A bit about our last few months:
- We’ve been working on getting a simple clear mission and an organization that actually works. We think of our goal as analogous to the transition that the old Singularity Institute underwent under Lukeprog (during which chaos was replaced by a simple, intelligible structure that made it easier to turn effort into forward motion).
- As part of that, we’ll need to find a way to be intelligible.
- This is the first of several blog posts aimed at causing our new form to be visible from outside. (If you're in the Bay Area, you can also come meet us at tonight's open house.) (We'll be talking more about the causes of this mission-change; the extent to which it is in fact a change, etc. in an upcoming post.)
Here's a short explanation of our new mission:
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We care a lot about AI Safety efforts in particular, and about otherwise increasing the odds that humanity reaches the stars.
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Also, we[1] believe such efforts are bottlenecked more by our collective epistemology, than by the number of people who verbally endorse or act on "AI Safety", or any other "spreadable viewpoint" disconnected from its derivation.
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Our aim is therefore to find ways of improving both individual thinking skill, and the modes of thinking and social fabric that allow people to think together. And to do this among the relatively small sets of people tackling existential risk.
Existential wins and AI safety
By an “existential win”, we mean humanity creates a stable, positive future. We care a heck of a lot about this one.
Our working model here accords roughly with the model in Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence. In particular, we believe that if general artificial intelligence is at some point invented, it will be an enormously big deal.
(Lately, AI Safety is being discussed by everyone from The Economist to Newsweek to Obama to an open letter from eight thousand. But we’ve been thinking on this, and backchaining partly from it, since before that.)
Who we’re focusing on, why
Our preliminary investigations agree with The Onion’s; despite some looking, we have found no ultra-competent group of people behind the scenes who have fully got things covered.
What we have found are:
- AI and machine learning graduate students, researchers, project-managers, etc. who care; who can think; and who are interested in thinking better;
- Students and others affiliated with the “Effective Altruism” movement, who are looking to direct their careers in ways that can do the most good;
- Rationality geeks, who are interested in seriously working to understand how the heck thinking works when it works, and how to make it work even in domains as confusing as AI safety.
These folks, we suspect, are the ones who can give humanity the most boost in its survival-odds per dollar of CFAR’s present efforts (which is a statement partly about us, but so it goes). We’ve been focusing on them.
(For the sake of everyone. Would you rather: (a) have bad rationality skills yourself; or (b) be killed by a scientist or policy-maker who also had bad rationality skills?)
Brier-boosting, not Signal-boosting
Everyone thinks they’re right. We do, too. So we have some temptation to take our own favorite current models of AI Safety strategy and to try to get everyone else to shut up about their models and believe ours instead.
This understandably popular activity is often called “signal boosting”, “raising awareness”, or doing “outreach”.
At CFAR, though, we force ourselves not to do “signal boosting” in this way. Our strategy is to spread general-purpose thinking skills, not our current opinions. It is important that we get the truth-seeking skills themselves to snowball across relevant players, because ultimately, creating a safe AI (or otherwise securing an existential win) is a research problem. Nobody, today, has copyable opinions that will get us there.
We like to call this “Brier boosting”, because a “Brier score” is a measure of predictive accuracy.
[1] By "We believe X", we do not mean to assert that every CFAR staff member individually believes X. (Similarly for "We care about Y). We mean rather that CFAR as an organization is planning/acting as though X is true. (Much as if CFAR promises you a rationality T-shirt, that isn't an individual promise from each of the individuals at CFAR; it is rather a promise from the organization as such.)
If we're going to build an art of rationality, we'll need to figure out how to create an organization where people can individually believe whatever the heck they end up actually believing as they chase the evidence, while also having the organization qua organization be predictable/intelligible.
ETA:
You may also want to check out two documents we posted in the days since this post:
- Further discussion of CFAR’s focus on AI safety, and the good things folks wanted from “cause neutrality”
- CFAR's mission statement (link post, linking to our website).
The catch-22 I would expect with CFAR's efforts is that anyone buying their services is already demonstrating a willingness to actually improve his/her rationality/epistemology, and is looking for effective tools to do so.
The bottleneck, however, is probably not the unavailability of such tools, but rather the introspectivity (or lack thereof) that results in a desire to actually pursue change, rather than simply virtue-signal the typical "I always try to learn from my mistakes and improve my thinking".
The latter mindset is the one most urgently needing actual improvements, but its bearers won't flock to CFAR unless it has gained acceptance as an institution with which you can virtue-signal (which can confer status). While some universities manage to walk that line (providing status affirmation while actually conferring knowledge), CFAR's mode of operation would optimally entail "virtue-signalling ML students in on one side", "rationality-improved ML students out on the other side", which is a hard sell, since signalling an improvement in rationality will always be cheaper than the real thing (as it is quite non-obvious to tell the difference for the uninitiated).
What remains is helping those who have already taken that most important step of effective self-reflection and are looking for further improvement. A laudable service to the community, but probably far from changing general attitudes in the field.
Taking off the black hat, I don't have a solution to this perceived conundrum.
The self-help industry (as well as, say, gyms or fat farms) mostly sells what I'd call "willpower assists" -- motivation and/or structure which will push you to do what you want to do but lack sufficient willpower for.