Nate Soares ⏹️
@So8res
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My current stance on AI is:
Fucking stop.
Find some other route to the glorious transhuman future.
There’s debate within the AI alignment community re whether the chance of AI killing literally everyone is more like 20% or 95%, but 20% means worse odds than Russian roulette.
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It takes more cleverness to articulate a thought than to think it. If you're thinking at the limits of your abilities, you have thoughts you can't articulate.
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Reminder: my reason for expecting AI to go poorly is, deep down, not about alignment being ultra-hard, but about Earth beeing a very derpy place.
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Relatedly, one (among many) of my beefs w/ modern schools (& culture more generally) is how much it harps on the dark aspects of humanity, and how little it highlights the light. Humans are rad. Humanity is rad. Sometimes hapless, sometimes evil, but overall, fuck yeah.
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It has come to my att'n that some of my friends are unfamiliar with the "humanity, fuck yeah" genre of writing, in which humanity is depicted as awesome (against an interstellar backdrop). Choice example: . Relevant subreddit: .
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"Stop using phrases that meticulously track uncommon distinctions you've made; we already have perfectly good phrases that ignore those distinctions, and your audience won't be able to tell the difference!" No.
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The definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering.
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One of my big takeaways from the discussion on this thread is how many people don't understand how insanely powerful a sample size of 19k is. Like, yeah, the correlations are small, but her likelihood ratios for her 0.06 correlations (vs 0.00) are still like a quintillion to one.
Sexual fetishes on the political compass, men and women. Total sample size was over 19,000!
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and people assure me that governments will start acting sane and reasonable around AI in the wake of "warning shot" accidents
Peter Daszak has received another grant from the NIH…
…to study bat coronaviruses in the wild.
After everything the world has just been though.
After all the risky research that was supposed to protect us from a global pandemic failed to stop one.
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it's even worse than
@yashkaf
depicts: big progress often comes from lots of small reconceptualizations. the "i can't distinguish your idea from a worse one in the literature" police are punishing real progress.
this is the best part of TPOT
the fuck do I care that someone 200 years ago had the same realization and wrote it down somewhere? fucking good for them!
what does it matter if I read it in a thread or a book or a thread quoting the book if it's the same idea?
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(ftr: I signed onto because I think that the current path leads to destruction, and that the letter's suggestions are marginal steps in the right direction, not because I endorse all its arguments, nor because I think those steps would help all that much.)
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The world is not made of arguments. Think not "which of whese arguments, for these two opposing sides, is more compelling? And how reliable is compellingness?" Think instead of the objects the arguments discuss, and let the arguments guide your thoughts about them.
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You can't (validly) argue from "we don't know how many bullets are in the chamber of this revolver" to "so playing Russian roulette with this revolver is fine".
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A common misconception of Aella's research is that it's constructed from Twitter-polls of her followers. Nope! When she reports research results, she's talking about huge surveys of fairly diverse populations. (Much bigger and more diverse than is usual in academia!)
People often say that my research is "twitter polls." I do a ton of twitter polls, but I primarily use them to gauge what might be potentially interesting topics for more thorough surveys in the future!
My actual research is stuff like this:
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But if someone finds a revolver lying around, spins the barrel, and points it at your kid, then your reaction shouldn't be “no worries, we can’t assign an exact probability because we don't know how many rounds are chambered”. Refusing to act b/c the odds are unclear is crazy.)
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Me: who are you to say which one of the dishwasher and the clotheswasher is "the" washing machine
Her dishes: shattering loudly during the spin cycle
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(A complement I once got from a research partner went something like "you just keep reframing the problem ever-so-slightly until the solution seems obvious". <3)
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if vampires are sexy humans, why aren't mosquitos sexy bugs?
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It's like being in a room full of LEGO machines, and you look at the machine that reads instructions and assembles the other machines, and it's built not out of LEGO but out of cleverly contorted instruction booklets.
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reactions to this are like a microcosm of why you usually can't trust humans with consequentialism.
in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about "I'd trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you" in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers
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my reflexive response to wordle is the same as my reflexive response to 2048 and other such fads: treat it as a low-grade attentional hazard and ignore it until it fades. this has mostly worked out for me, except for pokemon, which apparently never fades
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3. a community is probably stronger when its members just blurt out their beliefs (while meticulously being kind to each other). it's much easier to lose your way if you live in a mental world where PR is king over honesty and integrity. HT
@robbensinger
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The possible benefits from AI are great, but the benefits are significantly greater if we wait until we don’t have double-digit percent chances of killing literally everyone.
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i am tickled by how the etymology of supervillain is essentially "better villager"
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Also, while I'm on the topic: a fun hidden fact about Earth is that you don't actually need a license to collect and analyze data! No matter what the "do you have a degree" gatekeepers insinuate.
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the "curse of cryonics" is when a problem is both weird and very important, but it's sitting right next to other weird problems that are even more important, so everyone who's able to notice weird problems works on something else instead.
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oops, I meant that ribosomes are mostly RNA. (RNA is ofc 100% RNA)
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in calculus it's convenient to work with infinitesimals: numbers so small that their square is zero. in computer science, we work instead with coinfinitesimals: numbers so large that their square is infinity. which're why CS folk care so much about avoiding quadratic runtimes.
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For people who present as caring a bunch about data integrity, they're weirdly unresponsive to the data on their pet theory that Aella's polling population differs radically from a bigger and more diverse survey population. (The data isn't kind to their theory.)
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Civilization should say to these people: no, sorry, the (probabilistic) costs you’re imposing on us are too large, we will not permit you to endanger everyone like this, rather than waiting and attaining those benefits later, once we know what we're doing.
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Example: according to me, "my model of Alice wants chocolate" leaves Alice more space to disagree than "I think Alice wants chocolate", in part b/c the denial is "your model is wrong", rather than the more confrontational "you are wrong".
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(If you're worried about *you personally* losing access to the future because you'll die of old age first, sign up for cryonics, and help improve cryonics technology. I, too, want everyone currently alive to make it to the future!)
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it's notable that so many people object "but 'value' doesn't capture..." rather than cautioning "people might neglect the value of...". as if the word "value" must cover only the shallow and superficial features; as if no word is allowed to capture the deeper intangibles.
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“Don't worry, we'll watch for signs of danger and then do something unspecified if we see them" is the sort of reassurance labs give when they're trying to cement a status quo in which they get to plow ahead and endanger us all.
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I'm grimly amused that Earth seems perhaps "burned out" about pandemics; seems perhaps *less* likely to react quickly and competently than pre-COVID.
(Which does not bode well for the "surely humanity will get its act together after a warning shot" theory of AI alignment.)
Can some people either start betting this market down or start panicking please?
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I suspect this phenomenon is one cause of jargon. Eg, when a rationalist says "my model of Alice wouldn't like that" instead of "I don't think Alice would like that", the non-standard phraseology tracks a non-standard way they're thinking about Alice.
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My internal language has a bunch of cool features that English lacks. I like these features, and speaking in a way that reflects them is part of the process of transmitting them.
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This is Aella, stealing Nate's phone. Its his birthday and I made him a rate-nate birthday survey! If you're familiar with Nate's personality even a little I'd love if you could fill it out. Gonna give him some graphs as a gift.
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But more generally, civilization at large should not be accepting this state of affairs. Maybe you can't tell who's right, but you should be able to tell that this isn't what a mature and healthy field sounds like, and that it shouldn't get to endager you like this.
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ok my new theory is that girls can both have a feeling active *and* be forming words at the same time. and this is just, like, how they live their lives
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Big ambitions are for prioritizing between projects you'd love to work on, not for gatekeeping your enthusiasm.
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If I were designing a language, I would not render it easy to assign properties like "correct" to a whole person -- as opposed to, say, that person's map of some particular region of the territory.
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If you think you have proofs of both A and ¬A, think not "which proof is more persuasive?". Instead, observe that you are mistaken. Either the two statements are not in fact opposed, or one supposed-proof contains a flaw. Don't weigh proofs; seek flaws. So too with arguments.
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Picture putting a planet-sized revolver up against Earth, with one round chambered.
That's akin to what companies (or gov'ts!) are doing when they build towards superintelligent AI at our current level of understanding. More than a 1 in 6 chance that literally everybody dies.
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You don't have to have slightly different beliefs from others, to show that you're cool. You can just adopt others' beliefs wholesale, if they seem right.
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My take on RSPs: it is *both* true that labs committing to any plausible reason why they might stop scaling is object-level directionally better than committing to nothing at all, *and* true that RSPs could have the negative effect of relieving regulatory pressure.
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which sure would explain why many people hate on consequentialism; [legible-consequence]alism is a much worse moral theory than [comprehensive-consequence]alism.
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Another modern battle ground is "berry". Protip: if your new proposed definition of "berry" includes neither strawberries nor raspberries then it is a BAD PROPOSAL. You can tell by how "strawberry" and "raspberry" have "berry" in the name.
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can't tell whether there's only two sex positions that everybody pretends are lots of different positions, or
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2. people and institutions lauded as genius are often held together by only bubble-gum, wishes, and a favorable environment. if you rely on those people/institutions to accomplish great feats of competence under pressure, you're in touble.
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If the labs were coming right out and saying: “Yes, we’re endangering all your lives, with >1/6 probability, but we believe that’s OK because the benefits are sufficiently great / we believe we have to because otherwise people that you like even less will kill everybody first,"
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Enough model-building, more shitposting: the US should start taking that "all [people] are created equal" clause seriously, and declare that everyone in the world has US citizenship if they but wish it so.
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(I'm on the "more like 95%" side myself, but this thread is gonna be about how I recommend non-experts respond to the situation, and I think "> 1/6" is both more obvious and is sufficient for my purposes here.)
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Continuing: these people who are playing Russian roulette with the planet have no credible offer that’s worth enough that they should be putting all our lives at such grave risk.
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Cucumber? Central example of a vegetable. Strawberry? Central example of a fruit. If you're having trouble figuring out which is which, ask some local children to help you out.
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In my experience, conceptual clarity is often attained by a large number of minor viewpoint shifts.
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(Coarse examples: folks who think in probabilities might become awkward around definite statements of fact; people who get into NVC sometimes shift their language about thoughts and feelings. I claim more subtle linguistic shifts regularly come hand-in-hand w/ good thinking.)
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The world is full of people who will say they've "taken appropriate safety measures" or otherwise give a useless superficial response before plowing on ahead without addressing the deeper underlying issues.
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i was gonna sit this one out, but everyone else is out there getting a good grind in, so here's a few of mine that seem relevant
the FTX scandal proves the importance of the axe I was grinding all along
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Also, academia isn't reliably good at statistics, nor at analyzing social/psychological phenomena, so it's a strange point of comparison. Unless you're just swatting down someone who you think has risen above their station, ofc, in which case the objections make perfect sense.
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The people using "bug" to mean icky creepy crawly, "tree" to mean hard leafy greenery, and "berry" to mean bright lil bushfruit have got a good thing going. Stop tryina steal our words. Invent new ones. You can even use pseudolatin if you wanna sound all fancy and educated.
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"Have licenses" and "run evals" are fine suggestions, they’re helpful, but they’re not how a sane planet responds to this level of horrific threat. The sane response is to shut it down entirely, and find some other route.
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Yet somehow, once we figured out about genealogy, the pedants were like "well actually this fish's uncle was a fuzzy pigdear, so it's not actually a fish, you uneducated idiot, you absolute moron" and then we all forgot what "fish" meant out of sheer shame or something???
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it seems many people intuitively think that words like "value" can only apply to the legible and easily articulable aspects of things.
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In lieu of much more serious ownership and responsibility from labs, Earth just shouldn't be buying what they're saying. The sounds you're hearing are the noncommittal sounds of labs that just want to keep scaling and see what happens. Civilization shouldn't allow it.
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In sum, my internal dialect has drifted away from American English, and that suits me just fine, tyvm. I'll do my best to be newcomer-friendly and inclusive, but I'm unwilling to drop distinctions from my words just to avoid an odd turn of phrase.
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1. take note: the status quo is not always stable. your "criticism contest" can fail to reveal the giant risk that was staring you in the face the whole time. regularities you were implicitly and unconsciously relying on can evaporate overnight.
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To be clear:
@ARC_Evals
is asking for more than just "run evals", IIUC it's asking for something more like "name the capabilities that would cause you to pause, and the protective measures you'd take", which is somewhat better.
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There's a big diff between "I only saw a little data w/ a 0.06 correlation, which is probably noise" and "I saw such an enormously overwhelming pile of data than I am billions-to-one confident that the correlation is not 0.00, not 0.12, but 0.06 exactly". Aella's doin the latter.
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"Fucking stop" is a notably stronger response than “well, I guess we should require all the labs to have licenses” or “well, I guess we should require all the labs to run evals (like or ) so that notice early signs of danger"
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In fact, "you are wrong" is a type error in my internal tongue. My English-to-internal-tongue translator chokes when I try to run it on "you're wrong", and suggests (eg) "I disagree" or perhaps "you're wrong about whether I want chocolate".
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if they were coming right out and saying that bluntly, then... well, it wouldn't make things better, but at least it'd be honest. At least we could have a discussion about whether they're correct to think that the benefits are worth the risks, vs whether they should wait.
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re: the Canadian euthanasia controversy, I propose a compromise: cryopreserve them.
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Another part of why I flinch at jargon-policing is a suspicion that if someone regularly renders thoughts that track a distinction into words that don't, it erodes the distinction in their own head. Maintaining distinctions that your spoken language lacks is difficult!
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I propose we spell [ʒ] as "zh", like in "I'll have the uzh" (as a shortening of "I'll have the usual") or "It'll be pretty cazh" (as a shortening of "It'll be pretty casual"). Because s : z :: sh : zh.
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Also: not all labs are exactly the same on this count. Anthropic has at least committed to make AIs that can produce bioweapons only once they can prevent them from being stolen. …which is a far cry from owning how they're gambling with our lives, but it's better than "yolo".
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I just learned that RNA is made (mostly) out of RNA, rather than protein. Which makes complete sense, but also: wow.
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and in part because… well, I was hopeful there, for a moment, and those hopes were dashed. Which hurts. And maybe it's also helpful to display a little of that pain, from time to time.
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"A fruit is a plant ovary". Nope! Fruits are the sweet yummy ones. Vegetables have a more muted, often savory, often slightly bitter taste, that many people dislike (or at least like much less than fruit) when they're young.
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"it ignores how relationships get better with investment" nope, that's an increase in your value to each other that makes it harder to find someone worth trading up for.
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And I'm not here to criticize; I dunno what the board knew, but it's clear now that we're not on a sensible track. Even if this is the result of good intent all around, good intent isn't _enough_, on Earth. You try to kick the ball forward and it goes sideways. Derpery prevails.
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So, what now? Governments who have been alerted to the risks need to actually respond, and quickly. A research direction that poses such an insane level of risk needs to be halted immediately, and we need to find some saner way through these woods to a wonderful future.
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The "my model of Alice"-style phrasing is part of a more general program of distinguishing people from their maps. I don't claim to do this perfectly, but I'm trying, and I appreciate others who are trying.
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My stance on open borders is "what's the point of having all these fighter jets if we aren't even escorting transports to the Uighur camps to see who wants their liberty"
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I’m deeply skeptical; if they were the sort to notice early hints of later issues and react appropriately then I expect they’d be reacting differently to the hints we already have today (present-day jailbreaks, shallow instances of deception, etc.).
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(When I point this out in person, a surprising number of people respond to this point by saying: well, with Russian roulette, we know that the probability is exactly 1/6, whereas with AI we have no idea what our odds are.
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(Or, at least, I think this is true of me and of many of the folks I interact with daily. I suspect phraseology is contagious and that bystanders may pick up the alt manner of speaking w/out picking up the alt manner of thinking, etc.)
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And: I appreciate that at least some leaders at at least some labs are acknowledging that this tech gambles with all our lives (despite failing to take personal responsibility, and despite saying one thing on tech podcasts and another to congress, and ...).
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"But everyone knows that "you're wrong" has a silent "(about X)" parenthetical!", my straw conversational partner protests. I disagree. English makes it all too easy to represent confused thoughts like "maybe I'm bad".
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“and as part of carrying that responsibility, we’re testing our AIs in the following ways, and if these tests come back positive we’ll do [some specific thing that's not superficial and that's hard to game]",
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PSA: In my book, everyone has an unlimited number of "I don't understand", "plz say that again in different words", "plz expand upon that", and "plz pause while I absorb that" tokens.
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A second issue is: what are you supposed to do when the evals say “this AI is dangerous”?
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So, look: this isn't about who the fish's uncle is. When a kid points at a whale and says "look, a fish", and you're like "haha no, its tail flaps horizontally and its gradma had hair", who's in the wrong here?
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Sometimes a bunch of small shifts leave people talking a bit differently, b/c now they're thinking a bit differently. The old phrasings don't feel quite right -- maybe they conflate distinct concepts, or rely implicitly on some bad assumption, etc.
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The big fortresses on the side of righteousness are "crab" () and "tree" () which are such ragged genealogical concepts and such useful functional concepts that the misguided pedantry virus hasn't yet found a foothold.
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If an argument misleads you, think not "I have learned that similarly compelling arguments are often wrong." Think instead of which step within it was wrong, and adjust your thoughts so that they are not so easily guided down wrong paths.
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