’d expect based on past fundraiser performance. (E.g., we received $597k in our 2014 fundraisers and $955k in our 2015 ones.) Combined with our other non-Open-Phil funding sources, that means we’ve so far received around $1.02M in 2016 revenue outside Open Phil, which is solidly outside the $1.6-2M range we’ve been planning around.

There are a lot of reasons donors might be retracting; I’d be concerned if the reason is that they’re expecting Open Phil to handle MIRI’s funding on their own, or that they’re interpreting some action of Open Phil’s as a signal that Open Phil wants broadly Open-Phil-aligned donors to scale back support for MIRI.

(In all of the above, I’m speaking only for myself; Open Phil staff and advisors don’t necessarily agree with the above, and might frame things differently.)

So8res 13 Oct 2016 17:43 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
Posts or comments on personal Twitter accounts, Facebook walls, etc. should not be assumed to represent any official or consensus MIRI position, unless noted otherwise. I’ll echo Rob’s comment here that “a good safety approach should be robust to the fact that the designers don’t have all the answers”. If an AI project hinges on the research team being completely free from epistemic shortcomings and moral failings, then the project is doomed (and should change how it’s doing alignment research).

I suspect we’re on the same page about it being important to err in the direction of system designs that don’t encourage arms races or other zero-sum conflicts between parties with different object-level beliefs or preferences. See also the CEV discussion above.

So8res 13 Oct 2016 0:03 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Marylen’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
In short: there’s a big difference between building a system that follows the letter of the law (but not the spirit), and a system that follows the intent behind a large body of law. I agree that the legal system is a large corpus of data containing information about human values and how humans currently want their civilization organized. In order to use that corpus, we need to be able to design systems that reliably act as intended, and I’m not sure how the legal corpus helps with that technical problem (aside from providing lots of training data, which I agree is useful).

In colloquial terms, MIRI is more focused on questions like “if we had a big corpus of information about human values, how could we design a system to learn from that corpus how to act as intended”, and less focused on the lack of corpus.

The reason that we have to work on corrigibility ourselves is that we need advanced learning systems to be corrigible before they’ve finished learning how to behave correctly from a large training corpus. In other words, there are lots of different training corpuses and goal systems where, if the system is fully trained and working correctly, we get corrigibility for free; the difficult part is getting the system to behave corrigibly before it’s smart enough to be doing corrigibility for the “right reasons”.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 23:52 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
Thanks, Benito. With regards to the second half of this question, I suspect that either you’ve misunderstood some of the arguments I’ve made about why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic journals and conferences, or (alternatively) someone has given arguments for why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic venues that I personally disagree with. My view is that our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard journals etc. because (a) we deliberately focus on research that we think academia and industry are unlikely to work on for one reason or another, and (b) we approach problems from a very different angle than the research communities that are closest to those problems.

One example of (b) is that we often approach decision theory not by following the standard philosophical approach of thinking about what decision sounds intuitively reasonable in the first person, but instead by asking “how could a deterministic robot actually be programmed to reliably solve these problems”, which doesn’t fit super well into the surrounding literature on causal vs. evidential decision theory. For a few other examples, see my response to (8) in my comments on the Open Philanthropy Project’s internal and external reviews of some recent MIRI papers.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 23:40 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Dr_Manhattan’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
I’m not sure I understand the hypothetical—most of the actions that I deem necessary are aimed at affecting the trajectory of the AI field in one way or another.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 23:38 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: ZachWeems’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
I think this has been changing in recent years, yes. A number of AI researchers (some of them quite prominent) have told me that they have largely agreed with AI safety concerns for some time, but have felt uncomfortable expressing those concerns until very recently. I do think that the tides are changing here, with the Concrete Problems in AI Safety paper (by Amodei, Olah, et al) perhaps marking the inflection point. I think that the 2015 FLI conference also helped quite a bit.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 23:34 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
I’m not exactly sure what venue it will show up in, but it will very likely be mentioned on the MIRI blog (or perhaps just posted there directly). intelligence.org/blog.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 23:20 UTC
5 points
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on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
A question from Topher Halquist, on facebook:

Has MIRI considered hiring a more senior math-Ph.D., to serve in a “postdoc supervisor”-type role?

We considered it, but decided against it because supervision doesn’t seem like a key bottleneck on our research progress. Our priority is just to find people who have the right kinds of math/CS intuitions to formalize the mostly-informal problems we’re working on, and I haven’t found that this correlates with seniority. That said, I’m happy to hire senior mathematicians if we find ones who want to work with us and have the relevant skills.

One thing that is currently a key bottleneck for us is technical writing capability—if you are interested in MIRI’s research and you’re good at technical exposition, let us know.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 22:46 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: kierangreig🔸’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
Re: 1, “what are the main points of disagreement?” is itself currently one of the points of disagreement :) A lot of our disagreements (I think) come down to diverging inchoate mathematical intuitions, which makes it hard to precisely state why we think different problems are worth prioritizing (or to resolve the disagreements).

Also, I think that different Open Phil technical advisors have different disagreements with us. As an example, Paul Christiano and I seem to have an important disagreement about how difficult it will be to align AI systems if we don’t have a correct theoretically principled understanding of how the system performs its abstract reasoning. But while the disagreement seems to me and Paul to be one of the central reasons the two of us prioritize different projects, I think some other Open Phil advisors don’t see this as a core reason to accept/reject MIRI’s research directions.

Discussions are still ongoing, but Open Phil and MIRI are both pretty time-constrained organizations, so it may take a while for us to publish details on where and why we disagree. My own attempts to gesture at possible points of divergence have been very preliminary so far, and represent my perspective rather than any kind of MIRI / Open Phil consensus summary.

Re: 4, I think we probably spent too much time this year writing up results and research proposals. The ML agenda and “Logical Induction,” for example, were both important to get right, but in retrospect I think we could have gotten away with writing less, and writing it faster. Another candidate mistake is some communication errors I made when I was trying to explain the reasoning behind MIRI’s research agenda to Open Phil. I currently attribute the problem to me overestimating how many concepts we shared, and falling prey to the illusion of transparency, in a way that burned a lot of time (though I’m not entirely confident in this analysis).

So8res 12 Oct 2016 20:56 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
As Tsvi mentioned, and as Luke has talked about before, we’re not really researching “provable AI”. (I’m not even quite sure what that term would mean.) We are trying to push towards AI systems where the way they reason is principled and understandable. We suspect that that will involve having a good understanding ourselves of how the system performs its reasoning, and when we study different types of reasoning systems we sometimes build models of systems that are trying to prove things as part of how they reason; but that’s very different from trying to make an AI that is “provably X” for some value of X. I personally doubt AGI teams be able to literally prove anything substantial about how well the system will work in practice, though I expect that they will be able to get some decent statistical guarantees.

There are some big difficulties related to the problem of choosing the right objective to optimize, but currently, that’s not where my biggest concerns are. I’m much more concerned with scenarios where AI scientists figure out how to build misaligned AGI systems well before they figure out how to build aligned AGI systems, as that would be a dangerous regime. My top priority is making it the case that the first AGI designs humanity develops are the kinds of system it’s technologically possible to align with operator intentions in practice. (I’ll write more on this subject later.)
What links here?
- Malo's comment on Ask MIRI Anything (AMA) by RobBensinger (13 Oct 2016 19:34 UTC; 4 points)

So8res 12 Oct 2016 20:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: amc’s comment on: MIRI Update and Fundraising Case
There’s nothing very public on this yet. Some of my writing over the coming months will bear on this topic, and some of the questions in Jessica’s agenda are more obviously applicable in “less optimistic” scenarios, but this is definitely a place where public output lags behind our private research.

As an aside, one of our main bottlenecks is technical writing capability: if you have technical writing skill and you’re interested in MIRI research, let us know.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 20:25 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
I don’t think of our strategy as having changed much in the last year. For example, in the last AMA I said that the plan was to work on some big open problems (I named 5 here: asymptotically good reasoning under logical uncertainty, identifying the best available decision with respect to a predictive world-model and utility function, performing induction from inside an environment, identifying the referents of goals in realistic world-models, and reasoning about the behavior of smarter reasoners), and that I’d be thrilled if we could make serious progress on any of these problems within 5 years. Scott Garrabrant then promptly developed logical induction, which represents serious progress on two (maybe three) of the big open problems. I consider this to be a good sign of progress, and that set of research priorities remains largely unchanged.

Jessica Taylor is now leading a new research program, and we’re splitting our research time between this agenda and our 2014 agenda. I see this as a natural consequence of us bringing on new researchers with their own perspectives on various alignment problems, rather than as a shift in organizational strategy. Eliezer, Benya, and I drafted the agent foundations agenda when we were MIRI’s only full-time researchers; Jessica, Patrick, and Critch co-wrote a new agenda with their take once they were added to the team. The new agenda reflects a number of small changes: some updates that we’ve all made in response to evidence over the last couple of years, some writing-up of problems that we’d been thinking about for some time but which hadn’t made the cut into the previous agenda, and some legitimate differences in intuition and perspective brought to the table by Jessica, Patrick, and Critch. The overall strategy is still “do research that we think others won’t do,” and the research methods and intuitions we rely on continue to have a MIRI-ish character.

Regarding success probability, I think MIRI has a decent chance of success compared to other potential AI risk interventions, but AI risk is a hard problem. I’d guess that humanity as a whole has a fairly low probability of success, with wide error bars.

Unless I’m missing context, I think the “medium probability of success” language comes from old discussions on LessWrong about how to respond to Pascal’s mugging. (See Rob’s note about Pascalian reasoning here.) In that context, I think the main dichotomy Eliezer had in mind was “tiny” probabilities (that can be practically ignored, like gambling in the powerball) and strategically relevant probabilities like 1% or 10%. See Eliezer’s post here. I’m fine with calling the latter probabilities “medium-sized” in the context of lottery-style errors, and calling them “small” in other contexts. With respect to ensuring that the first AGI designs developed by AI scientists are easy to align, I don’t think MIRI’s odds are stellar, though I do feel comfortable saying that they’re higher than 1%. Let me know if I’ve misunderstood the question you had in mind here.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 20:17 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
Yep, we often have a number of non-MIRI folks checking the proofs, math, and citations. I’m still personally fairly involved in the writing process (because I write fast, and because I do what I can to free up the researchers’ time to do other work); this is something I’m working to reduce. Technical writing talent is one of our key bottlenecks; if you like technical writing and are interested in MIRI’s research, get in touch.

So8res 12 Oct 2016 19:19 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: InquilineKea’s comment on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
I largely endorse Jessica’s comment. I’ll add that I think the ideal MIRI researcher has their own set of big-picture views about what’s required to design aligned AI systems, and that their vision holds up well under scrutiny. (I have a number of heuristics for what makes me more or less excited about a given roadmap.)

That is, the ideal researcher isn’t just working on whatever problems catch their eye or look interesting; they’re working toward a solution of the whole alignment problem, and that vision regularly affects their research priorities.