It seems likely (though not certain) that they signed non-disparagement agreements, so we may not see more damning statements from them even if that's how they feel. Also, Ilya at least said some positive things in his leaving announcement, so that indicates either that he caved in to pressure (or too high agreeableness towards former co-workers) or that he's genuinely not particularly worried about the direction of the company and that he left more because of reasons related to his new project.
I agree: appealing to libertarianism shouldn't automatically win someone the argument on whether it's okay to still have factory farms.
The fact that Zvi thought he provided enough of a pointer to an argument there feels weird, in my opinion.
That said, maybe he was mostly focused on wanting to highlight that a large subset of people who are strongly against this ban (and may use libertarian arguments to argue for their position) are only against bans when it suits their agenda. So, maybe the point was in a way more about specific people's hypocrisy in how they argue than the question of concern for animals.
Either way, I continue to appreciate all these newsletters and I admit that the opinionated tone often makes them more interesting/fun to read in cases where it's not triggering me on issues that I see differently.
I think one issue is that someone can be aware about a specific worldview's existence and even consider it a plausible worldview, but still be quite bad at understanding what it would imply/look like in practice if it were true.
For me personally, it's not that I explicitly singled out the scenario that happened and assigned it some very low probability. Instead, I think I mostly just thought about scenarios that all start from different assumptions, and that was that.
For instance, when reading Paul's "What failure looks like" (which I had done multiple times), I thought I understood the scenario and even explicitly assigned it significant likelihood, but as it turned out, I didn't really understand it because I never really thought in detail about "how do we get from a 2021 world (before chat-gpt) to something like the world when things go off the rails in Paul's description?" If I had asked myself that question, I'd probably have realized that his worldview implies that there probably isn't a clear-cut moment of "we built the first AGI!" where AI boxing has relevance.
I lean towards agreeing with the takeaway; I made a similar argument here and would still bet on the slope being very steep inside the human intelligence level.
In some of his books on evolution, Dawkins also said very similar things when commenting on Darwin vs Wallace, basically saying that there's no comparison, Darwin had a better grasp of things, justified it better and more extensively, didn't have muddled thinking about mechanisms, etc.
Very cool! I used to think Hume was the most ahead of his time, but this seems like the same feat if not better.
Yeah, you need an enormous bankroll to play $10,000 tournaments. What a lot of pros do is sell action. Let's say you're highly skilled and have a, say, 125% expected return on investment. If you find someone with a big bankroll and they're convinced of your skills, you can you sell them your action at a markup somewhere between 1 and 1.2 to incentivize them to make a profit. I'd say something like 1.1 markup is fairest, so you're paying them a good prize to weather the variance for you. At 1.1 markup, they pay 1.1x whatever it costs you to buy into the tournament. You can sell a large part of your action but not quite all of it to keep an incentive to play well (if you sold everything at $11,000, you could, if you were shady, just pocket the extra $1,000, go out early on purpose, and register the next tournament where you sold action for another round of instant profit).
So, let's say they paid you $8,800 to get 80% of your winnings, so they make an expected profit of ($8,000 * 1.25) - $8,000, which is $1,200. And then you yourself still have 20% of your own action, for which you only paid $1,200 (since you got $800 from the 1.1 markup and you invest that into your tournament). Now, you're only in for $1,200 of your own money, but you have 20% of the tournament, so you'd already be highly profitable if you were just breaking even. In addition, as we stipulated, you have an edge on the field expecting 125% ROI, so in expectation, that $1,200 is worth $2,000*1.25, which is $2,500. This still comes with a lot of variance, but your ROI is now so high that Kelly allows you to play a big tournament in this way even if your net worth is <$100k.
(This analysis simplified things assuming there's no casino fee. In reality, if a tournament is advertized as a $10k tournament, the buy in tends to be more like $10,500, and $500 is just the casino fee that doesn't go into the prize pool. This makes edges considerably smaller.)
Regarding busting a tournament with a risky bluff: In the comment above I was assuming we're playing cash game where chips are equivalent to real dollars and you can leave the table at any point. In tournaments, at least if they are not "winner takes it all" format (which they almost never are), there's additional expected value in playing a little more conservative than the strategy "maximizing expected value in chips." Namely, you have to figure out how "having lots of chips" translates into "probabilities of making various pay jumps." If you're close to the money, or close to a big pay jump when you're already in the money (and at a big final table, every pay jump tends to be huge!), you actually make money by folding, since every time you fold, there's a chance that some other player will go out (either behind you at your table, or at some other table in a tournament where there are still many tables playing). If someone else goes out and you make the pay jump, you get more money without having to risk your stack. So, in tournaments, you gotta be more selective with the big bluffs for multiples of what is already in the pot, especially if you think you have an edge on the field and if the pay jumps are close.
You also quote this part of the article:
Theo Boer, a healthcare ethics professor at Protestant Theological University in Groningen, served for a decade on a euthanasia review board in the Netherlands. “I entered the review committee in 2005, and I was there until 2014,” Boer told me. “In those years, I saw the Dutch euthanasia practice evolve from death being a last resort to death being a default option.” He ultimately resigned.
I found a submission by this Theo Boer for the UK parliament, where he explains his reasons for now opposing euthanasia in more detail.
He writes:
It is well known that British advocates of assisted dying argue for a more restricted law than is found in the low countries. Here is my prediction: any law that allows assisted dying will come to be experienced as an injustice and will be challenged in the courts. Why only euthanasia for terminally ill patients, who have access to an ever widening array of palliative care and whose suffering will be relatively short, whereas chronic patients may suffer more intensely and much longer? Why exclude psychiatric patients, many of whom are suffering most heartbreakingly of all? Why only an assisted death for people suffering from a disease, and not for those suffering from irremediable meaninglessness, alienation, loneliness, from life itself? We are presently seeing how in the years 2016-2023 Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), from being euthanasia for terminal patients only, has evolved into an assisted death for patients whose chronic disease has become unbearable due to shortage of healthcare(Douthat 2022).
This is a "slope" of sorts, but I think it's not a bad one. The arguments for extending the practice all seem reasonable. What matters is, "are people suffering?" and, "are they right that there's not enough hope for them to justify continued suffering?"
Regarding pressure/being pressured, I thought this part was interesting:
This brings me to the second question: how to protect vulnerable citizens? Different from what is presently going on in Canada, I do not yet see a specific risk for citizens who by many are considered vulnerable – homeless, underinsured, people on welfare, people with disabilities. Although these groups are present in those who get euthanasia in the Netherlands, it is not my impression that they are overrepresented. If any group is well represented in the euthanasia numbers, it is the better-off, the healthy-aging population, the higher educated. In our research on practice variation, we found that in regions where the average experienced health is higher, the euthanasia numbers are also higher. In places where people on average are better off, obviously serious threats to their wellbeing tend to be more often a reason for a euthanasia request than in places where people are more used to dealing with life’s different hardships. This leads me to adopt a different definition of vulnerability, a vulnerability that may be found in all social and economic groups, from top to bottom: one of despair, meaninglessness, social isolation, feeling redundant. It may apply to wealthy citizens in a villa with woodblock floors and a grand piano, whose children have their businesses elsewhere and whose friends are either dead or institutionalized, just as much as to a single disabled woman on welfare. Anyone under this shadow of despair may make a euthanasia request, and there is no way a government can prevent this kind of vulnerability to motivate a euthanasia request, since the autonomous citizens are not under any other pressure than their own, that is, their own incapacity to face life’s harder episodes. “Life has always been a feast for me,” an elderly man whose euthanasia I assessed, “and that’s how it should end for me.”
I'd be curious to figure out why it is exactly that requests for euthanasia are higher in demographs where people tend to be better off/suffering less.
That said, I'm not at all convinced that this would prove that there's something horribly wrong going on with these developments after legalization of assisted suicide. (Still, I'd be curious to investigate this further.)
Reading this account, it feels to me like Theo Boer has a problem with death intrinsically, as opposed to only having a problem with death when a person has for-themselves good/strong reasons to continue to want to live. That's not an outlook I agree with.
"Their own incapacity to face life's harder episodes" is a question-begging phrasing. For all we know, many people who choose assisted suicide would voluntarily chose to continue with their suffering if there was more at stake that they cared about! For instance, if they learned that by continuing to suffer, they'd solve world poverty, they might continue to suffer. It seems wrong, then, to say they're "incapable," when the real reason is more about how they don't want it enough. It's their life, so their decision.
"Since the autonomous citizens are not under any other pressure than their own" – this is also an interesting perspective. He seems to be conceding that no matter how much society and relatives try to reassure chronically ill or disabled elderly people that they're still valued and cared about (something we absolutely must emphasize or work towards if it isn't everywhere the case!), those people will struggle with worries of being a burden. That's unfortunate, but also very natural. It's how I would feel too. But people who feel that way don't necessarily jump right towards considering assisted suicide! Consider two different cases:
In which of these cases is "worries about being a burden" (even if you know on some level that these worries probably don't accurately reflect the reality of the views of your caretakers or loved ones) a bigger reason to sway your decision towards wanting euthanasia? Obviously, it is in the second case, where you lack positive reasons to stay alive, so negative reasons weigh more comparatively, even if they're quite weak in absolute terms. In fact, what if "what will other people think" had been the primary motivation that kept you wanting to live for a long time, as long as you could provide more value for your relatives or loved ones? Is there not also something disconcerting about that? (To underscore this point, many people who are depressed write that the main reason they don't consider suicide more seriously is because of what it would do to their relatives and loved ones. If you want to see for yourself, you can read reddit threads on this for examples of people's suicidal ideation.)
“Life has always been a feast for me,” an elderly man whose euthanasia I assessed, “and that’s how it should end for me.”
This quote comes at the end of a passage that was all about "pressure," but it has nothing to do with pressure anymore, nor does it have to do with being "incapable of facing life's hardship." Instead, it just sounds like this person disagrees about the view that "facing life's hardship" for no upside is something that's a virtue or otherwise important/right to do. This is more like an expression of a philosophy that life can be completed (see also the ending of the series 'The Good Place,') or, somewhat differently, that there's no need to prolong it after the best (and still-good) times are now over. If that's someone's attitude, let them have it.
Overall, I respect Theo Boer for both the work he's done for terminally ill patients in the early stages of the assisted suicide program in the Netherlands and for speaking out against the assisted suicide practice after it went in a direction that he no longer could support. At the same time, I think he has an attitude towards the topic that I don't agree with. In my view, he doesn't seem to take seriously how bad it is to suffer, and especially, how bad and pointlesss it is to suffer for no good reason.
It might well be true that doctors and mental health professionals are now okay with assisted suicide as a solution too quickly (without trying other avenues first), but I'm not sure I'd trust Theo Boer's judgment on this, given the significant differences in our points of view. In any case, I acknowledge this is a risk and that we should take steps to make sure this doesn't occur or doesn't become too strong of an issue (and people who decide to go through with it should be well-informed about other options and encouraged to try these other options in case they haven't already been doing this to no success for many years).
Assisted Suicide Watch
A psychiatrist overstepping their qualifications by saying “It’s never gonna get any better” ((particularly when the source of the suffering is at least partly BPD, for which it's commonly known that symptoms can get better in someone's 40s)) clearly should never happen.
However, I'd imagine that most mental health professionals would be extremely careful when making statements about whether there's hope for things to get better. In fact, there are probably guidelines around that.
Maybe it didn't happen this way at all: I notice I'm confused.
This could just be careless reporting by the newspaper.
The article says:
She recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything, that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.”
Was it really the psychiatrist who added "It's never gonna get any better," or was it just that the psychiatrist said "There's nothing more we can do for you," and then Zoraya herself (the person seeking assisted suicide) told the reporters her conclusion "It's never going to get any better," and the reporters wrote it as though she ascribed those words to the psychiatrist?
In any case, this isn't a proper "watch" ("assisted suicide watch") if you only report when you find articles that make the whole thing seem slippery-slopy. (And there's also a question of "how much is it actually like that?" vs "How much is it in the reporting" – maybe the reporter had their own biases in writing it like that. For all we know, this person, Zoraya, has had this plan for ever since she was a teenager, and gave herself 25 years to stop feeling suicidal, and now it's been enough. And the reporter just chose to highlight a few things that sound dramatic, like the bit about not wanting to inconvenience the boyfriend with having to keep the grave tidy.)
I feel like the response here should be: Think hard about what sorts of guidelines we can create for doctors or mental health professionals to protect against risks of sliding down a slippery slope. It's worth taking some risks because it seems really bad as well to err in the other direction (as many countries and cultures still do). Besides, it's not straightforwardly evidence of a slippery slope simply because the numbers went up or seem "startling," as the article claims. These developments can just as plausibly be viewed as evidence for, "startlingly many people suffer unnecessarily and unacceptably without these laws." You have to look into the details to figure out which one it is, and it's gonna be partly a values question rather than something we can settle empirically.
There are other written-about cases like Lauren Hoeve quite recently, also from Netherlands, who'd suffered from debilitating severe myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) for five years and began her assisted suicide application in 2022. Anyone interested in this topic should probably go through more of these accounts and read sources directly from the people themselves (like blogposts explaining their decision) rather than just media reporting about it.
I agree with what you say in the first paragraph. If you're talking about Ilya, which I think you are, I can see what you mean in the second paragraph, but I'd flag that even if he had some sort of plan here, it seems pretty costly and also just bad norms for someone with his credibility to say something that indicates that he thinks OpenAI is on track to do well at handling their great responsibility, assuming he were to not actually believe this. It's one thing to not say negative things explicitly; it's a different thing to say something positive that rules out the negative interpretations. I tend to take people at their word if they say things explicitly, even if I can assume that they were facing various pressures. If I were to assume that Ilya is saying positive things that he doesn't actually believe, that wouldn't reflect well on him, IMO.
If we consider Jan Leike's situation, I think what you're saying applies more easily, because him leaving without comment already reflects poorly on OpenAI's standing on safety, and maybe he just decided that saying something explicitly doesn't really add a ton of information (esp. since maybe there are other people who might be in a better position to say things in the future). Also, I'm not sure it affects future employment prospects too much if someone leaves a company, signs a non-disparagement agreement, and goes "no comment" to indicate that there was probably dissatisfaction with some aspects of the company. There are many explanations for this and if I was making hiring decisions at some AI company, even if it's focused on profits quite a bit, I wouldn't necessarily interpret this as a negative signal.
That said, signing non-disparagament agreements certainly feels like it has costs and constrains option value, so it seems like a tough choice.