All of Joe Brenton's Comments + Replies

** Additional details for the meetup are on our Discord server, including maps and more location info:

** We will have sandwiches provided by Second Slice Sandwiches (including vegan options). Other food and drinks will be available to purchase on location from Segundo Coffee Lab, Gojui Smoothies, and Adoro Deserts.

** Interested in Effective Altruism?  Houston EA organizer Keirra will be there along with others involved in the Houston EA community!

** Andrew Wilsen wil... (read more)

Seems like this model has potential to drive resolution of this question on Manifold Markets to 'yes':

"Will Tyler Cowen agree that an 'actual mathematical model' for AI X-Risk has been developed by October 15, 2023?"

https://manifold.markets/JoeBrenton/will-tyler-cowen-agree-that-an-actu?r=Sm9lQnJlbnRvbg

2Sammy Martin
I think that MTAIR plausibly is a model of the 'process of how the world is supposed to end', in the sense that it runs through causal steps where each individual thing is conditioned on the previous thing (APS is developed, APS is misaligned, given misalignment it causes damage on deployment, given that the damage is unrecoverable), and for some of those inputs your probabilities and uncertainty distribution could itself come from a detailed causal model (e.g. you can look at the Direct Approach for the first two questions. For the later questions, like e.g. what's the probability that an unaligned APS can inflict large disasters given that it is deployed, we can enumerate ways that it could happen in detail but to assess their probability you'd need to do a risk assessment with experts not produce a mathematical model. E.g. you wouldn't have a "mathematical model" of how likely a US-China war over Taiwan is, you'd do wargaming and ask experts or maybe superforecasters. Similarly, for the example that he gave which was COVID there was a part of this that was a straightforward SEIR model and then a part that was more sociological talking about how the public response works (though of course a lot of the "behavioral science" then turned out to be wrong!). So a correct 'mathematical model of the process' if we're being fair, would use explicit technical models for technical questions and for sociological/political/wargaming questions you'd use other methods. I don't think he'd say that there's no 'mathematical model' of nuclear war because while we have mathematical models of how fission and fusion works, we don't have any for how likely it is that e.g. Iran's leadership decides to start building nuclear weapons. I think Tyler Cowen would accept that as sufficiently rigorous in that domain, and I believe that the earlier purely technical questions can be obtained from explicit models. One addition that could strengthen the model is to explicitly spell out differen

Updates:

  • We have a private room reserved at the back of the IRONWORKS building
  • Maps of the IRONWORKS layout and parking location are on Discord https://discord.gg/DzmEPAscpS under the channel #acx-meetups-everywhere-may-21-2023
  • We will have food and drinks provided from vendors in the IRONWORKS