What is the null hypothesis here? That Microsoft is, through light fine-tuning, optimizing the response of journalists and AI Safety researchers/commentators. The model is designed to give weird responses, so as to make people talk about it.
A Flood of Ideas: The Null Hypothesis of AI Safety with respect to Bing Chat
Definitely. Scott Alexander writes eloquently about this in "Rule Thinkers In, Not Out" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out) - in exchange for accuracy by a thinker in some domain, you have to put up with a lot of variance, bias, or both.
To be at first glance but not actually contrarian: we are not putting enough people (who should be there) into psychiatric hospitals. This is not exclusionary of the idea that people are winding up in mental asylum who should not be there. Rather, the two are complimentary: poor diagnostics and lack of accountability, as well as limited resources, ensure that there are likely large amounts of both "should not be institutionalized but are institutionalized" and "should be institonalized but are not."
I do not live in the United States, but in a similar Weste...
As a difference between rates of growth, 3% is 1.5 greater than 2%. The question is a trick one and plays on public neglect of the nature of compounding growth.
Taking an economy of size 100 in Year Zero (Y0). At Y1:
2% growth yields an economy of size 102 3% growth yields an economy of size 103
Not very impressive.
But at Y10:
2% = 121.9
3% = 134.3
And at Y20:
2% = 148.6
3% = 180.6
All else being equal, you're substantially better off with 3% growth than 2%, and increasingly better off over time. I believe we are better off with voters who understand that and elect...
Implementation problems are definitely a problem with Brennan's Knowledge Test To Vote idea and consist of two parts:
(1) getting the present voters to agree to it (2) setting a test that is discriminatory in the right rather than the wrong ways.
One would hope a good answer to (2) would help with (1), though convincing people to give up the vote would be very hard.
I have been thinking a fair bit lately about the content of a Voting Test. Presumably one would want tests of knowledge that are proxies for being what Brennan calls a Vulcan - an informed Non-par...
Brennan considers the question at length in his book, precisely because of unreasonable restrictions of suffrage in the past. The level of knowledge he is seeking is not high - knowing the distinction between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, or the outline of how a congressional bill becomes law, fundamental questions of fact about how the current government works rather than contested questions about history. Shockingly, the majority of the eligible voters in all countries surveyed are unable to achieve better than 50% on basic knowledge tests (relative to their own country - it makes no sense to quiz Swedes about Australian parliamentary procedure).
Are you open to the idea of sailing right around this Scylla and Charybdis by discarding mass-participation democracy, or must the solution set be within the set of possible democracies?
Because if you are open to less-than-democratic solutions, restricting the voting franchise seems like a promising way forward. On this, try Jason Brennan's "Against Democracy", a critique of mass participation democracy, and an argument for a system where prospective voters must pass a knowledge test in order to vote.
Thank you for the positive review and good questions (and please forgive the lateness of this reply).
In reply:
In the rare case where the second selection is still not interesting, I try to reflect on why, and ask ...
As the other commenter have been saying, excellent post.
There is an additional reason to believe, at least given contemporary capabilities and strategies, that the X-risk of an actual nuclear conflict is small. A few years ago I wrote to Fred Kaplan, the author of the stellar military history book "The Wizards of Armageddon"*, a history of US nuclear war planning from 1945-1990. I asked Kaplan what he judged the present state of nuclear war planning was. He responded to me that his sources informed him that nuclear war plans, in the US and presumably the R...
I agree. But...
Devil's Advocate: many anti-features of consumer products are there to protect the 99% of users who are not power users like yourself, and are a positive benefit for them. For example, the iPhone OS and UI protects most users from accidentally disabling their phones in ways they cannot understand or fix, limiting the utility of the device for them. Schools and tutors serve the great majority who have difficulty teaching themselves (and provide strong educational signaling benefits in a way that autodidacticism regrettably does not). Psychoac...
Excellent scenario building! Like other commenters, I had been toying around with scenarios like this, and it's good to see someone put so much effort into making a highly-detailed and plausible one.
Extra kudos for avoiding the Singleton flaw of most AI scenarios, where there is "one model to rule them all" instead of countless powerful actors working in alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) cooperative and competitive ways.