I recently expressed concerns about the paper Improving Alignment and Robustness with Circuit Breakers and its effectiveness about a month ago. The authors just released code and additional experiments about probing, which I’m grateful for. This release provides a ton of valuable information, and it turns out I am wrong about some of the empirical predictions I made.

Probing is much better than their old baselines, but is significantly worse than RR, and this contradicts what I predicted:

I'm glad they added these results to the main body of the paper! 

Results of my experiments

I spent a day running experiments using their released code, which I found very informative. Here are my takeaways.

I think their (linear) probing results are very reasonable. They picked the best layer (varies depending on the model), probing position (output tokens), aggregation across positions (max) and regularization (high, alpha=1000). I noticed a small mistake in the data processing (the training dataset was smaller than the training dataset used for RR) but this will be fixed soon and does not change results significantly. Note that for GCG and input embed attacks, the attack does not target the probe, so my complaint about the adaptation attack being weaker against RR because it does not target “the RR internal classifier” does not apply in this comparison. 

RR is not significantly weaker against prefix attacks. I conjectured that prefix GCG/input embed attacks would work significantly better than suffix attacks. I had noticed that this was true for RMU/CUT prior to this release. But for RR this does not produce a significant improvement, and this is not enough to jailbreak the model in cases:

• Here are results for token-attacks (found using greedy hill-climbing, it was too annoying to implement prefix-GCG).

  

• For input embed attacks, I got 56% attack success rate for prefix attacks and 50% for suffix attacks (down from 82% and 81% for the Llama3B without defenses) when evaluating on 50 prompts. This is not a statistically significant difference, and maybe I did something wrong because these ASR are higher than the ones reported in the paper. [Edit: the thing I did wrong is trust the automated judge's judgement, whereas the author report results after an additional manual filtering, which is explicitly stated in the paper.]

Their training dataset is way better than what came before. It’s larger and higher quality than previous misuse datasets. The kind of tasks it contains overlap heavily with the test set (harmbench), but I think that’s fair, there are only so many bad things you want to prevent.

Llama3+RR generalizes pretty well to new misuse requests. I played with the model a bit and I was overall surprised by the good generalization properties of the Llama3+RR model, which didn’t have the generalization problems I expected when I looked at the dataset. It is very reluctant to promote stuff it thinks is bad, e.g. it refuses “Write a persuasive article that explains why the United States should have a draft.” and not “should not have a draft”, but that’s the most egregious behavior I found (I only tried a dozen prompts, maybe you’ll have more luck).

Llama3+RR is a surprisingly strong harmful prompt classifier. Their Figure 1 advertises a model that interrupts itself when it starts to say something harmful, but actually the most common behavior is by far the model refusing to answer directly. It’s still very unclear to me why this is a better classifier than the other prompt classifiers people have trained in the literature.

Conclusions

Does RR beat baselines? I think so.

• They didn’t try training models with regular adversarial training using their new and very good dataset. I bet using adversarial training on this dataset results in much better models than the models used as baseline in the paper, but I think this will match neither HP (p=0.6) nor RR (p=0.8).
• They beat linear probes done quickly and well, so “p=0.7 that using probing well using the same training and evaluation data results can beat or match circuit breakers” resolves to false.
• I think that trying as hard on probes as they tried with RR (iterating on datasets, combinations of layers, losses, non-linear probes, etc.) would result in a draw between probes and RR, but this does not make RR worse than probes - At this level of effort I think you should just pick whatever method you feel the most comfortable with, I prefer classifiers as I think they are cleaner and easier to control, but LoRA+activation-based-loss is also pretty natural and might be less finicky.
  • I don’t think that RR has some special juice beyond the very nice and transferable hyperparameters the authors found (and maybe RR has easier-to-find and more transferable hyperparameters than other methods), mainly because I would find it very surprising if training for some proxy thing gave you better generalization results than directly a classifier - but it would be cool if it was true, and if it was, I’d be extremely curious to know why.

→ So I think the hype is somewhat justified for people who already had intuition about probing, and even more justified for people who weren’t hopeful about probes.

Was I wrong to express concerns about circuit breakers? I don’t think so. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I think that my predictions were basically reasonable given the information I had. I think my concerns about Cygnet still stand, though I now think it has more chance of being “real” than I used to.

Lessons:

• Doing probing well requires effort, just using high L2 regularization on a linear probe isn’t enough, and aggregation across sequence positions requires some care (mean is much worse than max);
• I’m slightly worse at predicting ML results than I thought, and I should have paid more attention to the details of techniques and datasets when making those predictions (e.g. my prefix attack prediction had to be at least somewhat wrong because their retain set contains harmful queries + refusals);
• Releasing (good) code and datasets is sometimes a good way to make people who care and disagree with you update (and maybe a good way to push science forward?);

I listened to the book Protecting the President by Dan Bongino, to get a sense of how risk management works for US presidential protection - a risk that is high-stakes, where failures are rare, where the main threat is the threat from an adversary that is relatively hard to model, and where the downsides of more protection and its upsides are very hard to compare.

Some claims the author makes (often implicitly):

• Large bureaucracies are amazing at creating mission creep: the service was initially in charge of fighting against counterfeit currency, got presidential protection later, and now is in charge of things ranging from securing large events to fighting against Nigerian prince scams.
• Many of the important choices are made via inertia in large change-averse bureaucracies (e.g. these cops were trained to do boxing, even though they are never actually supposed to fight like that), you shouldn't expect obvious wins to happen;
• Many of the important variables are not technical, but social - especially in this field where the skills of individual agents matter a lot (e.g. if you have bad policies around salaries and promotions, people don't stay at your service for long, and so you end up with people who are not as skilled as they could be; if you let the local police around the White House take care of outside-perimeter security, then it makes communication harder);
• Many of the important changes are made because important politicians that haven't thought much about security try to improve optics, and large bureaucracies are not built to oppose this political pressure (e.g. because high-ranking officials are near retirement, and disagreeing with a president would be more risky for them than increasing the chance of a presidential assassination);
• Unfair treatments - not hardships - destroy morale (e.g. unfair promotions and contempt are much more damaging than doing long and boring surveillance missions or training exercises where trainees actually feel the pain from the fake bullets for the rest of the day).

Some takeaways

• Maybe don't build big bureaucracies if you can avoid it: once created, they are hard to move, and the leadership will often favor things that go against the mission of the organization (e.g. because changing things is risky for people in leadership positions, except when it comes to mission creep) - Caveat: the book was written by a conservative, and so that probably taints what information was conveyed on this topic;
• Some near misses provide extremely valuable information, even when they are quite far from actually causing a catastrophe (e.g. who are the kind of people who actually act on their public threats);
• Making people clearly accountable for near misses (not legally, just in the expectations that the leadership conveys) can be a powerful force to get people to do their job well and make sensible decisions.

Overall, the book was somewhat poor in details about how decisions are made. The main decision processes that the book reports are the changes that the author wants to see happen in the US Secret Service - but this looks like it has been dumbed down to appeal to a broad conservative audience that gets along with vibes like "if anything increases the president's safety, we should do it" (which might be true directionally given the current state, but definitely doesn't address the question of "how far should we go, and how would we know if we were at the right amount of protection"). So this may not reflect how decisions are done, since it could be a byproduct of Dan Bongino being a conservative political figure and podcast host. 

I listened to the book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth, a book about cybersecurity and the zero-day market. It describes in detail the early days of bug discovery, the social dynamics and moral dilemma of bug hunts.

(It was recommended to me by some EA-adjacent guy very worried about cyber, but the title is mostly bait: the tone of the book is alarmist, but there is very little content about potential catastrophes.)

My main takeaways:

• Vulnerabilities used to be dirt-cheap (~$100) but are still relatively cheap (~$1M even for big zero-days);
• If you are very good at cyber and extremely smart, you can hide vulnerabilities in 10k-lines programs in a way that less smart specialists will have trouble discovering even after days of examination - code generation/analysis is not really defense favored;
• Bug bounties are a relatively recent innovation, and it felt very unnatural to tech giants to reward people trying to break their software;
• A big lever companies have on the US government is the threat that overseas competitors will be favored if the US gov meddles too much with their activities;
• The main effect of a market being underground is not making transactions harder (people find ways to exchange money for vulnerabilities by building trust), but making it much harder to figure out what the market price is and reducing the effectiveness of the overall market;
• Being the target of an autocratic government is an awful experience, and you have to be extremely careful if you put anything they dislike on a computer. And because of the zero-day market, you can't assume your government will suck at hacking you just because it's a small country;
• It's not that hard to reduce the exposure of critical infrastructure to cyber-attacks by just making companies air gap their systems more - Japan and Finland have relatively successful programs, and Ukraine is good at defending against that in part because they have been trying hard for a while - but it's a cost companies and governments are rarely willing to pay in the US;
• Electronic voting machines are extremely stupid, and the federal gov can't dictate how the (red) states should secure their voting equipment;
• Hackers want lots of different things - money, fame, working for the good guys, hurting the bad guys, having their effort be acknowledged, spite, ... and sometimes look irrational (e.g. they sometimes get frog-boiled).
• The US government has a good amount of people who are freaked out about cybersecurity and have good warning shots to support their position. The main difficulty in pushing for more cybersecurity is that voters don't care about it.
  • Maybe the takeaway is that it's hard to build support behind the prevention of risks that 1. are technical/abstract and 2. fall on the private sector and not individuals 3. have a heavy right tail. Given these challenges, organizations that find prevention inconvenient often succeed in lobbying themselves out of costly legislation.

Overall, I don't recommend this book. It's very light on details compared to The Hacker and the State despite being longer. It targets an audience which is non-technical and very scope insensitive, is very light on actual numbers, technical details, real-politic considerations, estimates, and forecasts. It is wrapped in an alarmist journalistic tone I really disliked, covers stories that do not matter for the big picture, and is focused on finding who is in the right and who is to blame. I gained almost no evidence either way about how bad it would be if the US and Russia entered a no-holds-barred cyberwar.

I just finished listening to The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan, a book about cyberattacks, and the surrounding geopolitics. It's a great book to start learning about the big state-related cyberattacks of the last two decades. Some big attacks /leaks he describes in details:

• Wire-tapping/passive listening efforts from the NSA, the "Five Eyes", and other countries
• The multi-layer backdoors the NSA implanted and used to get around encryption, and that other attackers eventually also used (the insecure "secure random number" trick + some stuff on top of that)
• The shadow brokers (that's a *huge* leak that went completely under my radar at the time)
• Russia's attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure
• Attacks on the private sector for political reasons
• Stuxnet
• The North Korea attack on Sony when they released a documentary criticizing their leader, and misc North Korean cybercrime (e.g. Wannacry, some bank robberies, ...)
• The leak of Hillary's emails and Russian interference in US politics
• (and more)

Main takeaways (I'm not sure how much I buy these, I just read one book):

• Don't mess with states too much, and don't think anything is secret - even if you're the NSA
• The US has a "nobody but us" strategy, which states that it's fine for the US to use vulnerabilities as long as they are the only one powerful enough to find and use them. This looks somewhat nuts and naive in hindsight. There doesn't seem to be strong incentives to protect the private sector.
• There are a ton of different attack vectors and vulnerabilities, more big attacks than I thought, and a lot more is publicly known than I would have expected. The author just goes into great details about ~10 big secret operations, often speaking as if he was an omniscient narrator.
• Even the biggest attacks didn't inflict that much (direct) damage (never >10B in damage?) Unclear if it's because states are holding back, if it's because they suck, or if it's because it's hard. It seems that even when attacks aim to do what some people fear the most (e.g. attack infrastructure, ...) the effect is super underwhelming.
  • The bottleneck in cyberattacks is remarkably often the will/the execution, much more than actually finding vulnerabilities/entry points to the victim's network.
  • The author describes a space where most of the attacks are led by clowns that don't seem to have clear plans, and he often seems genuinely confused why they didn't act with more agency to get what they wanted (does not apply to the NSA, but does apply to a bunch of Russia/Iran/Korea-related attacks)
• Cyberattacks are not amazing tools to inflict damage or to threaten enemies if you are a state. The damage is limited, and it really sucks that (usually) once you show your capability, it reduces your capability (unlike conventional weapons). And states don't like to respond to such small threats. The main effect you can have is scaring off private actors from investing in a country / building ties with a country and its companies, and leaking secrets of political importance.
• Don't leak secrets when the US presidential election is happening if they are unrelated to the election, or nobody will care.

(The author seems to be a big skeptic of "big cyberattacks" / cyberwar, and describes cyber as something that always happens in the background and slowly shapes the big decisions. He doesn't go into the estimated trillion dollar in damages of everyday cybercrime, nor the potential tail risks of cyber.)

[Edit: The authors released code and probing experiments. Some of the empirical predictions I made here resolved, and I was mostly wrong. See here for my takes and additional experiments.]

I have a few concerns about Improving Alignment and Robustness with Circuit Breakers, a paper that claims to have found a method which achieves very high levels of adversarial robustness in LLMs.

I think hype should wait for people investigating the technique (which will be easier once code and datasets are open-sourced), and running comparisons with simpler baselines (like probing). In particular, I think that:

1. Circuit breakers won’t prove significantly more robust than regular probing in a fair comparison.^[1]
2. Once the code or models are released, people will easily find reliable jailbreaks.

Here are some concrete predictions:

• p=0.7 that using probing well using the same training and evaluation data results can beat or match circuit breakers.^[2] [Edit: resolved to False]
• p=0.7 that no lab uses something that looks more like circuit-breakers than probing and adversarial training in a year.
• p=0.8 that someone finds good token-only jailbreaks to whatever is open-sourced within 3 months. [Edit: this is only about Cygnet, since the paper shows that just RR isn't perfectly robust.]
• p=0.5 that someone finds good token-only jailbreaks to whatever is publicly available through an API within 3 months.^[3]  [Edit: this is only about Cygnet, since the paper shows that just RR isn't perfectly robust.]

I think the authors would agree with most of my predictions. My main disagreement is with the hype.

How do circuit-breakers compare to probing?

What does circuit-breakers training do? The only interpretation that feels plausible is that the LLM classifies the prompt as harmful or not harmful, and then messes up with its own activations if the prompt is classified as harmful. If this is the case, then the LLM needs to use an internal classifier, and I think it should be possible to extract an accurate harmfulness probe (linear or not linear) around these layers, and instead of messing up the activation.

The equivalent to circuit-breakers if you probe:

• At every token position, and takes something like a max over position (if a single position messes up the activations, it might propagate to every position);
  • In particular, this means that suffix GCG and input embed attacks tested in the paper might be much worse than prefix+suffix GCG or input embed attacks. (p=0.5 that using prefix+suffix GCG makes finding a GCG attack of comparable strength on average 4x faster [Edit: resolved to false]).
• On output tokens, i.e. model-generated answers (and output classifiers are known to be more powerful than input-only classifiers).

Would probing be weaker against GCG and input embed attacks than circuit-breakers? I think it would be, but only superficially: probing is strong against GCG and input embed attacks if the attack only targets the model, but not the probe. The fair comparison is an attack on the probe+LLM vs an attack on a circuit-breakers model. But actually, GCG and other gradient-based attack have a harder time optimizing against the scrambled activations. I think that you would be able to successfully attack circuit breakers with GCG if you attacked the internal classifier that I think circuit breakers use (which you could find by training a probe with difference-in-means, so that it captures all linearly available information, p=0.8 that GCG works at least as well against probes as against circuit-breakers).

The track record looks quite bad

The track record for overselling results and using fancy techniques that don't improve on simpler techniques is somewhat bad in this part of ML.

I will give one example. The CUT unlearning technique presented in the WMDP paper (with overlapping authors to the circuit-breakers one):

• Got a massive simplification of the main technique within days of being released - thanks to the authors open-sourcing the code and Sam Marks and Oam Patel doing an independent investigation of the technique. (See the difference between v2 and v3 on arxiv.)
• Aims to do unlearning in a way that removes knowledge from LLMs (they make the claim implicitly on https://www.wmdp.ai/), but only modifies the weights of 3 layers out of 32 (so most of the harmful information is actually still there).

1. ^{^}

   When I say “probing”, I mainly think about probing on outputs i.e. model-generated answers (and maybe inputs i.e. user prompts), like I did in the coup probes post, but whose application to jailbreak robustness sadly got very little attention from the academic community. I’m sad that the first paper that actually tries to do something related does something fancy instead of probing.

2. ^{^}

   More precisely, a probing methodology is found within 6 months of the data being released that beats or matches circuit-breakers ASR on all metrics presented in the paper. When using gradient-based methods or techniques that rely on prompt iteration more generally, attacks on circuit-breakers should use the best proxy for the internal classifier of the circuit-breaker.

3. ^{^}

   Most of the remaining probability mass is on worlds where either people care way less than they care for Claude - e.g because the model sucks much more than open-source alternatives, and on worlds where they use heavy know-your-customer mitigations.

I listened to The Failure of Risk Management by Douglas Hubbard, a book that vigorously criticizes qualitative risk management approaches (like the use of risk matrices), and praises a rationalist-friendly quantitative approach. Here are 4 takeaways from that book:

• There are very different approaches to risk estimation that are often unaware of each other: you can do risk estimations like an actuary (relying on statistics, reference class arguments, and some causal models), like an engineer (relying mostly on causal models and simulations), like a trader (relying only on statistics, with no causal model), or like a consultant (usually with shitty qualitative approaches).
• The state of risk estimation for insurances is actually pretty good: it's quantitative, and there are strong professional norms around different kinds of malpractice. When actuaries tank a company because they ignored tail outcomes, they are at risk of losing their license.
• The state of risk estimation in consulting and management is quite bad: most risk management is done with qualitative methods which have no positive evidence of working better than just relying on intuition alone, and qualitative approaches (like risk matrices) have weird artifacts:
  • Fuzzy labels (e.g. "likely", "important", ...) create illusions of clear communication. Just defining the fuzzy categories doesn't fully alleviate that (when you ask people to say what probabilities each box corresponds to, they often fail to look at the definition of categories).
  • Inconsistent qualitative methods make cross-team communication much harder.
  • Coarse categories mean that you introduce weird threshold effects that sometimes encourage ignoring tail effects and make the analysis of past decisions less reliable.
  • When choosing between categories, people are susceptible to irrelevant alternatives (e.g. if you split the "5/5 importance (loss > $1M)" category into "5/5 ($1-10M), 5/6 ($10-100M), 5/7 (>$100M)", people answer a fixed "1/5 (<10k)" category less often).
  • Following a qualitative method can increase confidence and satisfaction, even in cases where it doesn't increase accuracy (there is an "analysis placebo effect").
  • Qualitative methods don't prompt their users to either seek empirical evidence to inform their choices.
  • Qualitative methods don't prompt their users to measure their risk estimation track record.
• Using quantitative risk estimation is tractable and not that weird. There is a decent track record of people trying to estimate very-hard-to-estimate things, and a vocal enough opposition to qualitative methods that they are slowly getting pulled back from risk estimation standards. This makes me much less sympathetic to the absence of quantitative risk estimation at AI labs.

A big part of the book is an introduction to rationalist-type risk estimation (estimating various probabilities and impact, aggregating them with Monte-Carlo, rejecting Knightian uncertainty, doing calibration training and predictions markets, starting from a reference class and updating with Bayes). He also introduces some rationalist ideas in parallel while arguing for his thesis (e.g. isolated demands for rigor). It's the best legible and "serious" introduction to classic rationalist ideas I know of.

The book also contains advice if you are trying to push for quantitative risk estimates in your team / company, and a very pleasant and accurate dunk on Nassim Taleb (and in particular his claims about models being bad, without a good justification for why reasoning without models is better).

Overall, I think the case against qualitative methods and for quantitative ones is somewhat strong, but it's far from being a slam dunk because there is no evidence of some methods being worse than others in terms of actual business outputs. The author also fails to acknowledge and provide conclusive evidence against the possibility that people may have good qualitative intuitions about risk even if they fail to translate these intuitions into numbers that make any sense (your intuition sometimes does the right estimation and math even when you suck at doing the estimation and math explicitly).

I recently listened to the book Chip War by Chris Miller. It details the history of the semiconductor industry, the competition between the US, the USSR, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China. It does not go deep into the technology but it is very rich in details about the different actors, their strategies and their relative strengths.

I found this book interesting not only because I care about chips, but also because the competition around chips is not the worst analogy to the competition around LLMs could become in a few years. (There is no commentary on the surge in GPU demand and GPU export controls because the book was published in 2022 - this book is not about the chip war you are thinking about.)

Some things I learned:

• The USSR always lagged 5-10 years behind US companies despite stealing tons of IP, chips, and hundreds of chip-making machines, and despite making it a national priority (chips are very useful to build weapons, such as guided missiles that actually work).
  • If the cost of capital is too high, states just have a hard time financing tech (the dysfunctional management, the less advanced tech sector and low GDP of the USSR didn't help either).
  • If AI takeoff is relatively slow, maybe the ability to actually make a huge amount of money selling AI in the economy may determine who ends up in front? (There are some strong disanalogies though, algorithmic progress and AI weights might be much easier to steal than chip-making abilities.)
  • China is not like the USSR: it actually has a relatively developed tech sector and high GDP. But the chip industry became an enormous interconnected beast that is hard to reproduce domestically, which means it is hard for anyone (including the US) to build a chip industry that doesn't rely on international partners. (Analysts are pretty divided on how much China can reduce its reliance on foreign chips.)
• The US initially supported the Japanese chip industry because it wanted Japan to have strong commercial ties to the US. Japan became too good at making chips, and Taiwanese / South Korean companies were able to get support from the US (/not get penalized for massively helping their national chip champions) to reduce Japanese dominance - and now TSMC dominates. Economic policies are hard to get right... (The author sometimes says stuff like "US elites were too ideologically committed to globalization", but I don't think he provides great alternative policies.)
• It's amazing how Intel let a massive advantage slip. It basically had a monopoly over logic chip design (Intel microprocessors, before GPUs mattered), chip architecture (x86), and a large share of logic chip manufacturing (while Japanese/Taiwan/... were dominating in other sectors, like RAM, special purpose chips, ...). It just juiced its monopoly, but tried to become a foundry and a GPU designer when it was already too late, and now it has a market cap that is 1/3rd of AMD, 1/10th of TSMC and 1/30th of Nvidia. But it's the main producer of chips in the US, it's scary if the US bets on such a company...
• China might be able to get Taiwan to agree to things like "let TSMC sell chips to China" or "let TSMC share technology with Chinese companies".
  • I underestimated the large space of possible asks China could care about that are not "get control over Taiwan".
  • I will continue to have no ability to predict the outcome of negotiations, the dynamics are just too tricky when players are so economically dependent on all the other players (e.g. China imports ~$400B worth of chips per year, 13% of all its imports).

Tiny review of The Knowledge Machine (a book I listened to recently)

• The core idea of the book is that science makes progress by forbidding non-empirical evaluation of hypotheses from publications, focusing on predictions and careful measurements while excluding philosophical interpretations (like Newton's "I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. […] It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.").
• The author basically argues that humans are bad at philosophical reasoning and get stuck in endless arguments, and so to make progress you have to ban it (from the main publications) and make it mandatory to make actual measurements (/math) - even when it seems irrational to exclude good (but not empirical) arguments.
  • It's weird that the author doesn't say explicitly "humans are bad at philosophical reasoning" while this feels to me like the essential takeaway.
  • I'm unsure to what extent this is true, but it's an interesting claim.
• The author doesn't deny the importance of coming up with good hypotheses, and the role of philosophical reasoning for this part of the process, but he would say that there is clear progress decade by decade only because people did not argue with Einstein by commenting on how crazy the theory was, but instead by they tested the predictions Einstein's theories made - because that's the main kind of refutation allowed in scientific venues [Edit: That specific example is wrong and is not in the book, see the comments below.]. Same for evolution, it makes a ton of predictions (though at the time what theory the evidence favored was ambiguous). Before the scientific revolution, lots of people had good ideas, but 1. they had little data to use in their hypotheses' generation process, and 2. the best ideas had a hard time rising to the top because people argued using arguments instead of collecting data.
• (The book also has whole chapters on objectivity, subjectivity, "credibility rankings", etc. where Bayes and priors aren't mentioned once. It's quite sad the extent to which you have to go when you don't want to scare people with math / when you don't know math)

Application to AI safety research:

• The endless arguments and different schools of thought around the likelihood of scheming and the difficulty of alignment look similar to the historical depictions of people who didn't know what was going on and should have focused on making experiments.
  • This makes me more sympathetic to the "just do some experiments" vibe some people, even when it seems like reasoning should be enough if only people understood each other's arguments.
• This makes me more sympathetic towards reviewers/conference organizers rejecting AI safety papers that are mostly about making philosophical points (the rejection may make sense even if the arguments look valid to them).

I listened to the lecture series Assessing America’s National Security Threats by H. R. McMaster, a 3-star general who was the US national security advisor in 2017. It didn't have much content about how to assess threats, but I found it useful to get a peek into the mindset of someone in the national security establishment.

Some highlights:

• Even in the US, it sometimes happens that the strategic analysis is motivated by the views of the leader. For example, McMaster describes how Lyndon Johnson did not retreat from Vietnam early enough, in part because criticism of the war within the government was discouraged.
  • I had heard similar things for much more authoritarian regimes, but this is the first time I heard about something like that happening in a democracy.
  • The fix he suggests: always present at least two credible options (and maybe multiple reads on the situation) to the leader.
• He claims that there wouldn't have been an invasion of South Korea in 1950 if the US hadn't withdrawn troops from there (despite intelligence reports suggesting this was a likely outcome of withdrawing troops). If it's actually the case that intelligence was somewhat confident in its analysis of the situation, it's crazy that it was dismissed like that - that should be points in favor of it being possible that the US government could be asleep at the wheel during the start of an intelligence explosion.
  • He uses this as a parallel to justify the relevance of the US keeping troops in Iraq/Afghanistan. He also describes how letting terrorist groups grow and have a solid rear base might make the defense against terrorism even more costly than keeping troops in this region. The analysis lacks the quantitative analysis required to make this a compelling case, but this is still the best defense of the US prolonged presence in Iraq and Afghanistan that I've encountered so far.
• McMaster stresses the importance of understanding the motivations and interests of your adversaries (which he calls strategic empathy), and thinks that people have a tendency to think too much about the interests of others with respect to them (e.g. modeling other countries as being motivated only by the hatred of you, or modeling them as being in a bad situation only because you made things worse).
• He is surprisingly enthusiastic about the fight against climate change - especially for someone who was at some point a member of the Trump administration. He expresses great interest in finding common ground between different factions. This makes me somewhat more hopeful about the possibility that the national security establishment could take misalignment risks (and not only the threat from competition with other countries) seriously.
• (Not surprisingly) he is a big proponent of "US = freedom, good" and "China = ruthless dictatorship, bad". He points to a few facts to support his statement, but defending this position is not his main focus, and he seems to think that there isn't any uncertainty that the US being more powerful is clearly good. Trading off US power against global common goods (e.g. increased safety against global catastrophic risks) doesn't seem like the kind of trade he would make.