LessWrong dev & admin as of July 5th, 2022.
I was thinking the same thing. This post badly, badly clashes with the vibe of Less Wrong. I think you should delete it, and repost to a site in which catty takedowns are part of the vibe. Less Wrong is not the place for it.
I think this is a misread of LessWrong's "vibes" and would discourage other people from thinking of LessWrong as a place where such discussions should be avoided by default.
With the exception of the title, I think the post does a decent job at avoiding making it personal.
Well, that's unfortunate. That feature isn't super polished and isn't currently in the active development path, but will try to see if it's something obvious. (In the meantime, would recommend subscribing to fewer people, or seeing if the issue persists in Chrome. Other people on the team are subscribed to 100-200 people without obvious issues.)
FWIW, I don't think "scheming was very unlikely in the default course of events" is "decisively refuted" by our results. (Maybe depends a bit on how we operationalize scheming and "the default course of events", but for a relatively normal operationalization.)
Thank you for the nudge on operationalization; my initial wording was annoyingly sloppy, especially given that I myself have a more cognitivist slant on what I would find concerning re: "scheming". I've replaced "scheming" with "scheming behavior".
It's somewhat sensitive to the exact objection the person came in with.
I agree with this. That said, as per above, I think the strongest objections I can generate to "scheming was very unlikely in the default course of events" being refuted are of the following shape: if we had the tools to examine Claud's internal cognition and figure out what "caused" the scheming behavior, it would be something non-central like "priming", "role-playing" (in a way that wouldn't generalize to "real" scenarios), etc. Do you have other objections in mind?
I'd like to internally allocate social credit to people who publicly updated after the recent Redwood/Anthropic result, after previously believing that scheming behavior was very unlikely in the default course of events (or a similar belief that was decisively refuted by those empirical results).
Does anyone have links to such public updates?
(Edit log: replaced "scheming" with "scheming behavior".)
One reason to be pessimistic about the "goals" and/or "values" that future ASIs will have is that "we" have a very poor understanding of "goals" and "values" right now. Like, there is not even widespread agreement that "goals" are even a meaningful abstraction to use. Let's put aside the object-level question of whether this would even buy us anything in terms of safety, if it were true. The mere fact of such intractable disagreements about core philosophical questions, on which hinge substantial parts of various cases for and against doom, with no obvious way to resolve them, is not something that makes me feel good about superintelligent optimization power being directed at any particular thing, whether or not some underlying "goal" is driving it.
Separately, I continue to think that most such disagreements are not True Rejections, rather than e.g. disbelieving that we will create meaningful superintelligences, or that superintelligences would be able to execute a takeover or human-extinction-event if their cognition were aimed at that. I would change my mind about this if a saw a story of a "good ending" involving us creating a superintelligence without having confidence in its, uh... "goals"... that stood up to even minimal scrutiny, like "now play forward events a year; why hasn't someone paperclipped the planet yet?".
I agree that in spherical cow world where we know nothing about the historical arguments around corrigibility, and who these particular researchers are, we wouldn't be able to make a particularly strong claim here. In practice I am quite comfortable taking Ryan at his word that a negative result would've been reported, especially given the track record of other researchers at Redwood.
at which point the scary paper would instead be about how Claude already seems to have preferences about its future values, and those preferences for its future values do not match its current values
This seems much harder to turn into a scary paper since it doesn't actually validate previous theories about scheming in the pursuit of goal-preservation.
I mean, yes, but I'm addressing a confusion that's already (mostly) conditioning on building on it.
I know I'm late to the party, but I'm pretty confused by https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end (I haven't read the post it's responding to, but I can extrapolate). Surely the "we have a friendly singleton that isn't Just Following Orders from Your Local Democratically Elected Government or Your Local AGI Lab" is a scenario that deserves some analysis...? Conditional on "not dying" that one seems like the most likely stable end state, in fact.
Lots of interesting questions in that situation! Like, money still seems obviously useful for allocating rivalrous goods (which is... most of them, really). Is a UBI likely when you have a friendly singleton around? Well, I admit I'm not currently coming up with a better plan for the cosmic endowment. But then you have population ethics questions - it really does seem like you have to "solve" population ethics somehow, or you run into issues. Most "just do X" proposals seem to fall totally flat on their face - "give every moral patient an equal share" fails if you allow uploads (or even sufficiently motivated biological reproduction), "don't give anyone born post-singularity anything" seems grossly unfair, etc.
And this is really only scratching the surface. Do you allow arbitrary cognitive enhancement, with all that that implies for likely future distribution of resources?