Follow-up to:
- CFAR's new focus, and AI safety
- CFAR's new mission statement (link post; links to our website).
In the days since we published our previous post, a number of people have come up to me and expressed concerns about our new mission. Several of these had the form “I, too, think that AI safety is incredibly important — and that is why I think CFAR should remain cause-neutral, so it can bring in more varied participants who might be made wary by an explicit focus on AI.”
I would here like to reply to these people and others, and to clarify what is and isn’t entailed by our new focus on AI safety.
First: Where are CFAR’s activities affected by the cause(s) it chooses to prioritize?
Some components that people may be hoping for from “cause neutral”, that we can do, and that we intend to do:
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We can be careful to include all information that they, from their vantage point, would want to know -- even if on our judgment, some of the information is misleading or irrelevant, or might pull them to the “wrong” conclusions.
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Similarly, we can attempt to expose people to skilled thinkers they would want to talk with, regardless of those thinkers’ viewpoints; and we can be careful to allow their own thoughts, values, and arguments to develop, regardless of which “side” this may lead to them supporting.
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More generally, we can and should attempt to cooperate with each student’s extrapolated volition, and to treat the student as they (from their initial epistemic vantage point; and with their initial values) would wish to be treated. Which is to say that we should not do anything that would work less well if the algorithm behind it were known, and that we should attempt to run such workshops (and to have such conversations, and so on) as would cause good people of varied initial views to stably on reflection want to participate in them.
Some components that people may be hoping for from “cause neutral”, that we can’t or won’t do:
- CFAR’s history around our mission: How did we come to change?
[1] In my opinion, I goofed this up historically in several instances, most notably with respect to Val and Julia, who joined CFAR in 2012 with the intention to create a cause-neutral rationality organization. Most integrity-gaps are caused by lack of planning rather than strategic deviousness; someone tells their friend they’ll have a project done by Tuesday and then just… doesn’t. My mistakes here seem to me to be mostly of this form. In any case, I expect the task to be much easier, and for me and CFAR to do better, now that we have a simpler and clearer mission.
Yes, I agree that this is the important question. I think there are benefits around stronger coordination among 1) CFAR staff, 2) CFAR supporters, and 3) CFAR participants around AI safety that are not captured by a quantitative increase in the number of seminars being run or whatever.
In the ideal situation, you can try to create a group of people who have common knowledge that everyone else in the group is actually dedicated to AI safety, and it allows them to coordinate better because it allows them to act and make plans under the assumption that everyone else is dedicated to AI safety, at every level of meta (e.g. when you make plans which are contingent on someone else's plans). If CFAR instead continues to publicly present as approximately cause-neutral, these assumptions shatter and people can't rely on each other and coordinate as well. I think it would be pretty difficult to attempt to quantify the benefit of doing this but I'd be skeptical of any confident and low upper bounds.
There are also benefits from CFAR signaling that it cares enough about AI safety in particular to drop cause neutrality; that could encourage some people who otherwise might not have to take the cause more seriously.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up: do you think it's more important for rationalists to focus even more heavily on AI research so that their example will sway others to prioritize FAI, or do you think it's more important for rationalists to broaden their network so that rationalists have more examples to learn from?
Shockingly, as a lawyer who's working on homelessness and donating to universal income experiments, I prefer a more general focus. Just as shockingly, the mathematicians and engineers who have been focusing on AI for the last several years prefe... (read more)