habryka

Running Lightcone Infrastructure, which runs LessWrong. You can reach me at habryka@lesswrong.com

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A Moderate Update to your Artificial Priors
A Moderate Update to your Organic Priors
Concepts in formal epistemology

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This style of thinking seems illogical to me. It has already clearly resulted in a sort of evaporative cooling in OpenAI.

I don't think what's happening at OpenAI is "evaporative cooling as a result of people being too risk-averse to do alignment work that's adjacent to capabilities". I would describe it more as "purging anyone who tries to provide oversight". I don't think the people who are leaving OpenAI who are safety conscious are doing it because of concerns like the OP, they are doing it because they are being marginalized and the organization is acting somewhat obviously reckless.

I did that! (I am the primary admin of the site). I copied your comment here just before I took down the duplicate post of yours to make sure it doesn't get lost.

@henry (who seems to know Nicky) said on a duplicate link post of this: 

This is an accessible introduction to AI Safety, written by Nicky Case and the teens at Hack Club. So far, part 1/3 is completed, which covers a rough timeline of AI advancement up to this point, and what might come next.

If you've got feedback as to how this can be made more understandable, that'd be appreciated! Reach out to Nicky, or to me and I'll get the message to her.

@jefftk comments on the HN thread on this

How many people would, if they suddenly died, be reported as a "Boeing whistleblower"? The lower this number is, the more surprising the death.

Another HN commenter says (in a different thread): 

It’s a nice little math problem.

Let’s say both of the whistleblowers were age 50. The probability of a 50 year old man dying in a year is 0.6%. So the probability of 2 or more of them dying in a year is 1 - (the probability of exactly zero dying in a year + the probability of exactly one dying in a year). 1 - (A+B).

A is (1-0.006)^N. B is 0.006N(1-0.006)^(N-1). At 60 A is about 70% and B is about 25% making it statistically insignificant.

But they died in the same 2 month period, so that 0.006 should be 0.001. If you rerun the same calculation, it’s 356.

habryka1d4016

Does anyone have any takes on the two Boeing whistleblowers who died under somewhat suspicious circumstances? I haven't followed this in detail, and my guess is it is basically just random chance, but it sure would be a huge deal if a publicly traded company now was performing assassinations of U.S. citizens. 

Curious whether anyone has looked into this, or has thought much about baseline risk of assassinations or other forms of violence from economic actors.

habryka1dΩ18364

Can you confirm or deny whether you signed any NDA related to you leaving OpenAI? 

(I would guess a "no comment" or lack of response or something to that degree implies a "yes" with reasonably high probability. Also, you might be interested in this link about the U.S. labor board deciding that NDA's offered during severance agreements that cover the existence of the NDA itself have been ruled unlawful by the National Labor Relations Board when deciding how to respond here)

habryka2dΩ13203

Thank you for your work there. Curious what specifically prompted you to post this now, presumably you leaving OpenAI and wanting to communicate that somehow?

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