All of yams's Comments + Replies

Preliminary thoughts from Ryan Greenblatt on this here.

[errant thought pointing a direction, low-confidence musing, likely retreading old ground]

There’s a disagreement that crops up in conversations about changing people’s minds. Sides are roughly:

1. You should explain things by walking someone through your entire thought process, as it actually unfolded. Changing minds is best done by offering an account of how your own mind was changed.
2. You should explain things by back-chaining the most viable (valid) argument, from your conclusions, with respect to your specific audience.

This first strategy invites framing you... (read more)

Do you think of rationality as a similar sort of 'object' or 'discipline' to philosophy? If not, what kind of object do you think of it as being?

(I am no great advocate for academic philosophy; I left that shit way behind ~a decade ago after going quite a ways down the path. I just want to better understand whether folks consider Rationality as a replacement for philosophy, a replacement for some of philosophy, a subset of philosophical commitments, a series of cognitive practices, or something else entirely. I can model it, internally, as aiming to be any... (read more)

Question for Ben:

Are you inviting us to engage with the object level argument, or are you drawing attention to the existence of this argument from a not-obviously-unreasonable-source as a phenomenon we are responsible for (and asking us to update on that basis)?

On my read, he’s not saying anything new (concerns around military application are why ‘we’ mostly didn’t start going to the government until ~2-3 years ago), but that he’s saying it, while knowing enough to paint a reasonable-even-to-me picture of How This Thing Is Going, is the real tragedy.

I think the reason nobody will do anything useful-to-John as a result of the control critique post is that control is explicitly not aiming at the hard parts of the problem, and knows this about itself. In that way, control is an especially poorly selected target if the goal is getting people to do anything useful-to-John. I'd be interested in a similar post on the Alignment Faking paper (or model organisms more broadly), on RAT, on debate, on faithful CoT, on specific interpretability paradigms (circuits v SAEs, vs some coherentist approach vs shards vs..... (read more)

there are plenty of cases where we can look at what people are doing and see pretty clearly that it is not progress toward the hard problem

There are plenty of cases where John can glance at what people are doing and see pretty clearly that it is not progress toward the hard problem.

Importantly, people with the agent foundations class of anxieties (which I embrace; I think John is worried about the right things!) do not spend time engaging on a gears level with prominent prosaic paradigms and connecting the high level objection ("it ignores the hard part of... (read more)

If you wrote this exact post, it would have been upvoted enough for the Redwood team to see it, and they would have engaged with you similarly to how they engaged with John here (modulo some familiarity, because theyse people all know each other at least somewhat, and in some pairs very well actually).

If you wrote several posts like this, that were of some quality, you would lose the ability to appeal to your own standing as a reason not to write a post.

This is all I'm trying to transmit.

[edit: I see you already made the update I was encouraging, an hour after leaving the above comment to me. Yay!]

Writing (good) critiques is, in fact, a way many people gain standing. I’d push back on the part of you that thinks all of your good ideas will be ignored (some of them probably will be, but not all of them; don’t know until you try, etc).

More partial credit on the second to last point:

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2766

Aside: I don’t think it’s just that real world impacts take time to unfold. Lately I’ve felt that evals are only very weakly predictive of impact (because making great ones is extremely difficult). Could be that models available now don’t have substantially more mundane utility (economic potential stemming from first order effects), outside of the domains the labs are explicitly targeting (like math and code), than models available 1 year ago.

Is the context on “reliable prediction and ELK via empirical route” just “read the existing ELK literature and actually follow it” or is it stuff that’s not written down? I assume you’ve omitted it to save time, and so no worries if the latter.

EDIT: I was slightly tempted to think of this also as ‘Ryan’s ranking of live agendas that aren’t control’, but I’m not sure if ‘what you expect to work conditional on delegating to AIs’ is similar to ‘what you expect to work if humans are doing most of it?’ (my guess is the lists would look similar, but with notable exceptions, eg humans pursuing GOFAI feels less viable than ML agents pursuing GOFAI)

My understanding is that ~6 months ago y’all were looking for an account of the tasks an automated AI safety researcher would hopefully perform, as part of answering the strategic question ‘what’s the next step after building [controlled] AGI?’ (with ‘actually stop there indefinitely’ being a live possibility)

This comment makes me think you’ve got that account of safety tasks to be automated, and are feeling optimistic about automated safety research.

Is that right and can you share a decently mechanistic account of how automated safety research might work?... (read more)

Thanks for the clarification — this is in fact very different from what I thought you were saying, which was something more like "FATE-esque concerns fundamentally increase x-risk in ways that aren't just about (1) resource tradeoffs or (2) side-effects of poorly considered implementation details."

Anthropic should take a humanist/cosmopolitan stance on risks from AGI in which risks related to different people having different values are very clearly deprioritized compared to risks related to complete human disempowerment or extinction, as worry about the former seems likely to cause much of the latter

Can you say more about the section I've bolded or link me to a canonical text on this tradeoff?

[was a manager at MATS until recently and want to flesh out the thing Buck said a bit more]

It’s common for researchers to switch subfields, and extremely common for MATS scholars to get work doing something different from what they did at MATS. (Kosoy has had scholars go on to ARC, Neel scholars have ended up in scalable oversight, Evan’s scholars have a massive spread in their trajectories; there are many more examples but it’s 3 AM.)

Also I wouldn’t advise applying to something that seems interesting; I’d advise applying for literally everything (unless y... (read more)

Your version of events requires a change of heart (for 'them to get a whole lot more serious'). I'm just looking at the default outcome. Whether alignment is hard or easy (although not if it's totally trivial), it appears to be progressing substantially more slowly than capabilities (and the parts of it that are advancing are the most capabilities-synergizing, so it's unclear what the oft-lauded 'differential advancement of safety' really looks like).

By bad I mean dishonest, and by 'we' I mean the speaker (in this case, MIRI).

I take myself to have two central claims across this thread:

1. Your initial comment was straw manning the 'if we build [ASI], we all die' position.
2. MIRI is likely not a natural fit to consign itself to service as the neutral mouthpiece of scientific consensus.

I do not see where your most recent comment has any surface area with either of these claims.

I do want to offer some reassurance, though: 

I do not take "One guy who's thought about this for a long time and some other people he recruited think it's definitely going to fail" to be descriptive of the MIRI comms strategy.

Oh, I feel fine about saying ‘draft artifacts currently under production by the comms team ever cite someone who is not Eliezer, including experts with a lower p(doom)’ which, based on this comment, is what I take to be the goalpost. This is just regular coalition signaling though and not positioning yourself as, terminally, a neutral observer of consensus.

“You haven’t really disagreed that [claiming to speak for scientific consensus] would be more effective.”

That’s right! I’m really not sure about this. My experience has been that ~every take someone offe... (read more)

I do mean ASI, not AGI. I know Pope + Belrose also mean to include ASI in their analysis, but it’s still helpful to me if we just use ASI here, so I’m not constantly wondering if you’ve switched to thinking about AGI.

Obligatory ‘no really, I am not speaking for MIRI here.’

My impression is that MIRI is not trying to speak for anyone else. Representing the complete scientific consensus is an undue burden to place on an org that has not made that claim about itself. MIRI represents MIRI, and is one component voice of the ‘broad view guiding public policy’, no... (read more)

Good point - what I said isn’t true in the case of alignment by default.

Edited my initial comment to reflect this

(I work at MIRI but views are my own)

I don't think 'if we build it we all die' requires that alignment be hard [edit: although it is incompatible with alignment by default]. It just requires that our default trajectory involves building ASI before solving alignment (and, looking at our present-day resource allocation, this seems very likely to be the world we are in, conditional on building ASI at all).

[I want to note that I'm being very intentional when I say "ASI" and "solving alignment" and not "AGI" and "improving the safety situation"]

What text analogizing LLMs to human brains have you found most compelling?

Does it seem likely to you that, conditional on ‘slow bumpy period soon’, a lot of the funding we see at frontier labs dries up (so there’s kind of a double slowdown effect of ‘the science got hard, and also now we don’t have nearly the money we had to push global infrastructure and attract top talent’), or do you expect that frontier labs will stay well funded (either by leveraging low hanging fruit in mundane utility, or because some subset of their funders are true believers, or a secret third thing)?

Only the first few sections of the comment were directed at you; the last bit was a broader point re other commenters in the thread, the fooming shoggoths, and various in-person conversations I’ve had with people in the bay.

That rationalists and EAs tend toward aesthetic bankruptcy is one of my chronic bones to pick, because I do think it indicates the presence of some bias that doesn’t exist in the general population, which results in various blind spots.

Sorry for not signposting and/or limiting myself to a direct reply; that was definitely confusing.

I th... (read more)

If this is representative of the kind of music you like, I think you’re wildly overestimating how difficult it is to make that music.

The hard parts are basically infrastructural (knowing how to record a sound, how to make different sounds play well together in a virtual space). Suno is actually pretty bad at that, though, so if you give yourself the affordance to be bad at it, too, then you can just ignore the most time-intensive part of music making.

Pasting things together (as you did here), is largely The Way Music Is Made in the digital age, anyway.

I th... (read more)

A great many tools like this already exist and are contracted by the major labels.

When you post a song to streaming services, it’s checked against the entire major label catalog before actually listing on the service (the technical process is almost certainly not literally this, but it’s something like this, and they’re very secretive about what’s actually happening under the hood).

Cool! I think we're in agreement at a high level. Thanks for taking the extra time to make sure you were understood.

In more detail, though:

I think I disagree with 1 being all that likely; there are just other things I could see happening that would make a pause or stop politically popular (i.e. warning shots, An Inconvenient Truth AI Edition, etc.), likely not worth getting into here. I also think 'if we pause it will be for stupid reasons' is a very sad take.

I think I disagree with 2 being likely, as well; probably yes, a lot of the bottleneck on developm... (read more)

So for this argument to be worth bringing up in some general context where a pause is discussed, the person arguing it should probably believe:

1. We are far and away most likely to get a pause only as a response to unemployment.
2. An AI that precipitates pause-inducing levels of unemployment is inches from automating AI R+D.
3. The period between implementing the pause and massive algorithmic advancements is long enough that we're able to increase compute stock...
4. ....but short enough that we're not able to make meaningful safety progress before algorithmic advanceme

I've just read this post and the comments. Thank you for writing that; some elements of the decomposition feel really good, and I don't know that they've been done elsewhere.

I think discourse around this is somewhat confused, because you actually have to do some calculation on the margin, and need a concrete proposal to do that with any confidence.

The straw-Pause rhetoric is something like "Just stop until safety catches up!" The overhang argument is usually deployed (as it is in those comments) to the effect of 'there is no stopping.' And yeah, in this ca... (read more)

I think it would be very helpful to me if you broke that sentence up a bit more. I took a stab at it but didn't get very far.

Sorry for my failure to parse!

I want to say yes, but I think this might be somewhat more narrow than I mean. It might be helpful if you could list a few other ways one might read my message, that seem similarly-plausible to this one.

Folks using compute overhang to 4D chess their way into supporting actions that differentially benefit capabilities.

I'm often tempted to comment this in various threads, but it feels like a rabbit hole, it's not an easy one to convince someone of (because it's an argument they've accepted for years), and I've had relatively little success talking about this with people in person (there's some change I should make in how I'm talking about it, I think).

More broadly, I've started using quick takes to catalog random thoughts, because sometimes when I'm meeting... (read more)

Yes this world.

Please stop appealing to compute overhang. In a world where AI progress has wildly accelerated chip manufacture, this already-tenuous argument has become ~indefensible.

Sometimes people express concern that AIs may replace them in the workplace. This is (mostly) silly. Not that it won't happen, but you've gotta break some eggs to make an industrial revolution. This is just 'how economies work' (whether or not they can / should work this way is a different question altogether). 

The intrinsic fear of joblessness-resulting-from-automation is tantamount to worrying that curing infectious diseases would put gravediggers out of business.

There is a special case here, though: double digit unemployment (and youth unemployment... (read more)

I (and maybe you) have historically underrated the density of people with religious backgrounds in secular hubs. Most of these people don't 'think differently', in a structural sense, from their forebears; they just don't believe in that God anymore. 

The hallmark here is a kind of naive enlightenment approach that ignores ~200 years of intellectual history (and a great many thinkers from before that period, including canonical philosophers they might claim to love/respect/understand). This type of thing.

They're no less tribal or dogmatic, or more crit... (read more)

I agree with this in the world where people are being epistemically rigorous/honest with themselves about their timelines and where there's a real consensus view on them. I've observed that it's pretty rare for people to make decisions truly grounded in their timelines, or to do so only nominally, and I think there's a lot of social signaling going on when (especially younger) people state their timelines. 

I appreciate that more experienced people are willing to give advice within a particular frame ("if timelines were x", "if China did y", "if Anthro... (read more)

I don't think I really understood what it meant for establishment politics to be divisive until this past election.

As good as it feels to sit on the left and say "they want you to hate immigrants" or "they want you to hate queer people", it seems similarly (although probably not equally?) true that the center left also has people they want you to hate (the religious, the rich, the slightly-more-successful-than-you, the ideologically-impure-who-once-said-a-bad-thing-on-the-internet).

But there's also a deeper, structural sense in which it's true.

Working on A... (read more)

I think the key missing piece you’re pointing at (making sure that our interpretability tools etc actually tell us something alignment-relevant) is one of the big things going on in model organisms of misalignment (iirc there’s a step that’s like ‘ok, but if we do interpretability/control/etc at the model organism does that help?’). Ideally this type of work, or something close to it, could become more common // provide ‘evals for our evals’ // expand in scope and application beyond deep deception.

If that happened, it seems like it would fit the bill here.

Does that seem true to you?

I like this post but I think redwood has varied some on whether control is for getting alignment work out of AIs vs getting generally good-for-humanity work out of them and pushing for a pause once they reach some usefulness/danger threshold (eg well before super intelligence).

[based on my recollection of Buck seminar in MATS 6]

Makes sense. Pretty sure you can remove it (and would appreciate that).

Many MATS scholars go to Anthropic (source: I work there).

Redwood I’m really not sure, but that could be right.

Sam now works at Anthropic.

Palisade: I’ve done some work for them, I love them, I don’t know that their projects so far inhibit Anthropic (BadLlama, which I’m decently confident was part of the cause for funding them, was pretty squarely targeted at Meta, and is their most impactful work to date by several OOM). In fact, the softer versions of Palisade’s proposal (highlighting misuse risk, their core mission), likely empower Anthropic as seemingly... (read more)

updated, thanks!

The CCRU is under-discussed in this sphere as a direct influence on the thoughts and actions of key players in AI and beyond.

Land started a creative collective, alongside Mark Fisher, in the 90s. I learned this by accident, and it seems like a corner of intellectual history that’s at least as influential as ie the extropians.

If anyone knows of explicit connections between the CCRU and contemporary phenomena (beyond Land/Fisher’s immediate influence via their later work), I’d love to hear about them.

Does anyone have examples of concrete actions taken by Open Phil that point toward their AIS plan being anything other than ‘help Anthropic win the race’?

I think a non-zero number of those disagree votes would not have appeared if the same comment were made by someone other than an Anthropic employee, based on seeing how Zac is sometimes treated IRL. My comment is aimed most directly at the people who cast those particular disagree votes.

I agree with your comment to Ryan above that those who identified "Anthropic already does most of these" as "the central part of the comment" were using the disagree button as intended.

The threshold for hitting the button will be different in different situations; I think the threshold many applied here was somewhat low, and a brief look at Zac's comment history, to me, further suggests this.

I want to double down on this:

Zac is consistently generous with his time, even when dealing with people who are openly hostile toward him. Of all lab employees, Zac is among the most available for—and eager to engage in—dialogue. He has furnished me personally with >2 dozen hours of extremely informative conversation, even though our views differ significantly (and he has ~no instrumental reason for talking to me in particular, since I am but a humble moisture farmer).  I've watched him do the same with countless others at various events.

I've also ... (read more)

This may be an example, but I don't think it's an especially central one, for a few reasons:

1. The linked essay discusses, quite narrowly, the act of making predictions about artificial intelligence/the Actual Future based on the contents of science fiction stories that make (more-or-less) concrete predictions on those topics, thus smuggling in a series of warrants that poison the reasoning process from that point onward. This post, by contrast, is about feelings.

2. The process for reasoning about one's, say, existential disposition, is independent of the ... (read more)

Sometimes people give a short description of their work. Sometimes they give a long one.

I have an imaginary friend whose work I’m excited about. I recently overheard them introduce and motivate their work to a crowd of young safety researchers, and I took notes. Here’s my best reconstruction of what he’s up to:

"I work on median-case out-with-a-whimper scenarios and automation forecasting, with special attention to the possibility of mass-disempowerment due to wealth disparity and/or centralization of labor power. I identify existing legal and technological... (read more)