I continue to feel like we're talking past each other, so let me start again. We both agree that causing human extinction is extremely bad. If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that it makes sense to follow deontological rules, even if there's a really good reason breaking them seems locally beneficial, because on average, the decision theory that's willing to do harmful things for complex reasons performs badly.

The goal of my various analogies was to point out that this is not actually a fully correcct statement about common sense morality. Common sense morality has several exceptions for things like having someone's consent to take on a risk, someone doing bad things to you, and innocent people being forced to do terrible things.

Given that exceptions exist, for times when we believe the general policy is bad, I am arguing that there should be an additional exception stating that: if there is a realistic chance that a bad outcome happens anyway, and you believe you can reduce the probability of this bad outcome happening (even after accounting for cognitive biases, sources of overconfidence, etc.), it can be ethically permissible to take actions that have side effects around increasing the probability of the bad outcome in other ways.

When analysing the reasons I broadly buy the deontological framework for "don't commit murder", I think there are some clear lines in the sand, such as maintaining a valuable social contract, and how if you do nothing, the outcomes will be broadly good. Further, society has never really had to deal with something as extreme as doomsday machines, which makes me hesitant to appeal to common sense morality at all. To me, the point where things break down with standard deontological reasoning is that this is just very outside the context where such priors were developed and have proven to be robust. I am not comfortable naively assuming they will generalize, and I think this is an incredibly high stakes thing where far and away the only thing I care about is taking the actions that will actually, in practice, lead to a lower probability of extinction.

Regarding your examples, I'm completely ethically comfortable with someone making a third political party in a country where the population has two groups who both strongly want to cause genocide to the other. I think there are many ways that such a third political party could reduce the probability of genocide, even if it ultimately comprises a political base who wants negative outcomes.

Another example is nuclear weapons. From a certain perspective, holding nuclear weapons is highly unethical as it risks nuclear winter, whether from provoking someone else or from a false alarm on your side. While I'm strongly in favour of countries unilaterally switching to a no-first-use policy and pursuing mutual disarmament, I am not in favour of countries unilaterally disarming themselves. By my interpretation of your proposed ethical rules, this suggests countries should unilaterally disarm. Do you agree with that? If not, what's disanalogous?

COVID-19 would be another example. Biology is not my area of expertise, but as I understand it, governments took actions that were probably good but risked some negative effects that could have made things worse. For example, widespread use of vaccines or antivirals, especially via the first-doses-first approach, plausibly made it more likely that resistant strains would spread, potentially affecting everyone else. In my opinion, these were clearly net-positive actions because the good done far outweighed the potential harm.

You could raise the objection that governments are democratically elected while Anthropic is not, but there were many other actors in these scenarios, like uranium miners, vaccine manufacturers, etc., who were also complicit.

Again, I'm purely defending the abstract point of "plans that could result in increased human extinction, even if by building the doomsday machine yourself, are not automatically ethically forbidden". You're welcome to critique Anthropic's actual actions as much as you like. But you seem to be making a much more general claim.

Indeed, I have long thought that mechanistic interpretability was overinvested relative to other alignment efforts (but underinvested in absolute terms) exactly because it was relatively easy to measure and feel like you were making progress.

I'm surprised that you seem to simultaneously be concerned that it was too easy to feel like you're making progress in past mech interp and push back against us saying that it was too easy to incorrectly feel like you're making progress in mech interp and we need better metrics of whether we're making progress

In general they want to time-box and quantify basically everything?

The key part is to be objective, which is related to but not the same thing as being quantifiable. For example, you can test if your hypothesis is correct by making non-trivial empirical predictions and then verifying them UGG. If you change the prompt in a certain way, what will happen or can you construct an adversarial example in an interpretable way?

Pragmatic problems are often the comparative advantage of frontier labs.

Our post is aimed at the community in general, not just the community inside frontier labs, so this is not an important part of our argument, though there are definitely certain problems we are comparatively advantaged at studying

I also think that ‘was it ‘scheming’ or just ‘confused’,’ an example of a question Neel Nanda points to, is a remarkably confused question, the boundary is a lot less solid than it appears, and in general attempts to put ‘scheming’ or ‘deception’ or similar in a distinct box misunderstand how all the related things work.

Yes, obviously this is a complicated question. Figuring out what the right question to ask is is part of the challenge. But I think there clearly is some real substance here - there's times an AI causes bad outcomes that indicate a goal directed entity taking undesired actions, and there's times that don't, and figuring out the difference is very important

If you can get a good proxy to the eventual problem in a real model I much prefer that, on realism grounds. Eg eval awareness in Sonnet

Seems reasonable. But yeah, it's a high bar

In my parlance it sounds like you agree with me about the importance of robustly useful settings, you just disagree with my more specific claim that model organisms are often bad robustly useful settings?

I think that it's easy to simulate being difficult and expensive to evaluate, And current models already show situational awareness. You can try simulating things like scheming with certain prompting experiments though I think that one's more tenuous.

Notes that I consider model organism to involve fine-tuning and prompted settings are in scope depending on specific details of how contrived they seem

I'm generally down for making a model organism designed to test a very specific thing that we expect to see in future models. My scepticism is that this generalizes and that you can just screw around in a model organism and expect to discover useful things. I think if you design it to test a narrow phenomena then there's a good chance you can in fact test that narrow phenomena

Have you tried emailing the authors of that paper and asking if they think you're missing any important details? Imo there's 3 kinds of papers:

1. Totally legit
2. Kinda fragile and fiddly, there's various tacit knowledge and key details to get right, but the results are basically legit. Or, eg, it's easy for you to have a subtle bug that breaks everything. Imo it's bad if they don't document this, but it's different from not replicating
3. Misleading (eg only works in a super narrow setting and this was not documented at all) or outright false

I'm pro more safety work being replicated, and would be down to fund a good effort here, but I'm concerned about 2 and 3 getting confused

Sure, but there's a big difference between engaging in PR damage control mode and actually seriously engaging. I don't take them choosing to be in the former as significant evidence of wrong doing